Anthology Complex

by M. B. Julien

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  Composition 1, Part 1

  Chapter 1:

  THIS ANTHOLOGIC LIFE

  Last night, I had a dream. I'm walking alongside a row of parked cars in broad daylight, peering through each car's driver seat window as I pass by. This goes on for a while, and each time I think I'm at the final car, there is another one. I start to think that this will never end. It reminds me of how you can draw a circle on a piece of paper, and then put a dot anywhere on the circle and as you attempt to move away from the dot by traveling along the circle, you are actually moving closer to the dot.

  As much as you want to escape from the dot, you are going to end up going right back to it. You might think that you are moving on from some horrible part or event in your life, but really you might just be ticking the time away for when you have to relive it. I keep thinking I'm at the end of this long row of parked cars, but I'm probably still at the beginning. Or back at the beginning all over again.

  As I pass by each car, I see that every driver's seat is empty, but of course they are empty considering they are parked. Most people probably don't sit inside a parked car unless they are waiting for something, or in my case, someone. Every driver's seat is empty until I finally get to the car that's at the end of the row, the last car before you reach the intersection.

  This car is also parked, but running, as if it is ready to stop living such an idle life, but at the same time too reluctant to do so. There is a man in the driver's seat, peering through the windshield of his car, watching all of the cars ahead drive by. Watching them as they pass by under the green light. Watching these cars as they serve their purpose, as they function properly.

  As he turns his head to look at me, the day turns into night, and the face I thought he would have is nonexistent. He tells me that we can fool some of the people all of the time, maybe even all of the people some of the time, but we can never fool all of the people all of the time. That we can never fool ourselves no matter how deep inside our mind we think we are.

  Before I could ask him what he meant, he was gone, but his car was still there, running. It then started to rain, and a storm immediately followed. I looked up at the rain and lightning, and then back down at the car, and now the driver door was open, as if the car was asking me to the take the wheel. For some reason, I couldn't bring myself to sit in the driver's seat, and that's when I woke up.

  After I wake up and think for a few seconds, I write down the dream in my composition notebook. I write down all of the dreams I can remember because I believe it's possible that the people we are in our dreams could be another us in another life spawned by the decisions we didn't make in this life. How different our life could have been and how different we could have been as a person if one little decision was altered.

  In this life, I made the decision to go to college after high school for a couple of years, and I got what I needed to get to be successful. In a dream I had years ago, I was homeless. My assumption on why I was homeless was because in that life, I made the decision to not go to college; an assumption based on the misconception that a formal education is necessary to be successful.

  So much of a life altered by one single decision. I started to think, even believe, that our dreams show us who we could have been, for better or for worse, as opposed to who we are now. As opposed to this life we have chosen to lead. A portal to possibilities that's just barely out of our reach. Every now and then I ask myself if college was worth it, even though I'd end up losing my sanity, or if I'd have been better off homeless, and maybe at peace.

  I close the notebook and put it back on the shelf. A shelf that holds hundreds of notebooks, all containing my other lives. My dreams. My complex. Somewhere along the road of parked cars, along the road of my life, I became aware of the psychological impact writing down these dreams had on me. Had for me. Writing down these short stories where I believed I was the main character. That the story being told was the story of my life. Finding so much meaning in a life drowned in meaningless. This purposeless life. A life with no driver. A life that never passed by under the green light. I try to trick my mind, I try to fool myself. This is me, walking down this long road of parked cars. This is me looking inside all of these cars, looking for a driver. Looking for a sign of life, but the only life I can find are in my dreams. In these notebooks filled with words, living my life vicariously through this strange fiction. I look at these notebooks, and I curse this addiction. This anthologic life.

  For so long I have cursed this life, but in the end I can only come to accept it because I believe we all suffer from the anthology complex. We all compile these short stories that turn into fantasies. We all suffer from this condition where we live the life of someone else, the story of someone else, where we see ourselves as ourselves, but under a different persona. Sometimes this persona is a big change, or a slight change. It doesn't just come in the form of dreams, but in the form of fictional work.

  We watch these movies and television shows and sometimes we see ourselves. Even if we don't realize it. We read these books and magazines, and sometimes we see ourselves. It comes in the form of art. We listen to these songs, and sometimes we hear ourselves. Sometimes we hear the stories of ourselves. We see these paintings, these photos, and sometimes we see ourselves. It comes in the form of thought. Sometimes we are sitting at home, or at work, or at school, and we begin to think, daydream even, of another life.

  Our mind comes up with these people that we represent and these actions that we perform. Unfortunately, sometimes we know the version of us from the other life better than we know our true selves, and sometimes we like that person better, too.

  I stare at the shelf, and I try to remember the driver's face, but he was faceless. I try to remember the sound of his voice, but all I can hear is the sound of mine. The problem with trying to remember a dream is that it's like a faded memory sometimes, and if enough time passes by, say a few years, it gets harder and harder to distinguish a memory from a dream. Reality from fiction.

  Sometimes it can drive you crazy, but having an organized shelf of notebooks that can differ reality from fiction helps. Another thing about dreams and memories is that they can have very similar properties. Usually in both our dreams and our memories, when we try to remember them, we see them in third person. In our dreams we aren't Jesus Christ, we are ourselves meeting Jesus Christ, and when we try to remember it, all we can see is ourselves meeting Jesus Christ.

  I keep trying to remember his face, even though I know he has no
face, and that's when I remembered that I had a dream in that same exact location a few months ago. I was in a helicopter, and the pilot was trying to land the helicopter on the same street I had been walking down in the dream I had last night.

  The helicopter lands and there is a lifeless body on the sidewalk near the last car in the row of parked cars. The same last car I saw the driver in last night. I got out of the helicopter and kept trying to walk over to the dead body, but each time I got closer, it seemed like he went further away. It was as if the distance kept cutting itself in half, but I still could never reach him. Just barely out of my reach. After a long time of walking, I simply woke up. Sometimes dreams were weird like that; even though I had that dream in the past, the events in it happened after last night's dream.

  That's what I believe anyway. That's what makes sense to me right now. And it's happened before. One time I had eight dreams where if I rearranged them in a chronological order that made logical sense, I could make a tale out of it. That's not to say the tale itself would make any sense. These eight dreams led me to believe that maybe individually, our dreams may seem random and irrelevant, but if we can remember these dreams, or write them down, and then put them in an order that made sense, we could see the many tales of our many lives.

  Chapter 2:

  THIEVES FROM NEW YORK

  About a year ago, I had a dream. Dressed in a rich man's suit and tie, committing a poor man's crime. They put the money in a garbage bag that I supply because I threaten their existence. The funny thing is a third of them have probably never taken the time of day to ponder their existence. Sometimes I wonder if I've taken the time of day to ponder my own.

  Is existence really that important? Is that life? Just merely existing. If you are in outer space, and you see a piece of rock in a stationary position, it will stay that way forever. If you see a piece of rock moving, it will continue moving at that same exact speed in that same exact direction forever.

  This is true if no other forces are applied to the piece of rock; forces such as gravity, electromagnetism or friction. The piece of rock doesn't have a specific reason as to why it wants to stay stationary or why it wants to keep moving, it just does because it is. It's not waiting for something to come, it's not traveling because it needs to be somewhere. It just does because it is.

  Applying this method of thought to the idea of why something that's living wants to stay alive is interesting. I'm holding a shotgun to this bank employees head, and I'm wondering if she wants to stay alive simply because she is alive. What if she were dead? Would she want to stay dead simply because she is dead?

  If she were happy, I'm sure she would want to stay happy. She probably actually would stay happy until a force comes along, maybe a "force" such as disease, and the doctors tell her she has cancer. That happiness would be gone. She would stay depressed until another "force" came along.

  They finish filling the garbage bag with money and I take it. Something so valuable placed in a garbage bag, there is something poetic about that, something symbolic. I run out of the bank and get into my partner's car. His hands are sweating, his face probably is too, and I'm the one who did all of the talking. We drive away with a garbage bag full of money, but we have no real intentions of spending the money on ourselves. He drives into a parking garage and we get out and look at the money. He takes off his sad theater mask and his suit jacket and tells me he doesn't know if he can keep doing this.

  I ask him what he means. I knew exactly what he meant. He couldn't keep risking his life and freedom for other people, people he didn't even know. I tell him that there are way too many people suffering out there from poverty, from starvation, from whatever, simply because of this imbalance in the world. I wanted to tell him that he wasn't angry enough. That he didn't have enough hate in his heart. And then I wake up.

  Some people die because of a lack of food, and others die because they have too much food. Starvation, obesity. If that's not imbalance, I'm not sure what is. Simple mathematics will tell you that if you have one apple on each end of a table, totaling up to two apples, and you take one apple from one end and put it alongside the other apple on the other end, you have subtracted one apple from one end and added an apple to the other end. I visualize what was once balance, but is now inequality. Imbalance.

  There is probably enough food in the world to feed every mouth, but some mouths take more than they are welcome to. How can someone right this wrong? Do you steal that apple back, and bring it to the mouths that starve? Do you steal that money and give it to those who need it? Robin Hood would say yes. He would say you have to do the wrong thing for the right reason.

  Earlier today I'm checking my mail, and I hear someone coming down the stairs. It's Mary, who lives in the apartment above me. She walks by and nods, and I nod back. She is walking so quickly that it's apparent that she's late for something, maybe work, maybe an appointment. I'm standing there with my mail in my hand, thinking to myself, realizing that almost every time I see Mary she is in some sort of hurry. A look in her eye that she may not accomplish what needs to be accomplished, and that scares her to death.

  I start to wonder if she is always in a hurry because she wants to be in a hurry, like a piece of rock moving through outer space on some pointless voyage to nowhere. I start to think, are people the way they are simply because they are that way, and they want to stay that way. They want to keep being that way. If this is truth then that would mean, according to the aforementioned science, that people can never change. Not unless a force comes along and changes them. Maybe a force such as love, or hate.

  Chapter 3:

  SIXES AND SEVENS

  There are those who will tell you that numbers, mathematics, have the potential to answer every question there is out there. That if we can understand them, they will reveal the truth. Uncover something we have been looking for the answers to for so long. The problem is that mathematics alone is just numbers, formulas, equations. It's only when these numbers are applied to something that they have meaning, possible comprehension. It's when they are applied we have a science. Science, the language we can understand.

  The apples on the table is simply one minus one gives you zero, or one plus one gives you two. However, when we apply the idea that this apple is being taken away from someone, that this person may starve and die, we understand what these two equations really mean.

  A few nights ago I woke up at six a.m. because I had to go use the bathroom. I'm in there, relieving myself, when I hear someone yelling at someone else. At first I say to myself, "This early in the morning?" But then I start to listen, I even lift up my window a little bit so I can hear the words more clearly.

  A man is yelling at a woman. He yells about how he is always late for work because she can't complete a simple task. On her end, all I can really hear is sobbing, but I can feel her regret. I close the window, flush the toilet and turn off the light as I exit, and I go back to sleep.

  Last night, I had a dream where I woke up at seven a.m. because I needed something to eat. I go to the kitchen and make a less than desirable sandwich, and not a second after my first bite I hear someone talking to someone else. I put the sandwich down and out of curiosity I lift up the window a little bit so I can listen to what's being said. A man is talking to a woman. The man asks the woman if she got the car from the repair shop and brought it home last night. She says she forgot. The man comments on how she is always forgetful, and out of nowhere she rips into a furious rage.

  She starts to yell as if she were bottling up so many years of regret inside herself. From what I could hear, the man didn't yell back, he just leaves for work. I close the window and leave the kitchen, forgetting about my sandwich. Forgetting about turning off the light. When I get back to my bed, there is a woman lying in it. I lay down next to her but I can't see who she is, and then I wake up.

  I'm laying in bed this morning, and all I can think about is why I would have a dream about my discontented neighbors. I
keep thinking about why they are so different in my dream than in real life. Probably the same people, but different actions and reactions to an event. I start to wonder if there is a mathematical formula out there that determines what kind of person someone will be. What kind of person someone is. How they will react to a certain event. Can I write down these two peoples' equations and finally understand, finally know who they truly are.

  There is a man named Joe in my apartment building. He lives right across the hall from me. Sure, I can know Joe, but I can never really know Joe. I can know what he likes to watch on television, what he likes to eat for lunch, what type of women he prefers, but I can never truly know Joe. I can never truly know Joe the same way one person can never truly know another person.

  But still, I wonder if there are a group of numbers I can apply to Joe's behavior, to Joe's habits, to find out who he is so I can truly know him. Just to understand Joe. And when I wonder that, I wonder if I can find out who I truly am in the same sense. Just to understand myself.

  I'm still laying in bed, and I start to think about the times that I woke up. Six, seven. Two different times, two different outcomes. Two different numbers, two different results. If I had waken up at five or eight how different would the outcome be? How different would the result be? I would probably be up too early to hear them or wake up too late and just miss them. I start to wonder if fate has anything to do with it. The objectivity of fate. Was I suppose to wake up at six in this life, and suppose to wake up at seven in the dream life?