Look Again

I was a failed artist.

I laid down in my bed. I was living with my parents again. After five years of being out on my own, I was back here in this little room. This is where I’d spent most of my life.

I wasn’t a good artist. My hands were shaky. My lines never met up where they should. And I didn’t like drawing portraits anymore. I stood out. I was an artist who didn’t like art.

I had a few friends hold me up for a while. They were the kind of people who didn’t mind sharing their beds. That’s how I lasted so long. I was never really by myself.

My mom wanted me to go to college. I wasn’t good at school either. She thought I should apply anyway. I wrote my name on the application. Then I threw it out my window. It soaked in the garden for a couple of days. There was a lot of rain that week. I knew she’d find it eventually. She left it on my pillow in a puddle of dirty water.

I moved out soon after. It wasn’t that I had it bad here. Or that I was ever asked to leave. I just couldn’t sit still for any longer. I thought I had something I could do by myself.

I was uncomfortable. I turned over on my side and stuck my hand under my pillow. My fingers pushed against something hard. I stalled, trying to figure out what it was. I grabbed and pulled.

It was a little black book.

Before I moved out of this house I had owned a journal. Inside the journal was every single dream I’d ever had since I was twelve. The journal disappeared before I got the chance to finish it. I didn’t dream very often.

After it was gone I spent a month searching for it. I had scavenged every room in the house. I didn’t say anything about it to my parents. No one knew it existed. It was mine. I grieved for it in silence.

I sat up in my bed and reached to switch my light on. I needed a better look.

Under the light, I saw a white scratch across the front cover of the book. I felt around the edges, touching the corners, checking the stitching.

There was no doubt this was my journal.

I held it tight. It looked rougher than it used to.

My heart was beating hard. I flipped it open. On the inside of the cover, in black ink, was my name. I’d never seen that kind of handwriting before. And I'd never written my name in this journal.

On the first page was a dream about a poisonous river that flooded my town. Everyone stood on their rooftops while their houses melted underneath them. I saw myself standing before a gutter, watching the water rise. That had been the closest I’d ever come to being on a boat.

I knew which dream was on the first page because I’d read over it so many times as a kid. What I had actually written was now ineligible.

The margins were completely full with different colored markings. Like someone had gone through and tried to annotate everything. It looked like another language. There were shapes and lines and arrows. None of it made sense to me.

I continued to flip through the book. Most of the pages were unreadable.

I was confused.

On the last page, there was something written in English. The passage almost looked as if it had been stamped into place. Each letter was uniform and completely symmetric to the one next to it.

“Thank you for allowing us access to your REM information. Our production was successful. Two documents. Two movies. Three books. Your identity has been explored and placed in a suited division. We hope to come into contact soon.”

I reread the paragraph a few times. Underneath was another paragraph that read like a terms and agreement. And underneath that was my signature.

I never wrote my name in this book.

I had no idea what this all meant.

I put the journal down on my bedside table and stared at my window. The screen was ripped and the locks didn’t work. Someone could have easily broken in and taken my book.

But that didn’t explain anything.

I looked over at the journal. It was sitting there next to my lamp just like it used to.

Somehow I fell asleep.

When I woke up, I understood something. I picked up the journal and turned to an empty page. I didn’t have a pen. I stumbled out of bed to look for one.

I scrawled out the dream as quickly as I could see it.

In my dream I had been standing in the middle of my room, facing my closet door.

“You’re a star over here,” a voice had said from inside my closet.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“You’ve got the chops.”

“For what?”

“You know where to look, right?” The voice asked.

I didn’t say anything.

“Congratulations,” the voice said.

I had stared at my closet door. Then I had woken up.

After writing it out I shut the book and stared at the scratch across its front. It wasn’t just a scratch anymore. It was a gash. Like someone had cut over it with something sharp. I took two fingers and began to peel back the loose leather.

I could see the cardboard inside, along with a piece of paper laying flush against it. I started to rip the skin up. I knew not to damage the paper. I had to get it out of there.

My journal was mutilated but I had a check in my hand.

Twenty thousand dollars. I stared at it until my eyes crossed.

Whoever signed the check had bad handwriting. It was made out from a company called space.

It felt like a joke. I somehow knew that it wasn’t.

I put some clothes on. I had to cash it in to know for sure.

I left out the front door so I didn’t run into my parents.

My car coughed when I started it. It was cold outside.

When the teller took the check from me she asked, “savings or checking?”

It had been so easy.

“Savings,” I told her.

I sat in the parking lot for a while. I was staring at my phone. I had my bank account pulled up. There were twenty thousand dollars in there.

I drove home feeling numb.

My mother was in the kitchen when I walked through. Se was making eggs.

“Where’d you go?” She asked.

“The bank.”

“You got a job?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Doing what?”

“I’m going to be a writer.”

“What?” Her voice deflated. “You’re seriously still messing around?”

I didn’t respond to her. I started to walk back to my room.

I closed the door and immediately went for my journal. The leather pieces I’d torn through were still on the floor. I bent down to pick them up. Then I pulled a stapler from my desk and sat down on my bed where I began stapling the cover back together. It looked like shit when I was done. It didn’t matter. I flipped it open and began skimming over the pages again.

I’d missed something. On one of the empty pages, there were some notes. They were written in English. The handwriting was similar to what was on the check. It took me a while to figure out what it said.

“We assumed the book would have been finished considering how long you’d had it. Perhaps it’s quality over quantity. Or maybe you have bad sleeping habits. Be more mindful in the next one.”

“You write too fast. Everything would sound better if you took the time to remember.”

“Add more visuals.”

It was like I was being critiqued.

“Dream fifty-seven was a personal favorite. It was shot down in production.”

I was curious so I went through and counted every single dream until I got to fifty-seven. It took a while to decipher what I had written.

“Everyone lived in their basements. We didn’t have any water so we had to dig a hole in the floor and drain water from the dirt underneath the house. The water turned us all into addicts. My family developed an addiction to eating dirt.”

I couldn’t read the rest of the dream because it had been scribbled over. But I could remember that the dirt tasted like sugar. And I could remember the portrait I had painted when I had woken up that morning. I painted my mother with dirt all over her face. She really hated it when I showed it to her.

I put the journal inside a drawer and tried to stop thinking about all of this. I felt like a crazy person. I also felt like an addict. I couldn’t leave my ideas about it alone.

A few minutes later I started researching stories. I was trying to find one similar to mine. None of the posts I looked at were relatable. I thought about writing my own thread but something inside me knew not to.

After dinner I sat on my bed and stared at my drawer. I was fidgeting with my fingers, trying to keep my hands to myself.

I checked my bank account again and stared at the number on the screen.

When I went to bed that night I had another dream.

My closet door was busted to pieces. Wood splintered everywhere. It stuck out of my floor and pointed down from my ceiling.

I wasn’t allowed to see who it was. I stared at a wall. They opened my drawer.

“A hack job you did,” a voice said.

“It was the best I could do,” I responded.

“The next one is bigger.”

“It will take a long time,” I said.

“Do you remember the notes?”

“What if I forget?”

“You won’t.”

When I woke up my closet door was in one piece. I looked over at my drawer. I knew the journal was gone.

I sat up and slid the drawer open anyways. Inside was a different journal. This one was bigger. I took it out and set it on my lap. I turned through every page. It was completely empty. I picked up a pen and wrote my name on the inside of the cover.

This was just something weird that happened to me.