The Dream Keeper

It all started when I went to a party my friend was having. Well, I use the word ‘party’ loosely. My friend was only a bit better off, socially, than I was; so that meant he was having his friends and his roommate’s friends over to get drunk. I qualify for the categories ‘friend’ and ‘likes to get drunk’ so I thought, what the Hell? It’s not like I have anything else to do, right? I’d never met his roommate. We only knew each other through School – he had just finished his Associate’s, so he was halfway done. I’d be going back for my Psychology Master’s after two and a half years of working night shift at a gas station and living with two roommates of mine, one of whom was my brother. I didn’t know my friend’s roommate had just hit thirty. But he had, and that meant the other group was mostly older people – there were eleven in total though, so I was able to take my usual course of action. That is, I hung back and got drunk, watching everyone else fumble through the awkward smalltalk...

Is it me or is it you? If it’s not one, it must be two Can you feel it? You know I do, If it’s not me, it must be you. Is it black, or is it blue? The sea, the skies, and our souls, too; You see it, don’t you? It’s not new, And if not false, it must be true. Is it the Sun, or the Moon? Which one makes that haunting tune? I know it’s one, and you’ll know soon; Which one is me and which is you. Is it me, or is it you? If it’s not false, it must be true It can’t be one, it must be two; So if I'm not me, I must be you.

I'm not afraid of dying. Really, I'm not. I have very fragmented memories of my earlier years. Most of them revolve around the same stock images we all have of our childhoods, T.V. Shows and parents fighting, but nothing of any significance to anyone but me. So let's ignore that. I've been writing for around eight years now. Well, writing anything I'd be proud of, anyways. But the older my stuff is, the weirder it seems to me. I feel less and less like the person who wrote or drew these things in the first place, and I know why. It's because the person I was, then, is dead. Literally. The ideas and attitudes I used to have got swallowed by new ones as life went on. Things get pushed out of my head to make room for new things, which in turn get pushed out by something new. All of our dreams and thoughts and feelings come from wherever they come from and then either get turned into something - art, music, literature, our jobs or our actions - or dissipate....

K A N E decided he would finally look into what was going on with Dawn when a group of tenants in his apartment building had begun complaining to him. Then he was finally sure that it wasn’t just him. He wasn’t going crazy. Something was wrong with her, and somethin needed to be done . Dawn moved in the apartment across the hall from him. Kane was the Landlord, a friendly old man, Hospital Worker on the Graveyard Shift until he retired. He lived by himself in a little one-bedroom at the fourth floor of his apartment building. It was always a mess. The green futon in the corner was covered in clothes; since he didn’t have any heating in his room and only two, thin sheets, he covered them in his dirty laundry to conserve what little warmth was available. His Computer was covered in dust, since he’d selected cable over internet this month. Things bothered him, sure, but Dawn had begun to grate on his nerves even before the Hudsons complained. Late in the evening, when he had...