standing on a scaffold, looking down at steel cables while a technician and i engage in smalltalk. He reaches into a pulley box that looks like it should be holding reels of film 

 

he disassbles the pulley box covers and pulls one of the steel cables 

 

a distorted face of an unkempt man spools forth, caught between the pulleys, stretched.

He looks so tired

 

talking to a heavily tattooed man in a fish and chips shop about a sordid past.

 

His tattoos are script and they change into the sentences he's saying every time I look back at him. 

 

I compulsively look away and back to try to expedite the conversation, but he figures out my game.

 

"Look at me."

Then he stops talking.

 

His tattoos read, on his eyelids, "I don't live that life anymore."

 

a gallery of specific moments of my life 

 

i used to have a dream where I would walk around a dilapidated commercial space that was nothing but doors, ductwork, pipes, and stained mustard carpet , work down and black in sections that suggest high traffic over a long time.

 

I felt with urgency that I needed to choose a door, but I knew what lay behind all of them. 

 

Any one door would lead to a nightmare scenario that would play out almost the exact same way. Each door was consistent , too -- the same door led to the same nightmare.

 

Then I would wake up in the room and have to choose again.

 

I am watching myself from behind one of the doors, much older now.