We worried for a future we could not taste, a future that boiled over the buildings and the people we were compelled to occupy. We hoped for trajectories and destinations, points of culmination and termination on the horizon. Pressing coins and butterscotch candies into clasping hands failed to improve our chances. When it was mixed up in sex, when it would be inappropriate to pursue that other, when someone had to be displaced, or society would not allow for that type of love, we became gorgeously melancholic. We didn’t let on how often we thought about each other’s genitals, or what we thought about when the boy on the street corner pressed his tongue to his coffee-stained cuff. The strain of our secrets seized our hearts and bowels, caused our muscles to tense, and our jaws to clench. The hate came out in the ways we subtly sabotaged or abused people, actions we could not admit or recall, the interference of an inaccessible self. We were subject to constant evaluations, repeated rejections, and inevitable cruelties. We didn’t know when it started or if it would end. We didn’t know because when we followed the brambled and evolving trails of our memories they eventually coalesced in the Void. Our memories were inseparable from the immanent present: our jaw-clench, the soft wool of our sleeves. There was a general atmosphere of concern and an urgent need to get somewhere with more reliable escalators. We looked forward to the physical manifestation of the mood of our recurring dream: a piece of bitten-off styrofoam. Even the most rousing compliments were plateaus leading to other plateaus. Everyone said that this activity of hands and mouths was our activity, the manifestation of agency and will. We were estranged from our longings. It was impossible to tell if someone was the object or the obstacle. We lost sleep over the neighbor standing in the hallway, his sleeve on fire, his hair on fire. Sometimes it seemed like spontaneity was occurring or might occur but we could not prove it, so we fumbled. We went back to stacking the plates just so. We faked like we knew, so that when others returned our gaze they would reflect back the expression of certainty we had cultivated and sometimes successfully employed. Reassured, we went back to telling the story of the doctor who molested the mayor’s wife. Deep down we knew the ending and the beginning were simultaneous, that nonexistence was the condition for existence. We could not know that all doing was undoing, that undoing created the breaks and splinters that made multiplicity possible. We accepted boiled meats and shortcuts to the classroom in place of satisfying intercourse. It was advisable to act against instinct and feeling, and anyway it was impossible to act in accord with something inaccessible to consciousness. We convinced ourselves there was no communal dream. Our time and experience was relentlessly captured and controlled. We thought it best to wait things out while slouching. The rumination renewed itself each moment as novel, fresh paranoia. We enjoyed the spectacle of dumpsters: the broken glass, the styrofoam snow. A sense that innermost depravity could be exposed at any moment, that we turned inside out for anyone who really wanted to know the truth. Everything was unbelievably chaotic and nothing favored an outcome of equanimity. Many people seemed to think they were better than us, and this greatly agitated us and worsened our jaw-clenching habit. Still, deep in our hearts when it came to love we bubbled and swelled like petted lapdogs. Vigilance was necessary but the reward was elusive. Seized by unattainable desires and the shame of our tendencies, we were captivated by excess: soaps that smelled like clove cigarettes abated our nicotine addiction but left a cancerous residue to be mouthed off. We pretended that we were all past this kind of concern now, that it was something we had grown out of. Everyone said we turned inside out already. The inner workings of minds and bodies, our sex and desires, polluted the atmosphere with dreams and set the passageways on fire.