what i'll put in my book

I can see it happening already and I know what I need to do. In the wake of duty, this boat is taking on inspiration. I've got siren songs ringing in my ears telling me to let it capsize and float adrift in some romantic ideal of artistic irresponsibility. I can't, though. I'd be too hand to mouth to get anything done, I'd do nothing.

So I'm buying a book for all my dreams. And all those thoughts and the flashes of staggering beauty and the color palettes and the construction plans and the moods will go there. I worry about the big ideas, though. I worry a little book won't hold them without crushing them. Maybe I'll look for them a year hence and find they're incomprehensible, that I no longer understand feelings that were the only things I felt.

The big one:

An ocean with a black sky and silver water, a beach of worn rock formations. A building right on the edge, built in the early 1900s with carefully laid marble and crumbling cornices and huge leaded windows. Isolation, the end of all things, the safety of irrelevance. An interior made of real wood under palls of dust, twelve foot ceilings, deco lamps, chrome light streaming in even in the midst of the eternal storm. A cast of characters who chain-smoke and sleep in their best clothes, opulent and disheveled. A beautiful mime with a broken heart, a prostitute dressed up like a princess, a serial killer and renowned academic. A runaway farmgirl who only wants to be a mermaid.

And there's the character who goes mostly unmentioned to keep the narrator's heart from breaking. A man with no name and a past that is merely the sum of all human experience, or at least the rawer ones. We readers know that he's blonde (or once was), tan, muscular, taciturn. He belongs to music, to the desert. He probably doesn't fit this scene, someone else's dream, and maybe that's why we never find him there. But the careful details of the interior, the glorious faltering lines of the building itself, the ocean and all its passion - they exist in tribute to him.

Even if I write it down, I'm terrified of the day I forget.