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society, common traditions. A woman has died and part of it is because she met me, but the only
thing I can feel is the need to know where she is now, to know what happens after the heart stops
beating and the brain stops thinking.

Some time goes by and now I'm making breakfast. Before I can really start there is a banging at my
door. It's the police, but not any of the ones I've seen before. One of them is telling me they have a
search warrant for my apartment, and another is telling me that I'm under arrest for the murder of
one Kathleen White. I am confused, possibly in the mildest state of a coma, I can't comprehend a
word they are saying to me.

They say that I may not have done the actual stabbing, but that they know I played a role in the
death of Kathleen White. That I wanted her dead. Another officer starts to pat me down. He puts
his hand in one of my coat pockets and takes out a piece of gum, and that's when I wake up.

The use of an unreliable narrator is sometimes necessary to depict the atmosphere of the narrator's
mind. There was a time in my life when dreams and actual real-life memories were difficult to
differentiate, separating reality from fiction was not feasible. Sometimes we wake up from dreams
angry because we wish it was real life, and sometimes we wake up relieved because it wasn't.

I look in Derek's room, he's sleeping. I turn on the television and hear about how several more
people have died. All most likely having a tie to the drug trade. Not too long afterwards, there's a
knocking at my door and I look through the peephole. It looks like one of Jamal or Derek's friends,
but I can only assume because there is no one here to guide me. I open the door and the man asks
for Derek. I ask him who he is, literally.

He says he's a friend of Jamal's, or, was a friend of his. I ask him if Jamal is okay, but all he does is
look down and nods sideways. All forms of language is simply the outward projection of the mind.
What kind of life is this?

I wake Derek up, and they both leave. It's probably the last time I will see either of them, and
finally this place where I reside is my own again. I go to the room where Derek stayed, and I look
at my composition notebooks. All in place, as if they were never touched. Derek has the mindset,
but what he chooses to do in life is up to him. Heads, tails, call it in the air.

I had this dream one time where I was walking through a city, the downtown area, and there were
so many busy people. People who were going places; people walking, driving, running, bicycling.
In the contrast there were people who stayed still, laid still, sat still, stood still. These were people
without homes; men, women, children. Families. Every system produces waste.

I walked past a man who was sleeping on a piece of cardboard, and sat down on a bench that was
next to him. Still on my journey to a peaceful place that I had yet to find. Seeing these people like
this made me wonder if it was their own fault that their lives turned out like this, or if it was the
fault of society. Is it that for one person to live in a home, another must be without one? There was
a man who said that a nation is only as strong as how it treats its unfortunate.

All this time I'm thinking that these people screwed up somewhere in their lives, but what I don't