And if your head explodes with dark forebodings too, I'll see you on the dark side of the moon. Half of the time we're gone but we don't know where. Two song references for the price of one.

And when the feelings of pain faded into numbness, Brick found himself in new but familiar surroundings. He was no longer clutching his heart and dealing with a minor concussion at the bottom of a bathtub that was slowly filling up with water. He was standing in front of his childhood home, a very American place. The neighborhood breathed with the lives of those that nested there, old, young and those caught in between. It was a relatively peaceful autumn day only interrupted by the occasional car driving down the hill or pedestrian walking down the cracked and crooked slope of concrete that the locals often tread on during their daily rituals.

Brick looked at himself. He was no longer adorned like a grunge wannabe. His long flowing hair was now shorter, wavier and slightly thinning. He wore faded secondhand jeans, a cotton t shirt and denim jacket that had loose threads hanging from some of the button holes. He lost his beard, gaining only stray whiskers as a replacement. His gut protruded, his posture slumped. He held an old broom in his hands, whose wooden handle made his palms red and swollen. He was a shadow of his proper self and yet he felt at home as this schlub. He was no longer the Brick he had known.

Being as he was a creature hell-bent on pursuing the parameters of his character, he got to work. As a troubled artist, he had spent his days writing and recording while also lamenting the toll that creation took on his soul. As this directionless slob, he set out to clean the driveway and sidewalk until he could sweep no longer. He began sweeping every minute particle, branch or leaf that he came across. As much as he labored, the debris kept falling from above. His work would never be done.

As he swept the piles towards the road in order to more easily collect his burdensome bounty, a brand new luxury car purred along the downward curve in front of him. The driver was an old classmate of his. He was dressed in only the finest of suits and would dare not degrade himself with manual labor when others could be paid to do that on his behalf. Though they had spent many hours in the classroom together, learning the same lessons, time had made the two unrecognizable to one another. The familiar stranger honked at the man on the street, not out of recognition but merely to ensure that not a drop of sweat tainted his precious vehicle. He stepped on the gas and left the man on the street coughing in an exhausting cloud.

Once humiliated, the former Brick scooped the first pile of fallen nature into the large trash bag he had brought with him before returning to the sidewalk to begin the second round of his mundane ordeal. A pleasant sight caught his eye. Down the street walked loveliness. Though he tried to avert his gaze, he could not help but stare at the woman walking down the hill. Her short brunette hair, which only reached down the frame of her perfect face, shined from the sun that slipped through the clouds, as did her vintage aviator sunglasses. The closer she got, the more and more she resembled the woman he had fallen for so easily a lifetime ago. He stood paralyzed as she passed him by, dumbfounded and uncertain whether it was really who he thought it was or just a cruel facsimile. The memory still stung him as it had years earlier, not losing an ounce of venom.

This whole routine would soon become a loop as he watched those around him grow and live as he stood still, trapped. Eventually he stopped thinking at all and simply began going through the motions mindlessly, for his body and mind were no longer his own as he believed. In the back of his head he could still hear the faint echoes of music and falling water. They seemed so distant that he questioned whether they were not merely an escape from his prison of apathy and self-loathing. And when it seemed like years had passed before him in a single breath, he heard the word “Brick” repeated again and again until it no longer resembled a word at all but became like the monotone buzzing of a deaf man’s existence plaguing him in the crater of his decaying mind. Both worlds became as threatening as a lie to him and he no longer cared which lie pleased him more.