I had a friend named Jetson. He was more like a patient because he paid me to listen. Jetson could see things before they happened whenever he closed his eyes. His dreams were a lot like a maze. In this maze Jetson could breathe underwater.
Jetson was a lot like a swan if you looked at him from a distance. He swam with his long swan neck and never got caught on soda can rings. He breathed a combination of hydrogen and oxygen and exhaled pure nonsense. The maze in which he dreamed had no beginning, no end, and no clearly marked exits. The beings that inhabited the maze were a lot like people Jetson knew in real life. They were loud, translucent, and always too busy.

Sometimes Jetson forgot what he was doing and closed his eyes and listened to Mozart. This could happen at any time, he just zoned out and could hear Mozart's resonance no matter what he was doing at the time. He could be eating dinner, walking down the street, buying eggs, or trying to get laid. Jetson used to tell me it was really cool and all, to be able to hear music without legally downloading it, but sometimes he wished he could be like everyone else and blast a few off on some cute girls or go to baseball games.

Jetson had bigass braces that had consumed most of the enamel of his teeth. He was all rust. He liked to look directly into my eyes for long periods of time, mostly in silence. I could tell it made him nervous, that he was scared of the sound of his own voice. He said things like, "This could be about you but it's really more about the idea of you," and, "I want you to be deeply offended." I stared at something distracting while he talked so I could listen better. He gave me a look like he wanted to probe me with all sorts of homemade devices. "I want your fingernails to pierce the skin of my cheeks," he said, "when I die laughing at you."

When he told me these things he liked to chew on the ends of my throw rugs, which I didn't have a problem with, I could tell the guy was pretty hungry and pretty broke; he'd just given me his last five dollars for permission to enter my house. I politely nodded, and delicately addressed the situation at hand by removing loose threads from the corner of his mouth as he spoke. He was unraveling all right, nice and slow too.

The dogs are barking, my body is being used as an end table, or perhaps a footrest. There are rings on my face from the glasses. Someone spills their coffee on my chest, it burns but at least I'm awake.

I'm starting to think I was a waste of a perfectly good placenta.