Waking up in Dreams
- Raimundas Malašauskas & Gabriel -
Raimundas : One night I fell asleep in a bar in Vilnius and woke up the next morning in a market in Roma as a cup of coffee.
Gabriel: This was the third time we met, right? I had just lost my job as cotton candy and ended up working as a sugar cube on the Piazza Navona.
R: Was it difficult to transform from cotton candy to a sugar cube? Did you notice how it happened, or was it immediate and imperceptible for you?
G: I am rather comfortable with adapting myself to new and unfamiliar situations. As cotton candy, life did not burden me much. I could say things were light and almost weightless, but it also lacked shape and solidity. My decision to find a job as a sugar cube was impulsive. I was looking for a more rigid shape—something more defined. One day I woke up and just bundled myself—pressed myself—and, well, formed a cube. It was much like the transformation of a caterpillar into a butterfly, yet maybe less romantic. One could argue I became a sugar cube out of necessity. Keep in mind, I had lost my job and took it upon myself to both change my life and shape of existence. I would not go as far as to say it was an act of travesty, but it was surely an act of self-reinvention.
R: Even more romantic than a caterpillar turning into a butterfly, when butter mixes with pillar and fly in the act of self-reinvention, reinvention itself gets re-invented. It is a common thing to choose existing, ready-to-use patterns of reinvention, but how do you re-invent the reinvention? Do you start from butter or fly?
G: Obviously butter. It being a product derived from milk, and as I am sure you know, milk is the elixir of life—mammal life that is. Maybe honey is to a butterfly what butter is to a calf. Catch my drift? As for re-inventing the reinvention, that sounds like evolution: the new model of the last model. I would argue that all invention is reinvention.
R: Don’t you think your transformation from cotton candy to sugar cube was prefabricated?
G: Premeditated, maybe, but what about waking up as a cup of coffee? In Roma? I was surprised to see you there and don’t recall you ever telling me what happened after.
R: The strange thing is that I am not sure what happened before I fell asleep in that bar: I remember the sweat of her body becoming myself and coffee cups sinking in butter. “Add some coffee, add some coffee!” someone screamed. Do you want to know what was inside of the cup?
G: This dream of yours, it troubles me… do you still have that tendency to just black out and fall asleep in bars? It got you into a load of trouble back in the nineties. As for what was inside of the cup, I presume it was sweaty, covered with some tiny oil spills like those coffees one gets on days when the temperature of the air is higher than that of the liquid.
R: Exactly. There was this taste of something we’ve never wanted to try—stronger than both of us. G: I could smell it. Remember, there I was, scratching my square sugary back to you. We were both abandoned that day. I melted; you evaporated. Ah, how nice to dig up memories. We should do it again soon. R: Yes, tomorrow.
G: And then we will dig up today.