Brown Palace / 1700 Broadway

Click for map: Brown Palace / 1700 Broadway / lat 39.74397695161378 lon -104.98726171451153

Call 720-845-5413 extension 14 to hear this dream.

You look at the brown stone of the hotel’s walls, & you recall something familiar, some memory you can’t quite hold onto, a bit of a face, a table full of cakes & pies, adults laughing at something you’d said, you wondering what was so funny. You see a chunk of memory at your feet & you pick it up. You twist the memory back & forth in the light, watching the shiny parts of it glitter & flash. The memory tingles against your skin. The memory is warm. You slip it in to your pocket. It quivers a bit. This hotel was built atop the largest memory mine in America. For years, this mine was the richest source of memories in the western hemisphere. Miners pulled tons of memories out of the mine each day, the memories dense & rich. Over the decades, as technology changed, the demand for mined memories decreased—too much logistics, too many middle-men. The miners spread the mine further & further, reaching countless tunnels out over the country, until every house & shack & condo & apartment & tent in America now connects directly to the mine. Memories rise up into the beds & kitchens of America, straight from their source in the earth. And now you are back in your home, in the quiet before dawn. You fill a glass with cold water & take a sip. But everything you do feels like a memory, feels like something you have done a million times, yet not done in forever. The water tastes of memory. The sound the dripping faucet sounds like memory. And who is that, just at the edges of what you can see? They extend one hand, beckoning you to them. You step forward & follow, through a doorway you had never noticed before in your home, down a tunnel that runs steeply into the earth, down into the memory mine, where the darkness gives way to the memories all shimmering in the stone walls, so bright you must squint your eyes to see.