Reflections on a Man in a Room

I wouldn’t want to be left in the same room with him, relatively alone. It was only the two of us, and then him. Its better to judge wrongly and leave, then to stay and risk…stuff.

The threat was real then. He could easily have done things to us. The door could lock. The walls were thick concrete – sounds didn’t easily pass through. And he could’ve.

He had this look about him. Like he would. Like he was on edge, ready to snap at any moment, any mistaken word. Like he couldn’t look at us without thinking about “it”. But it might just have been me.

So I left. Didn’t wait for any more evidence. Its usually too late by then anyways. I don’t know what happened to the other girl who was with me. She didn’t leave. You could accuse me of abandoning her there, but I didn’t. I told her what I thought and left it up to her. We spoke about him later on. She said he was a nice guy. He might well have been. A lot of them are. Nice.

Every Day We Begin Again

Every day we begin again.

Every night as you drift to sleep thinking of tomorrow, what is it you’re looking at? She stands there, between the far end of the horizon and the place where your sight gives way to blurry globs of colour. She does not speak to you. The only sound you hear is the wind as it blows away her scent, co-mingled with the wet-earth smell post-rain, and the taste of iron lies on your tongue.

Every time I turn to her, she is gone.

She comes wearing new dresses each day, all wet-edged with grass. My hands are numb with cold and I cannot see if she asks something of me.

I keep walking.

Every time I turn to her, she is gone.

The morning wakes to her voice, like sweet scented wind whistled through the lips of a tropical canopy. Birds gather at her window (barred), wings flapping like a million men running on dry underbrush. The rain inside drips like the pounding of silent piano keys (drumming fingers on wood). Gunshots suddenly (lightening) puncture through the canopy somewhere (men run frantically now).

She has collected her songs in a jar, to sing some other day.

The scarf hanging behind the door flickers in my peripheral vision. It isn’t cold out. The scarf has been hanging there from several winters ago, faded and dusty now, partially moth-eaten.

No face emerges from behind the door. The door does not budge. Yet it seems as though the scarf has become an effervescent vapour that moves to drafts of air blowing through the door’s woody fingerprints, but the air is stagnant

The baby-tongue of my lantern’s flame stands, twitching only slightly. My shadow on the wall is a malformed apparition and the moon cannot be seen from  my window. The scarf still flickers in my peripheral vision and I expect you to walk through that door.

“Leave living to those who know how to do it.”

Cleaning out your home after you passed, I finally understood.

Chapters – 2

The screen comes in and out of focus. There are patterns reflected on it from today’s pale sunlight. It will rain today, heavily.

She begins her day like any other – with the brown slop-substitute for food. Out the door now, in the car, she goes over what she must accomplish during the day. There are several emails to reply to, mostly from Rob, her editor. She writes slogans for a living; things like Coca cola’s “Open Happiness”. Though not for a multinational company, and not for half as much money as the person who wrote that (slop).

Rob emailed her about a meeting with a big client of their’s – some new office supply company. She wonders if her life could get any more mundane than it is now and concludes that it is possible. Upon further inspection (though), she cant see how.

The clock’s cubic orange numbering tells her she’s on time, punctual, as professionals are supposed to be. She has been debating turning on the radio like she usually does. There is something peaceful about this town in winter.

The sound of moving people now, in this room where you have closed your eyes and chosen, once and for all, to rest. The sound of moving people. Moving closer to your bed, closer even to the rhythmic rise and fall of your chest, the soft ups and downs of your stomach, the barely audible moans, whines, sighs coming from your cocooned shape.

Moving people- yes, them, the movers that came and packed it all away. Wrong address, you told them. Any address would be the wrong one, except all of those, down the road. The older ones, just so slightly weathered.
We are from there – from those weathered houses.

Moving people, shuffling around, breaking the peace. Moving people, their gray faces and forced words that hold no meaning once rolled on their charred tongues and pushed through their blue lips. Moving people, all of them. Moving over your almost lifeless body, moving with the rhythmic rise and fall of your breathing, the ebb and flow of your blood, the barely audible moans, whines, sighs. Moving.

Too much has happened in this room. In this room where you sit reading my words. Too much has happened to you and we cannot all survive in this room, yours only by proximity.

It has the best view of the garden. A view you saw everyday as they fed. A view you never noticed, thrust on your stomach, breathing through (suffocating in) soiled sheets from the day before. Too much has been taken – we cannot all survive.

You dont remember. You do remember. You dont remember. It never happened. You do remember. It keeps on happening. Moments of peace come to find you now, and you fight them off. It was in peace that you gave to them. You can never touch peace again.

Comfort

You spoke to me this morning of our comfortable lives. Comfort, you said, is a feeling so rare. It is just this country, this place that can give comfort. Luxury, you meant, but confused the words. While you buttered your toast, you went on – it is only here the poor can feed themselves with a single green note. No one dies hungry on these lands.

Last night we passed by a child digging scraps from the dumpster. You didnt see him.

Life is good. God is great. What a beautiful world it is to the girl in that emergency ward. You know what happened to her, don’t you?

There is comfort here. Comfort between the legs of children. Comfort in his amputated limbs. Comfort in her black eye. Comfort beneath the chaffed, bare feet. Comfort in the tattered, unwashed clothes. Comfort in disguised prisons. Comfort in the delicate gold chain he makes her wear. Comfort in pounding hearts, beating fists. Comfort in screams, in suffocating silence. Comfort in knowing you are above it all, because you watch from your glass windows and wipe the filth off when they knock your door. Comfort.

Yes, there is comfort here, in this city of god. But for those that don’t believe.

What I Cannot Write Of

I am lost in I’s and You’s – barriers I cannot think past. I cannot write about people. I cannot write about the boy in the street selling candy. I cannot write about his mother. He is an illegitimate child. I cannot write about his father. Does he have one? I cannot write about the girl tagging behind him. Half-sister? Blood. The one he protects with all the might his little body holds.

I cannot write of what I do not know. I cannot write of what I lack in courage to discover. I cannot write about pain, loss, despair (pleasure, fulfillment, hope). I cannot write in truth. I cannot write the truth. The ink of this pen drips with lies. I am young, naive (dishonest, manipulative). What you read here you cannot trust. What you read here you cannot trust.

You once cut your finger along the edge of this page. You once cried and stained the words, mixed the lines. You once slept, crinkled time. You wrote on these pages, your truths in my ink.

Lies.

It is a pain thinking of titles.

You drip. I drip. We drip together in an amalgam of liquidity. Nothing exists now. Everything exists now. Nothing exists now. Everything exists

Now.

We’re swimming in each other, around each other, immiscible. Once in a while a particle of me gets lost in you. We are never one. When we are still you float over me. In movement you break me, and I you. We fuse back together eventually. Sometimes you suffocate me. Sometimes I hold you back. Neither of us is enough.

I awoke to you last night, fearful, not of you but of what you do to me. I awoke to myself. Untrusting. I fell asleep again, clutching a taped shard of glass like an old teddy-bear, rolled in a ball, cocooned.
(I awoke hours later. By myself. With you)

Tonight my weapon is a thin box-cutter. Tomorrow I will have none. It goes like this, once every few weeks. By time I realize blades do not cut through water and mirrors do not bleed. Please know it is not you I do not love.

Rainy Days

A few drops of acid separate you down the middle, skin melts off, falling in gooey clumps at your feet. You have been divided in halves. Thirds rather – theres a bit of you there on the floor. Yes, next to the shoe. Either way, you have been divided into segments that collectively may become you, but alone are nothing but abstractions of human nature that may belong to anyone. Was there not once a con artist with your intelligence? Or an unfeeling sadist with your dry wit and sarcasm? Maybe a molester with your tenderness? Perhaps a gunman with your grief?

Recognizable yet indistinct globs of you float, slither, seep, dry up into the atmosphere to rain down on a tree far off beneath which lies a child, drinking up the fragments of humanity that soak through to the bone. One cannot tell what the child will be. And only he may retell the story of each raindrop falling upon him.

The Fog

The dizziness goes away and  a fog takes its place. A calming fog. The kind that falls over your consciousness pre-sleep. Pre-sleep. A state you have been in for a while now. Shades of gray, you read somewhere. People like you are in shades of gray, pre-sleep, post-wakefulness. Metaphors. What would one do without them? And you cant decide between the maybe’s and must’s and have-to’s anymore. Judgment is impaired pre-sleep. Impaired judgment is what brought you here in the first place, though. Or was that distorted perception. Memory is gone. The fog. It’s the fog, don’t worry about it.

There are so many screaming for someone to save them. Fools. Fools they are. No one saves anyone anymore. No one can save anyone. Its those darn metaphors again. And the fog. No one understands the metaphors…because of the fog. It’s a world in grayscale. How close to ten are you?

How close to ten are you?

Baseball. You’ve got three strikes. But you play like a gymnast. You do it with skill, finesse, tact. You’ve been training since…how long now? It’s the Olympics of life. Or death, in this case. How close to ten are you?

The sun set a while back. Skyscrapers aren’t your thing but the city is beautiful. People in grayscale, diffused yellow against deep blue sky.

The fog has set in like pre-sleep loss of consciousness. Maybe this time it’ll last.

Ruins of War (part 1)

The stench of week-old blood and dirty bandages makes the air thick, unbreathable. A man coughs and a child cries out, awoken by the sound. Her mother, shuffling around in bed, uncovers her breast and gives it to the child, now comforted. Both fall into unrestful sleep. The man coughs again. Nothing stirs.

We are the ruins of war. I the nurse, they the unwanted war booty, the sick, injured, disheartened; men who cannot labor and women who cannot be labored upon. They took the children, lead them to a gas-room and gassed them all. Outside this make-shift tent, ash falls from the sky like rain. It is the ash of our children. Our future in ashes.

We thought they would come to free us. Our soldiers. People. The rest of civilization. Many a day have passed, I have lost count. The sick have not been counting down to freedom. They have been counting down to death. That is their freedom now. And the disheartened? Some sit on the dirt floor, limbs wet with urine, feaces and blood. Indifferent. Others go on like the world as we know it has not been attacked, incinerated and forgotten. They speak of their businesses (that have been burnt), their families (that have been burnt) and memories from yesterday (that have been burnt).

“Be thankful,” they told us, “that we are letting you go. We could keep your women and make you work as slaves, even in ill health. But our hearts are merciful.”

And they then scoffed, turned and left us with no food, water, shelter or ground. And we were thankful. In that moment, we were thankful. The old women say now we are unrepentant again. This war is punishment for our sins. The sins are ours. Mine. Yours. We are comrades in sin. Our sin is life. And their rosaries protect them from a merciful, benevolent god.

(to be continued when I have less homework)

Distorted Truths

You hide as if your existence means much but the truth is you could walk down the road for a mile unscathed as cars simply pass through what you think is real. You hide as if it matters what you are and who you are. You hide because they want to hurt you but they don’t. You’re not important enough. You’re merely the cardboard man hanging at the end of a shooting range – practice. You hide as though you believe you should be hidden, like a diamond in a safe. And you never could be more mistaken. You’re nothing but the cheap replica on display at some dusty museum, groped by dirty hands that want a piece of your, albeit fake, brilliance. But when the lights go out, you sit there like the worthless lump of glass you are – unglimmering. Where is your brilliance now, dear one? Where are the truths that brought you to this place? Now you glow red, seething like the crimson velvet cushion you were placed on. Now you shatter. Now you break to shards that spill all over; the blood you draw is mine.

Chapter 1.4

Brush in black water. Green swirls of pain transcend from her pink fingertips. She strokes the canvas again, once tenderly, once with rage like the black water she cleans with. Thick oil paint hides delicate rips in canvas. The paint is red now.

She paints dripping rain-water, waterfalls on stairways. She paints in water-washed floors, and a bright window that makes the inside glitter. Brush in black water again. She treads water.

The painting is left to dry, infront of the bright window that makes it glitter. The painting is left to fade, in the piercing sunlight. The painting it left to peel, crinkle to powder and be washed away in flowing crystals.

The rips in canvas are bare.

Travel

She rolls over to the smell of wet earth and clings to foreign bedsheets like dewdrops. Waking up to rain is an unfamiliar pleasure. The phone rings. It is her wake up call (wasn’t it supposed to be earlier?). Breakfast will be served till ten which gives her an hour and a half to shower, get dressed and finish before nine.

There is no one in the elevator when she gets on and the restaurant is half-empty. The morning rush has passed and others have not woken yet. Perfect. Its like waking up at dawn.

“Table for one?”

She’s lead to the table by a sleepy-blue-eyed waitress in her teracotta-beige uniform. Loose-fitting jacket and trousers, pale yellow trim. She wouldnt mind having breakfast with her.

“Coffee or tea?”

“Coffee please.”

The waitress smiles her practiced everyday smile. Soft, a little too far off somewhere with just the right amount of hesitation, sincerity. She will now go smile at other customers, lead them to their tables and serve them coffee. Or tea.

~*~

“I would like a bellman sent up to my room please.

Thank you”

Theres a soft ding-ding sound. The door bell. They have doorbells for hotel rooms now. It makes sense.

“Can I help you ma’am?”

“Yes, I’m checking out. My luggage is over there.”

He loads the solitary bag onto his cart and wheels it toward the elevators. This is one of those jobs feminists arent screaming about.

The elevator ride was comfortable. The bellman made no conversation and there was no compulsion to. She could have stayed in the elevator for hours, comfortably silent. He had a name-tag on his jacket. Something long. She didnt look at it for long. Just a glance. No eye-contact. Comfortable.

“How may I help you, ma’am?”

The receptionist forced a welcoming good morning and hello, followed by a practiced smile. His eyes were sharp, harsh. She missed the waitress.

~*~

Of What Cannot be Put in Words

You make me want to cry, wrapped in the middle of the night like a melting chocolate core in a hard chocolate shell. You make me want to hold myself because there is no one to hold. You make me want to break down and fix up all my little kinks with surgical precision, top it off with tiny stitches that leave no scars. You make me want to shake and shiver and sob into the pillow so I can convince myself I am alone. You make me want to love the moments.

You make me want to feel. You make me want to take a walk in a thunder storm, in a stream, in a deserted garden that reminds me of a barren field. You make me want to climb trees and jump off to know what its like to soar and be sore, to know a high and a low and a somewhere in between. You make me want to sleep. You make me want to dream of forgotten things, little things, little happy things. You make me want to snatch time from inside a waterfall behind which we hide.

You make me want to wipe away dust, land, water. You make me want to…

You make me want…

You

make me.

(Inspired by a lovely talk with a wonderful friend)

The Time

Its time. Its time.

Its time for forgotten things. Its time for peace, for love, for war, for sleep. Its time to smooth a million kinks. Its time to fix, time to mend, time to patch together the air and cover the breach. Its time to make good, be good, lest karma bite back again. Its time to live, time to hold up arms and abandon shields. Its time to wake, to walk, run far before it catches up.

Most times its not the time to breathe.

Fast

Turn around. You always turn around, then say its time to leave.

Its not time to leave. Its time to stay and stick it out. Its time to face up. Grow up.

But then you said you would rather not, and took to running away. You put on your sneakers and zipped past everything fast enough to only see blurs.

The road doesnt take you anywhere.

Chapter 1.3

Clouds hang in the air like saddness, post-rain. Moisture, sweat and synthetic esters fuse to a fragrance she remembers from long ago (in a garden with a sprinkler and a dog and a little dead fish to bury).

She shuffles her feet to the shower.

(We are gathered here today…)

Unzip. Unbutton.

(to honour the short life…)

Untie and brush.

(of Flappy the Fish…)

Undress.

(She was a joyful fish…)

Stand.

(with a heart full of love…)

Fidget.

(She led a full life…)

Scratch.

(and made our lives full…)

Draw water.

(…May she rest and peace…)

Whats done and said does not matter.

(…as she lived in it…)

Its always a happy-ever-after.

Maybe its time to switch perfumes.

Chapter 1.2

Its raining inside.

She doesnt carry an umbrella anymore. Gray clouds make up for wallpaper and ceiling decor. Miniature lightening bolts strike corners in each room. There is always light. The floor she walks on is flooded. Her toes numb and blue from the cold. She used to wear warmer clothes when it began. Plumbers were called, heaters were installed. They couldnt fix anything.

She went to bed that night, drenched. Droplets fell on her, rain ceasing to drizzle as she slept. The water soaked through her blanket, clothes, hair. But her skin didnt wrinkle and the food didnt spoil. Water rolled off tables and papers as if it were nothing. It flowed from under doors, around the legs of chairs, but the wood didnt swell. The rain inside kept noise away. All she heard from then were her feet splish-splashing as she treaded, the tup-tup-tup of drops somewhere, the rush of a waterfall as it flowed down the stairs and the endless pelting of raindrops as they fell from the ceiling.

Then she came to love the rain.

Headache

The world breathes into my head. Its scalding breath and my cold silence rise in a whirlwind of destruction. Flesh. Blood. Bone. I can go no deeper.

Little animal screams arise from somewhere far. Panic-stricken. Survival instinct kicks in too late. Screams beget screams beget screams and paralysis. The predator leaps – a quick swipe. Crack. Slump. Dead.

Blood rushes in like scared rabbits, fleeing. Gnawing at the insides of my head for a way out. If only release were that easy. I lose wavelengths in their screams in my screams in the sound of little bits bone chipping away.

I wait for the demons to feast.

Little Bird

I dont want morning to come yet. I dont want sunrises and morning flowers. I dont want voices, people, life. It is harder to hide when the lights are on, and there is no option but.

I dont want lilies and wild flowers. I dont want apologies and little blank spaces. I dont want more skeletons, walls or demons. It is harder to hide when the lights are off, and there is an option but.

I dont want morning to come yet, and erase my impenetrable night. I dont want stars to shine or walks in moonlight. The silence broken only by wild creatures and forced sighs. There is no other way to quiet quivering lips and whys. Later when tears conceal to fake crystalline, and there is no room to breathe, I’ll pull apart the curtains, clear conscience and take flight.

Maybe some day I’ll be found somewhere with broken ribs; closed eyes.

Disintegrate

On.

Off.

On.

Off.

At this rate it wont be long before the fuse blows. Then we’ll bask in eachother’s darkness and bathe in the distance between us till we forget we knew how to swim. Our drowning bodies will drift away from eachother, carried on different currents to the same whirlpool, and escape will not matter then.

We’ll wait for Moses to part the seas once more and see eachother, here, there, everywhere. Little bits of you and little bits of me that we each lost as they drifted out to sea. They will come to their rightful place, and I will collect your pieces in a hollow clam shell stowed away in my chest. Later, when the waters of distance deposit me on some shore to rot, all that will be left of me are those little bits of you that I never returned. And the little bits of me you never wanted.

Never-Ending Season

There are things missing – puzzle pieces lost in the everyday hustle – thoughts, feelings, words, meanings, all missing. Lost, maybe? Or maybe just…not found. Like little torn petals in an uncovered basket that drift away with the wind or leaves that cling a little too lightly to their branch. Why does the branch never cling back?

Autumn. The season of decadence. Maybe it looks better that way – faded, water-washed and filtered orange. More aesthetically pleasing, like a story without the words. Peak season for insect vacations. Maybe I’ll crawl under a pile of leaves and feed off their demise.

But things get worse before they get better. So Winter comes with its despair. And stays. Cold has a way of seeping in through the tiniest cracks, and chilling the healthiest bodies. Fear not though. Winter fears the Cold we carry.

Summer was afraid we would miss the crystaline ice we wore as jewelry in our bones, so it forgot to come.

And all thats left of fairytales are the snow angels lying crushed beneath us.

Chapter 1

She walks into the kitchen and opens the fridge door, standing in a halo of light. A neatly stacked selection of identical, transparent containers displays itself, of which she picks one, opens it and examines the contents. A brownish sludge of what once must have been food is all that is left inside. She snaps the lid back on and stows it away, picking another container and doing the same. After scrutinizing the contents of five boxes, she reaches the sixth. From the sixth container, she empties three tablespoons of the distasteful brown soup and warms up her meal in the microwave. The darkness outside causes a partial reflection of her image to form in the kitchen window. She stares intently at herself – past herself – as she brings half-filled spoons of leftover broth to her lips.

After having eaten and washed, she puts the lone pink bowl she has been eating from back in its individual cupboard and leaves.

The bathroom door is closed and firmly locked. She keeps her eyes off the mirror and on her hands as she washes. Soapy foam slides off to reveal blue-green veins that snake like seaweed from her wrists to her fingers. She washes her face, dries herself, steals a glance at the mirror and thus begins her daily, unfaltering routine to nothing.

Boogeyman

If you lay in the dark long enough, with your eyes open, everything disappears. Even things you see with light that snakes in from between the curtain and the wall, or that barges in from under your door. Everything disappears and still, you can feel it breathing right beside you. You can feel its flesh an inch from yours. You can feel it, ready to grab you, seep through you as soon as you unclench your fists, close your eyes and drift to sleep. Its muscles tensed, breathing controlled, much like yours. Don’t turn around. Whatever you do – Don’t. Move.

Your eyes burn unbearably now, so you risk a blink – you risk seeing it in your peripheral vision, you risk being seen afraid. The child in you makes believe; if you don’t see it, it don’t see you. Your eyes burn still, water, dry – fear makes us overcome many things.

There are only a few hours left till the sun rises; many nights left till peace comes. You wouldn’t be afraid if death came now, and took you, with your eyes open, frozen. They’d say you died like you lived, gazing at something beyond, looking for something more… They wouldn’t know – I hate looking for things and now
if I could just

close my eyes
and

sleep…

Falling and Fusion

Breath deeply till it passes – feeling. Numbness calmly sutures all wounds until you’re far enough from yourself not to care of who said what, when and to whom. You now exist as two people, estranged from one another; two people that see each other here and there but have not the will to speak, or to know. You the one that writes this note now, are free of all emotional attachment.
The other you is dead.

With precise movements of your dexterous hands, you record every moment that begins to pierce through your indifference. By binding it to paper, you hope it will cease to burn through you – but that is seldom the case. It burns still and you have your journal set ablaze, yet it somehow burns without consuming itself. Fire can only consume that which is of this world, you conclude.
These thoughts are not.

Where are they from, then?

Breath deeply, make it pass. You ponder not on pointless questions that bear no relevance to your being. Beings. There are two of you now. Does one still exist if one is dead? Does death alter the inherent property of a human being? If one were to stop being, what would one be? You ponder on pointless questions that bear no relevance to your beings.

Your anti-being lays motionless before you and you wonder how long you may remain separate this time. It is a gradual process, this disassociation. Like a stunt-devil, you learn to fall closest to ground. As you learn, you go higher, fall longer and let the numbness consume you.

And fusion…is when you hit ground.

Rants dont have titles

Things fade. Time devours all relationships, then you bury the ashes and walk away. You visit their graves on special occasions to remember them, pay your respects to them. You remember how they have each painted a mark, which you sometimes call a scar, on your body that will remain as you grow old and wither.

The trick is when to call time, or when to charge up the pads once more, tell everyone to get their hands off your relationship and shock it. Chances are you’ll have done that a lot, for the special ones. Chances are most of the special ones are still alive and kicking. Then there are those that didn’t make it, though they were special. You shocked and shocked and begged and cried and kicked the operating table and threw down your array of surgical instruments. But you couldn’t operate alone.

You were afraid, after your first time losing one on the table. You let some choke, because you were afraid. Others, you didn’t take to the operating table. They too died of neglect and fear. Some, you left on the operating table. Got tired and walked away. You left them for someone else to bury, watched their funeral from afar. Then regretted it.

Regret is a funny thing. Funny in the distant, tragically ironic way you try to see your life in. There is irony in all tragedies though, is there not? Tragedy is all about missed chances, what-ifs and unfulfilled possibilities. And irony? You just like to think there is some, so you can laugh at it. So it isn’t a tragedy to you, but a twisted comedy that leaves you in tears of laughter.

Or at least, what seem to be tears of laughter.

Oblivia: Maps

You’re lost.

You walk over to the city information desk and ask for a map. You’ve been here for a while now, but these all-consuming streets seem to have been designed by Deadalus, and you feel like one of the 14 young men and maidens offered up to the Minotaur. You’re half expecting to see a map marked by strings, cracked walls and abandoned shields. Of all things, its Greek mythology that your tired, wandering mind recalls.

Non-existent wind plasters an obscure map to your face, not unlike the one you imagined. You wonder what you would’ve got had you asked for a trail of bread-crumbs or sparkling red shoes to take you home.

You walk over to a pensive passer-by, the first you’ve seen, brooding over a piece of paper that from afar looks very much like a treasure map from a pirate movie.

Sir, could you tell me the way Home?

He looks up from his map, notices yours.

Did you get this from the information desk?
Yes.
That’s the wrong map.

You look from your map to his, back to yours. He’s gone.

There are no walls in Oblivia, you notice – aside from the towering stone monument that separates you from Esperenza. There are no walls, yet you hold in your hand the map of a labyrinth – the labyrinth of thoughts that Oblivia is. You see, you are King Minos, the sacrifice and the Minotaur all in one. You offer yourself up to be destroyed by your demons, while you look on in amazement and twisted joy. The labyrinth grows as you do, and right at the heart of it grows Oblivia.

You had no Ariadne in Esperenza to gift you a string. And as you turn the corner in your mind, arriving at a familiar abandoned shield, you realize –

You’re lost.

Self-Retribution

It comes in waves; and you could choose to be the cliff…Or the pebble that breaks away and drowns in one of the world’s twenty seven seas.

It comes in waves; you first stand at land’s edge and admire it licking your toes. Nothing more fresh, enlivening than how it nips your pinky and slithers away. You move closer still, allowing it to submerge you, every now and then. And you remain there, half-soaked, feeling it drag you a few centimeters back and forth. You watch as most turn and head toward land, but curiosity…and maybe something more… keeps you going.

It comes in waves; and you now realize there is no awe and wonder in its power, for you are held in it. You first thought, as it lifted you up to the moon that you may reach out and capture a celestial body in your fragile, human hand. And you did reach. Almost. It hauled you downward before your finger so much as grazed a star. It hauled you down and thrust itself upon you – then released you, just as you thought it might crack your twelve ribs, puncture your lungs and drown you in your own blood. It released you to the surface, where you breathed, and from where it took you under again. From then, all that kept you living were those few seconds zero meters above sea level.

It came in waves, and took away little granules of you, till you held no unique shape or form. It smoothed out the creases, cracks, curves, till you were another indistinguishable, weathered stone.

It came in waves and took you away.

The Road to Oblivia

Daylight.

Wake up and maybe today you’ll see the world afresh, with new eyes. What you saw before was a lie, a bad dream, a terribly written story told to you over and again. Wake up and maybe today…maybe today.

Daylight.

Wake up and maybe today you’ll see it – the beauty they all speak of. Wake up and you may see the world for what it really is – an opportunity. Seize the day. Seize it before it seizes you. Get up, spring to your feet. Opportunity awaits.

Daylight.

Wake up. Just. Wake. Up. Its not a lie. Its not a bad dream. Its not a story. You don’t live in a story and life doesn’t work that way. Just wake up.

Daylight.

It hits you. Repeatedly. Daylight burns into your soul as if you were a vampire. The rising sun heralds a new torture session. Each day leaves a little bit of you intact – just enough to be burnt again. And again. And again.

Energy cannot be created nor destroyed.

The ashes and embers of your soul land in Oblivia. And you become nothing. You live shattered – existing in both worlds but living in neither. It is for the best. When the time is right, you can will yourself back to Esperenza. Click your heals and say, “There’s no place like home.”

There is no place,

like home.

Still-born

Night dawns as realization, as water ripples over your grave in sync with the winds that emanate from your hollow heart with every beat and every contraction of a useless muscle that struggles to birth a dead human being.

It grew in your chest for years, suffocating you slowly from the inside till you finally had no room for it, place for it, love for it. So you left it alone to be smothered by its own greed to live and feel as humans do till it ceased just like you had and you smiled to yourself not having known before of the jealousy you felt. Satisfaction quickly sunk to your throat in a lump as reality pounded its fists in your head and you found yourself in tears and tatters when shards of guilt ricocheted off the hard marble floor and cut your flesh because your shield had shattered. You found the fetus of you still pressed against your lungs and heart and ribs and weighed you down as you tried to move on and move past and let go of the dead weight dragging you down to your grave where realization dawned as night did but came too late.

That Which Must Not Be

The likes of you are not meant for day. It is you, your kind, that hinders the growth of all that is inexistence, leaches from the earth all it has to offer before dying a wasteful death. It is you – unable to live from one day to the next, to hope, and love, and cherish and rejoice in the gift of what we all have received. It is you that brings us all down to where you are, in your little hellhole, unable to move, lay down, rest, blink, breathe. It is you, clinging to miniscule projecting roots in the soil, pulling them down as you attempt to climb higher, climb to where the air is easier to breath in, the sun is easier to see and the rain does not drown you out.

You exist, motionless, breathless, frozen in a moment that never shatters. A moment. That is all you are, that is your life encapsulated. You exist in it, suffocating, slowly, silently as time creeps – a metronome in slow motion, giving rhythm to the beating. The tempo quickens but your heart is dead. Your soul sings off key to a chorus quivering down your bones, the only way to stop icicles forming within you.
Soon, this too shall stop.

You feel yourself begin to disintegrate, become nothing more than particles of nothingness – that which you were before you found yourself lost. And when the rain stops, and saprotrophic beings begin to nestle in your flesh, you realize it was not the moment to be shattered, but you.

Thoughts

You shy away like a bug from a hot flame that may burn you, boil your innards and make the filth inside you pour out, be revealed, be shunned disgustedly. You skitter from shadow to shelf, back to shadows that you know will disguise you. You live, dodging the light, movement, discovery. You would not be this afraid, no, you are a strong one. You would not be this afraid if you knew they would not tear your wings away from your deceptively soft shell, and let you live in the agony of knowing – there was a time you were not afraid.

You lie. It was always this way. You have just come to realise and re-realise what life holds for you. Like a re-birth..only not. There is no way, you have come to conclude, that you may re-learn the past so it does not bind you. You are bound, you recall, by invisible threads to invisible thoughts that tower over you, threateningly. There was a time you were not afraid of your own mind.

They speak to you with their silence – not their ferocious attacks, but through their silent invasion of everything you first thought yours. They are under your skin, crawling, itching, uncomfortably close, uncomfortably you, uncomfortably no longer yours to command. And here you lie in a body that betrays you. Marked, branded with words they taught you. Your body betrays you.

You lie. Alone. Knowing where they were, where they went, where they touched, where they crawled beneath your skin and left their filth to be yours. And you know.

There is nothing left to be done now.

You know too much.

Whisper (part 3)

Whisper….whisper….

The word is caught in my head as the wind blows softly but carries no sound of yours. Distant music from some far off restaurant wafts in the heavy air. You would love it here, this beach, the sand, the water and its foam. There are few sea-gulls here. I suppose that means there are not very many fish in the sea. None like you, anyways.

I wish to fall asleep here, with the waves carying out sand from under me – sinking. I wonder if I’ll wake up to find a message in a bottle you’ve sent me. I wonder if I’ll wake up at all.

May the waves carry me to where you are.

Suitcase

You laugh and forget for a moment – for one blissful moment; an all-encompasing moment that makes the raindrops freeze mid-fall and makes the world seem nothing more than a whirlpool of energy that is us.

Its not very hard to get lost in such moments. I seek to lose. Theres too much baggage to drag around already. How come no one ever grabs this from behind your back on an airport? It would be convenient, like more comprehensible legal forms and disposable cars. We have neither of those as yet. It’ll be a while before we’ll have emotional baggage theives.

In the mean while, I’ll sit here with you, and you with me, and we’ll unpack our suitcases together. And we’ll laugh, and forget for a moment -

Suitcase – Joe Purdy

(Click on the link for full effect. WordPress wont let me embed the player V_V )

Whisper (part 2)

It has been a while since our flares made these pallid waters blush. First mine, then yours, then ours spelling out words that only we understood. And perhaps, some strangers that we never knew, and an old sailor out on the water.

…—…

.. .—-. –  …. . .-. .

And we’re still here.

Whisper

…into the wind, and maybe your words will be carried through to where the waters rush in to embrace the land. How long, I wonder, since a singular droplet of salt water met its material opposite in the sand to make them greet each other fiercely and then part again. How long since the breeze kissed wisps of hair on a lover’s face. How long since you remembered and believed and spoke…

(to be continued…)