Down In Me

“What? What is it?”

“Thought I heard something…”

“Oh, I’m sure it’s nothing.”

“Yes, I’m sure you’re right.”

“…”

“Again?”

“Yes, yes, I heard it distinctly that time.”

“What does it sound like?”

“I can’t explain. It… it’s weird.”

“Um…. are you sure it’s not just appliance hum or an errant bird perhaps?”

“No, no. Why do you suggest such specific things?”

“Well, I don’t know. I had to suggest something.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“Well you weren’t being very forthcoming.”

“That’s because I don’t know what it is. There it is again! You must have heard it that time?”

“No, I’m sorry.”

“I’m hearing things, apparently.”

“I would say so.”

Off to hire a convertible again? Your search for the sun amuses me. You know your sensitive skin is unaccustomed to the burn. Why aren’t you satisfied in your own place, your native homeland with your birth mother who tended to you with utmost care?

The city cries out for you today and all you can do is wave her a half-hearted goodbye. You make me sick with your holiday dreams ephemeral and unsubstantial.

Your fair weather lust has taken hold again. We cannot cater to your fanciful desires. We simply can’t keep pace with your tiresome demands. I prefer it here a million, million, a million times over. In the cold, the grey and damp. I prefer the rotten stench of alcoholism, truth and overuse. So go. Go and see what you might find in the clear blue sky. I know everything truly necessary is right below this heavy cloud, tangled in the sour sweet pollution of this mouldy air.

Go. Go then. We won’t wait up but we’ll still be here. We’ll still be right here when you decide you want back in to the fold. Façades may change but our innards remain their broken same. We may fix the broken door eventually, I should think.

“I just wanted to say how sorry I am. You know… for what happened.”

“Please, don’t apologise. Really. I should be apologising to you. In fact, I am.”

“No, no. Please… you have nothing to be sorry for.”

“Yes, I do and I am because the entire regretful… incident… the entire incident was my fault.”

“No. It wasn’t. You are not to blame. I led us to that… that place. I take responsibility and I very much need your forgiveness.”

“As I said, I have nothing to forgive you for, truly. You must forgive me.”

“I can’t forgive you. For you have done nothing to warrant forgiveness.”

“Oh. I am still sorry, though.”

“Yes, I am quite remorseful myself.”

“I just don’t understand how you could have.”

“Well, I don’t know really. I suppose it just sort of happened.”

“These things don’t ‘just sort of happen’!”

“This one did.”

I see the veins in my hands. Maybe due to the cold, my skin’s translucence allows me to see the green and purple lines travelling from my palms, branching outwards through the tips of my fingers. I never noticed them before. I noticed the new wrinkles in the skin on the back of my hand a few years back now. I decided then that life was finally beginning to wear on me. Down on me. Wear me down. How little I knew then in comparison to the even less I know now.

I touch my fingertips together in a specific way to release the tension when I am feeling that particular unease, though it does little to alleviate my baseless fears. He noticed it once, decades ago and ignited the awareness, suggesting something hideously wrong with my mannerisms. Something to be molded into a rather more acceptable form. Something that must always be done while other things are coming undone. I am exhausted from teetering carefully on this farcical edge.

I flashback to your hands, palest white and strangely even, like the clichéd surface of a rose petal. The palms and fingertips calloused at every fold, the wretched jagged nails, dirty and unkempt like so much else about you. I sense your fingertip moving inwards along my palm, tracing the trails of my lifeblood. I feel a ragged nail graze my softness tenderly. It runs over the scars and beyond, to the flesh of my forearm. Fingertips feel their way through distant patches that were never perturbed.

I cry out for that touch sense existing only in that moment that has now slipped coldly through my aching grasp.

I am the walking dead again. A lifeless body that smooths along without trace. A ghost whose hold cannot be held or sensed, much less inhaled or tasted. The myriad faces that barely swirl the air around me are clear white unrecognisable. I am clouded by the blurry view over my swollen, reddened eyes. I am enveloped in a heavy shroud of dew and mist and dust and clouds and self horror.

Absent-minded, I watch you take off, day after day. My ears full to bursting with the rumble of your roar. The ground grumbling beneath my vibration. Lifting your nose towards the clouds, your glistening wide body glides effortlessly off the strip. Overwhelmed with the need to crawl inside you and feel you hoisting me away, disappearing me into the distance. Is there a flight to nowhere? A place where no one greets you when you land? A new time zone in which to find solace? My bags are packed yet my seat belt remains unfastened. I won’t be going anywhere for now. If only because I can’t stand the scrutinising eyes of your supposed protectors.

I slowly open my eyes again. This near impossible task will be my biggest achievement for the day. But you’re not there to mouth your approval. I head out without breakfast, as usual. No one giggles a command of protein to start the day proper.

Right turn on the wrong street and from the opposite side. Who will set me back on course? Not you. Your sense of direction is slightly off these days. I slip and trip at that uneven spot again. You know the one. The one you’re not there to warn me against, to dust me off from.

Gadgets remain eerily quiet through the day. No tender secret messages or quick breathy calls. No hurry to return home only to be greeted by a silent, wistful cat. Who will chastise me for not looking after the mundane chores and everything beneath me? Another takeout you’ll never again force feed me with fumbling chopsticks.

And in the dreaded night, between fitful spurts of sleep falling, I find no stinging palm to strike my flesh and remind me that I am not purely made of written words. That despite my best efforts to mutilate, I continue to own a body that can still be felt. That my gaping holes can still be glutted to the brim. That I’m not alone in the cold sweat of thought. That I can still touch the beauty in this mortal moment.

Trivialities, all told. In truth, I don’t much care. And you’re not around to insist that I do.

“So here we are then.”

“Yes, here we are.”

“Funny, isn’t it?”

“What is?”

“Oh well, you know, this…”

“Yes, yes, I suppose it is.”

“I mean, I would have never thought…”

“No?”

“Well, no, I mean I suppose I had my suspicions.”

“Yes, yes I suppose you did.”

“I mean, didn’t you?”

“Me?”

“Yes?”

“Well, I sure… I mean I think that I… err…”

“Yes?”

“Well the thing is that, the matter is really… how can I put this?”

“Go on.”

“It’s just that, well…”

“…”

“Oh, nothing really. Don’t mind me.”

“Are you sure, because it feels like something’s not being said.”

“Oh? Do you have something you need to say?”

“Well no I errr, I meant you.”

“Oh, no. Nothing worth being said. No.”

“Oh well good. Me neither.”

“Yes.”

“Right.”

“OK. Well then I suppose I’ll see you around?”

“Yes, yes I suppose you will.”

Know
Read the bodily whispers etched in skin
Write on the glass pallid surface transparently
Hear the catch of breath, the heave of chest, the slight perspiration

Respond
Accordingly increase, desist, decrease, resist
Blind signs sighted on your sinuous path over hazardous bends
Curves crawling teeming writhing with scratches and warmth

Accept
The morning after the interminable ends, dew soft breath fogs its appreciation
Seen and sensed in a desperate embrace
Sweetly citrus-scented basking boldly in a mourning sun

This isn’t your standard neon pink box wrapped present tight whipping boy shitface heady writing screaming wanting horse’s ass we’re talking about here. You can’t begin to understand what goes on in the lonely dark mother’s kiss in the back of a black VW convertible at 6 a.m. with all the lights turned low in the holes on her face. Who knows why you continue to read to breathe to think to act with such feverish fervor and intent on drowning and sickly throwing the dime across the dimly-lit hall and the unoriginal stinking aching two-toned unthinking witting writing prose. Who knows how a mother with a sick child in the emergency ward of some shitfaced stoned two-headed suburban alien across the street from the car park with one eye open and two focused intently on her does it. She’s losing losing losing it all across the wall in the twisted light of the ocean of her dreams and her chin in the dark against the dark and the night and the sun and the smell the stench of the femme where she lost it all over. This isn’t your standard well of depth and dank and stark and good stuffing cock full of creamy dreamy steamy fripperies and knickknacks and shitsacks and trifling trifles and truffles you’re used to. This is nothing like what you think they said she saw or what you know she said you saw her say deliberately in an attempt to fuck you both in the face of the fact. This is nothing like that or the other or the one in which you act where you feel so intently that you know who you know what you are who you are where you are how you are with who you are. Because you know that time when they said you were? That was total utter bastard bullshit.

Hey. Sshh. Come here. QUIETLY! For fucksake. Are you trying to give me away? What? What do you mean to who? You fucking idiot. Look. Listen. I don’t know how to tell you this but… they’re listening. Yes. And watching. Everything. What do you mean how? Do I have to spell everything out for you? Fucksake. Listen to what I’m saying. They know. THEY KNOW. They are coming for us, my friend. I’m sorry that you are going to be one of the innocents caught in the crossfire but there’s no way around it. You know too much already, man. You’re fucking implicated. An accessory and shit. Yes laugh it off, laugh it off now motherfucker. You won’t be laughing when you’re at the bottom of the pit after hours of water torture and shit. Yes, you won’t be laughing… SSSHHH! You won’t be laughing it up then, motherfucker. Listen. Whatever happens… I’m your only friend in this. OK? Your only fucking friend. Don’t turn me in, man, don’t fucking give me away. You gotta know your loyalties, keep that shit straight, you get me? Yes, yes. Of course you do. You know what I’m talking about. Quiet, now. They’re coming. Quiet. Just remember… the eagle flies at dawn, my friend. AT DAWN. Remember that. And stay calm.