Down In Me

I wasn’t very forthcoming earlier. The truth is that I do care, of course I care. I want to be wild and fancy free, hair blowing in the wind, but I’m shiver shake step by step and scream.

When you roll over in bed and you hug yourself close to me with that mortal fear, I want to die, too. And I understand why you would. Your life, long though it’s been, hasn’t held much of anything in the way of happiness for you. I think. I don’t know. But I think. I could be mistaken, I was never good at that sort of thing. Whatever that is. I tend toward the hopeless.

In later years, though nothing much happens, contentment - or at least placid tranquillity - is still a struggle. It’s all a struggle. Until you close your eyes. And leave me. Like I once. Left you. Only a bit more. With permanence. For time. Without the courtesy of an empty promise like I made you.

I don’t know what to say to you, I never know what to say, but especially now, precious words cower under the duvet between us. Afraid to be spoken. Afraid to be. Afraid like us. Like you. You.

In the night, when the dark envelops you and you get a tiny glimpse of how it might be and you wonder if this is how it might be, only worse. Only worse. Scared. Alone. Hug close. Hold tight.

I swallow hard. I am not equipped to deal with this slow wasting away and yet it’s all we do. Waste. Things. Away. Slowly. I understand. I think. I understand. The self. The pain. I want you to go, but not like this. I’m not sure how. But not like this.

Björk, All Is Full Of Love, directed by Chris Cunningham

I haven’t been true to the self-imposed vacuum credo I spouted. I’m guilty. I’ve worried too much about words, pretty words, correctly-placed words, ordered words, meaningful words, thoughtful words, words brimming with emotion from the depths of my beautiful soul oh god somebody please hear me! feel me! save me! fuck me, jesus!

Bullshit.

From now on it’s cocksucking, fucking, sick cunting, rage, and armoured skies and jelly beans or maybe no words because none of this shit matters.

And in the same breath pretty words and prettier words and even more of the prettiest words fucking ever. And I’m going to relax my anal cavity. A bit.

And make paragraphs of varying lengths and strengths.

Or.

You know.

Not.

Because I’ve been reading your mental breakdowns, and your pleas for attention, your sorrowful realisations, and your shameless self-promotion, and your ticking clocks, and your ticking bombs and your fucking rhymes and your misplaced lines and shit that scans and shit that doesn’t, and shit that heals and shit that breaks, the shit you steal, the shit you barter, the ‘you’ you trade, the lies I buy, the lies that I make and take and fake and fuck fuck and fuck and fuck and.

And I’m tired now. I don’t want to speak your language now. I never wanted to speak. But maybe I will now. If I can voice the sound of my stand. For a time.

Can I ever have one without the other? I want to feel one pure, untainted emotion at a time, instead of having one and looking forward to or dreading another. Why is everything partitioned in blocks of anticipation? Always looking towards, always waiting for. I’d rather just exist if it’s all the same.

I feel sorry for things, people, myself. I feel sorry that we cannot be better, be more. This in itself is a symptom of the condition described above, I think.

I want to smell your house instead of smelling my arm in desperate attempts to remember. Scent lingers, then fades. Everything fades with time, they say. I feel desolate and inconsolable. I refuse to listen to reason, bar the negative variety.

This throat lump, this quick-beating heart, these sweat-slick palms, they’re no good for me. These butterflies are the wrong shape, the wrong color. I swallow hard out of habit, but some things refuse to be repressed on occasion. The physical notes denote a muddled mental state at best. The body and the mind eat each other and wrestle each other and console each other and begin again.

I’m sorry I can’t write for you. I never could, I pretended. There’s too much going on up there, it clouds my view. And even if I could see beyond the mist, what’s to say I could report it accurately? I despair needfully and needlessly and play with words hopelessly to pass the time listlessly when there’s no time. And wait, keep waiting and waiting.

Large, masculine, virile, erect. His shadow cast over me, southeast to northwest. The illusion of musky protection which glides heavy on the wind to blow my hair in every direction. Safe with a stranger. Has it really gotten this bad? Have we really devolved this far we no longer need proof or even to settle for lies?

Stranger on a train, ten paces to the left and we become damsel in distress, tied to the tracks just up ahead. You’ll come to your untimely demise, testing things out the old-fashioned way. Scattered limbs, 100-mile an hour blood. Steaming remains of girls who suckled the lying breast.

The last minute long past, it’s time to board the train, lugging your own damn valise.

Come, come with me, I promise you it will be fun. Come play with me and you’ll have the best time and twenty years from now you’ll still be sitting around reminiscing about what a great time that was, the time that Ani Smith invited you to go out with her and you were reluctant at first and, oh god, was that a big mistake because you hadn’t the faintest idea what a wild ride you were in for and how the next day, after watching the sun come up, because that’s what Ani always does after amazing nights, you thought to yourself, wow, am I ever glad I decided to ignore my inhibitions and just follow Ani blindly off the cliff because I know as I sit here holding her hand right now in this moment that if I live to be the age of sea turtles, no matter what happens or who I meet in all those years, I will never ever regret the decision I made which led to this small but terribly significant moment in my terribly insipid existence. Or you know, you can sit there eating Cheerios and watching bullshit American sitcoms in your underpants, pretending to laugh while milk slips from the corner of your mouth, thinking nothing, being nothing, acting nothing, talking nothing, blank blank blank. I won’t be upset, I promise you, whatever you choose in this moment, I am going to

I am going to. I am going to what? I sat here for ten minutes thinking of a suitable way to finish that sentence. I’m going to what? What am I going to do? I wracked my brain but my initial excitement had waned rather quickly. I got up and went for a walk and thought.

I can’t make statements of action. I can’t even write them and pretend it’s fiction. This character, Ani Smith, she tries you know, sometimes. People even believe her, you know. Sometimes. But I’m dragging her down, I’m holding her still, we’re chained together in a cheesy comedy where someone lost the key.

It’s like the most dissatisfying orgasm which begins so promisingly with the right tickles and tingles moistening all the right places and you’re thinking to yourself yes, yes, here comes the big one, but then it kind of half-assed bucks and fizzles and you’re left all, is that it? And so you try for another because come on, there’s gotta be some more in there, but now you’re ashamed for being so greedy and nothing comes, no one comes. No one comes.

Weightless you descend. Dribbling thoughts propel you towards the edges of reason, when the earth was motionless at the very centre of the universe and even less was known than is now forgotten. You’re a speck whose nature betrays itself. Ordinary pulsing excrement that arrives with an uber serious crash bang exponential yet soon comes to its shoddy shameful fizzling with a mere inaudible lazy whimper. We had great expectations for your stellar movement. A fine performance, old as sky, solid as ground, fine as the silver dust we spread across the night in the shape of your name. When new dawn breaks over your horizons and the bright white light floods your dry, empty, ugly and unmoved lifeless rot inching towards nothing, the distance between us turns crystal. I’ll take my weightless flight now, if you don’t mind.

I am special. Unique. Yes I am, don’t argue the facts. I am the only — not the first but the ONLY — person who has ever felt this feeling at this time in this way ever.

Only I’m not. How can I be? Can I be? Yes, yes, you hold water. Stick to the original stick-to-itiveness. Be confident, isn’t that what they advise? Unique and special people are confident in their originality. They don’t think they are, they just are.

Why do the words unique and special look so sad? They are tacky sweet nothings, having lost all meaning through overuse. They remind me of the one whore in that small town passed around from cock to cock. Lost all meaning but kept living. Kept thinking.

I can’t stop thinking. I can’t stop thinking that I’m not. I can’t stop thinking that this apologetic life is going to rush through me and dissipate without trace. That I’ll come to my anti-climactic end — and fuck knows I adore a good climax — regretful, morose, having lived a life of alienation, surrounded by death and never fully immersed. So I once played the dummy whore to keep living. To taste life.

Switch tactics. Something. Anything to direct this mind in the direction of more directive thoughts. Think, think, think. That’s the problem, that’s the fucking problem. Too much fucking thinking. Endless streaming conscious analysis that ultimately leads to that familiar cottage at the end of a dirt road in the middle of nowhere. The one with depression, hopelessness, anxiety, fear, shame, ridicule and their faithful companions in dripping heavy black spray paint all over the weathered façade. The one that’s empty inside save for a cold, rusty iron chair near where the hearth used to be.

But that’s where I do my best work. Sitting in that chair thinking thumping exhaling laboured breath aching, expelling hard chemical sweat from fevered pores, bloody palms gripping the chairs’ arms for dear sweet life and recoiling in horror from the frightful monster that aims to grab me, shit on me, kill me or worse: enslave me in a completely non-sexual fashion; he makes me pay the bills and do the housework. But there’s no one there. No one but me. I need solitude for my worst best work. Right now, though? I need a fucking cigarette.

I grow restless. Just shut the fuck up with your monsters and your housework and your whores. I can’t hear my especially unique thoughts over your incessant whining drone.

It all comes down to this. Did you change me or did I mean to change? Who’s doing the talking? And to what end? Am I a wellspring of creativity or a sublime candidate for therapy? I know you have all the answers but that knowledge doesn’t keep me from feeling the questions.

How do you change from one minute to the next?
Why do you constantly question your emotions to that point?
Why do you share them with others, knowing the outcome only varies with your feeling of them in this particular corner of your mind?
Why do you continue to live in this space, the one that makes you question the core of every last occurrence?
Why do you continually make yourself vulnerable to those perceptions you create?
When do you expect to be able to let go and just breathe?
When does time start to matter less?
When does the internal dialogue cease?
When do you give yourself a minute to exist, unfettered by your self-imposed constraints?
How do you move from this to something more fitting?
Where is the point at which you become the ideal version of you?
Not the pretense, but an actual, with flaws all your own, those with which you’re able to coexist?
Are you just following that prescribed path to nowhere?
Has it all been preordained and if so, why go to the trouble of feigning free will?
Can you ever give yourself and give of yourself and give enough, and not feel the emptiness of that old vessel?
When do you just stop?
How do you stop? How do you stop.

I’m a blank. If you came round right now and told me to jump off the proverbial cliff after you, I would. Not because I’m that stupid (though I might be) but because I’m that bored.

It’s not that I don’t have current problems, residual issues, deep-seated fears, false hopes, a million things that require attention. On the contrary, it’s all so much that I default to the basic stance of boredom. I can’t muster enough thought to think, emotion to feel, power to con, drama to overreact. Things flow over me almost without notice. You could:

Rape my body tomorrow
Take all of my belongings tonight
Beat the shit out of my face in the morning
Sing my sorrows clear to me in the afternoon
Knife me half to death in the dead of night

None of it would matter. Much. I’d barely flinch but I’d appreciate the gesture wholeheartedly because I’m that bored. Blank. Almost blank enough to stop writing. But blankness itself can be fodder for an empty piece on the hopelessness of existence and the dangers of self-destructive habits.

The moment you become aware that you are blank is itself a split second of non-blank sensation. So maybe I’ll fight you, if I can find the fight somewhere behind the boredom. Right now, it doesn’t look likely. But I reserve the right to pull it out later. In spades.

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.

I’m awake but no one can tell. There’s no one to whisper good morning. I open a small slit in the blinds just big enough to see a sliver of the outside. No one knows. The harsh bright reality is jarring and I let go immediately. If I tripped and fell down the stairs and hit my head and died right now no one would know for weeks. Maybe months. No one knows that I’m having coffee and not tea. I know it’s been raining because I hear the cars splashing outside. No one knows I’m here alone. No one knows that I haven’t done my laundry for weeks or that I haven’t paid a bill for months. I hear my neighbors talk and laugh outside. They don’t know I’m here. They don’t know I can hear them. A child screams and giggles, completely unaware that I envy him. The postman jams junk through the letter hole startling me. He doesn’t know I’m here. I try to read a book that no one knows I’m reading. Is it night yet? Can I go to sleep and disown myself for a few hours? Hopefully I won’t dream. Just dark, quiet, stillness. Try to make it last. It doesn’t. I’m awake again but no one can tell.

I want to apologize for that last post. I’m not sure to who, but bear with me, I’m going somewhere, I think.

I meant to write a staggering piece on the beauty of a simple look and it’s ability to communicate, to take hold, to inspire. Instead in an immature fit of sexual frustration mingling with guilt and self-hate I spewed forth the disgraceful soliloquy in question. I have since relieved myself in many ways including a shower and some much needed sleep and sobering up and my thoughts now are, if not clearer, at least more open.

I’m ashamed of what I wrote because it belongs in that category of things one may think but one should never voice. And yet I can’t bring myself to delete it. It is self-destructive, obnoxious and not very good writing. But it is cruelly honest. And it is me.

So as much as it’s been pestering me and festering at the back of my mind since I hit that fateful publish button, I’m going to resist the aching urge to delete it. I guess what this means is that in the end, I’m doing this for me.

I’m apologizing for being so unkind and careless with myself, for allowing a couple of online strangers to see it and for generally being a shit writer with stupidly good intentions, an overactive imagination and a shamefully high sex drive.

Of course, I can’t promise there isn’t more where that came from as I’m sure we’ve only just skimmed the surface. But there might be some good stuff coming from somewhere deep down below, too.

Yes. It’s there. I promise not to relent until I find it.