greenlit
A year without a word was coming to an end which I couldn’t see yet. A no-bullshit apocalypse, near enough to forecast the weather for the very last day. The final seconds, ticking away on a watch that had stopped working months ago. Something else, in a place no one had ever bothered to look. Someplace you can only find by accident, standing perfectly still for your life and banging a left.
I hadn’t spent much time wondering whether I was losing my mind, because she was pretty convincing: I’d lost it more than a year ago. You had taken it from me, she said. And I didn’t put up much of a fight, because I wasn’t expecting to go on living. Even if she had been wrong about me, I must have figured: what am I going to do about it? I wasn’t a person anymore. I didn’t have any traits or ideas or a word to offer anyone about anything.
For a long time, I believed she hated me. The way she looked at me seemed a clear-enough indicator, and I could imagine a number of decent reasons why she might: if she blamed me for what you’d done, or if she just saw me as a product of your madness, left to burden and haunt her. Either would have been fair, and neither required much pondering to seem plausible. It was only once I finally stopped feeling sorry for myself that I realized it had nothing to do with me.
In her bedroom, in the instant she knocked my left light out, I saw what she had seen but couldn’t admit:
varial recognizance
dressed to quell
Some doing, is all it takes. A little dying, a diet of lying, and wordless abandon to the strands of thin light playing against the glass. Medicine to begin and end another one night sanguine stand in the sunkissed sand. Manual time, borrowed from a terribly broken watch. A certain number of steps and the grand secret of seductive grief.
Then the process complexifies and tends to vary, night-to-night. Last night, it was a sort of retrocausally prophetic stage play, my own shadow portraying young death himself. The day prior had been deliberately drenched in whiskey, too much, but enough to mine a well-founded fear and its accompanying abject terror. I was still in the late-stage dry blitz, slightly dizzy, and made much worse with my newly minted nightmare laid bare. Then the light ceased dancing and the room ceased to be.
windowless – twelve
One wonders if the sterile, lifeless halls of psych hospitals and crisis wards and stabilization units are meant to be a canvas for the people who truly belong there. I don’t think it means anything, but it did give me an idea.
patients iii
“That’s really sweet,” says one patient to the other, “but the second you fall in love, a fate worse than death is on the table. I’m not wrong.”
neurotically charged
Magic words. What an idea.
Collect your thoughts and collate them in a hole of a different color. Fill it with your personal space and cover it with half of the sudden.
A skinless drum rings without issue. The lifeless love knows death in the biblical sense.
