ghxsts

The walls had grown familiar to him.

He lived in this place. White, bleached looking walls with an incomplete paint job revealing they’d taped the corners and creases but never hand-painted them when done. A pumped out piece of work for an assembly line of souls to live in cheaply, but still over-priced.

He sipped his drink quietly, the glow of the monitor barely registering in the white-wash of the fluorescent light above him. He sat at his desk, papers scattered meaninglessly about it or tacked to a wall as if to justify themselves. The vodka bottle sat capped on one side of the flat surface, his laptop on the other. The sound of a fan buzzed from the far side of the room near his disheveled bed; it was a constant, and constants were good. An unused guitar hung its head quietly in the corner, and he did the best he could to not embarrass it with attention. A simple dresser, a simple, small closet. Books filled a bookshelf, and a tiny table was pushed up against the wall on which sat a collection of liquors and a familial extension of the scattering of papers on his desk. A few articles of clothing lay scattered across the thin, industrial rug that coated the surface of the room.

He shared this two room apartment with a stranger who he pretended to be friends with. Their interactions took place in the kitchen, which they kept organized and cleanly to the best of their capacity. They shared a mutual terror of confrontation, and this worked miracles in ensuring they acted responsibly towards one another. The Monitor flickered imperceptibly as the video he watched droned, unaware of how meaningless its quality was in the long run. A perceptive eye would have caught site of a few scattered empty pill bottles around the vicinity. An omniscient eye would realize the man yearned for a cigarette as he leaned back against his ill-crafted wooden chair and stared with empty eyes at the ever glowing laptop monitor. His room-mate didn’t approve of smoking in the apartment; he couldn’t blame him. He pried open a tin of chewing tobacco and tossed a pinch in the pouch of his cheek. No, he couldn’t blame him; after all, he didn’t approve of smoking the apartment either.

The fan droned and the screen flickered as an equally compelling sound oozed out of the computer speakers. For a while now he had wondered if he was still alive. There was some evidence that he was, there was some evidence he was not.  Every morning seemed to suggest he was dead-he had stopped showing up to his scheduled events and he barely spoke with anyone, certainly not daring to answer a call. But the evenings, they seemed to suggest he was still dying, probably from a belly wound to the psyche. He based this assertion on the fact that it was taking forever, and he knew that belly wounds were supposed to take a long time. Of course, by “knew” he really meant that TV and the internet had suggested this fact to him: however if these sources of experience were flawed he’d have no choice but to declare the last 21 years a waste and start over.

No, that was too harsh. He had done things, for a time. That time had slowed up like an aging metabolism though until finally it just plain stopped and everything seemed to freeze up and fatten. Now he didn’t do things. Now he sat here waiting for everything to go dark as it must inevitably. He checked his watch; 3:00 in the morning. Not unusual. He generally kept the shades drawn and the fluorescent bulb buzzing, so the conditions beyond the womb of his room were of little significance.

To be honest, the conditions beyond the state of his mind had generally lost their meaning.

Respect became a serpent - the master of each breath yet with every gift tightening its hold until the world turned the gray of ambition.  A fire runs through these veins, infection springing like sunrise from a wound that we’ve lost sight of. Answers without questions and predetermined outcomes coat the ground like snow. Out my window I hear connections; like an apparition taking familiar shape, like the taste of scent - it places emphasis on absence.

There’s something pressing in on me. I’m familiar with it, like a friend from the past who never grew up and expects you to be the same. I’ve let it in because I don’t have the heart to turn it away. It slowly blinds me to what’s important; it fills me with need. You can’t feel good about what you do if you can’t feel good. It’s always there now, perched in the corner of my soul watching like a voyeur,  enjoying how uncomfortable I am & my soul dances for it like a girl behind glass; when it’s done it  slumbers, but it won’t be out for long. I want to send it away, but its my only customer.

You surrender tomorrow with today, and we’ll keep stumbling like children lost in the darkness of their own home.

“The problem was you had to keep choosing between one evil or another, and no matter what you chose, they sliced a little bit more off you, until there was nothing left. At the age of 25 most people were finished. A whole god-damned nation of assholes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst way possible, like voting for the presidential candidates who reminded them most of themselves. I had no interests. I had no interest in anything. I had no idea how I was going to escape. At least the others had some taste for life. They seemed to understand something that I didn’t understand. Maybe I was lacking. It was possible. I often felt inferior. I just wanted to get away from them. But there was no place to go.”

“I am the maniac, I am the fool - I found a monster in me when I lost my cool. It lives inside of me, eating whats in its way - put black spray paint on my windows during the day. I wanna spend time with it, I think I’m losing it. . . or I found it and I’m using it.”

Like rain-water running down the street, these days pool in strange and unseen places; I’m living my life like a beetle buzzing against the window pane. What became of you that makes you hover like smoke and move like a memory? Sometimes the wind is pushing and sometimes it pulls, but calm water is a curse without shores. You have a gaze like water recently disturbed, trembling and elastic with the ardor to be effortless. Every lake envies a river like silence envies sound, all because the circumference of earth fails to not offend.

I feel the world slow like an unwound clock – light stretched to become shadow. It’s the same pattern as always and I suffer the lack of the entropy: the distance between the bars and the cell expands and contracts like a struggling heart. The surface of time without the influence of willpower is smooth and infinite.

Light hangs lower in the sky, more like an ethereal mist than the tangible substance I’m used to clutching tightly in my fist and tugging at the horizon with. The sounds of home are precious and fleeting; snatches of cacophony, stretches of silence: against me they both are harmonious.

I’m supposed to long to leave here.

“Agony is truth, its our connection to the living. I accept it as perfection and keep on existing in the now”

You let fall delicate patterns familiar and archaic pouring candle wax on canvas in equidistant fragments of mosaic your eyes remind me of the milky way galaxy and if I could I’d mold every fraction of infinity together to form a perspective to better suit you with what you want to do with yourself. Forthwith; I meander further from the candlestick to watch my shadow burn out just to chuckle in the darkness of your incandescent furrows.

Hell isn’t a place that you go when you die, hell is a feeling that you get deep inside. Hell is the look that you get in your eyes when you find everything you believed was a lie. It’s not that I don’t believe in heaven, it’s that I don’t believe in hell.

It’s that I know I won’t be punished for a life that I lived well.

“It happens faster than you could ever think – from always and forever to never again in less than a blink.”

I reach for burning truths to warm myself in this coming winter cold but you’ve stamped them out, and all that remains is black suit tombs for memories, ashen victims whose faces still show traces of surprise.

I pulled out time today, unrolling it like an enormous rug, twines running into twines haphazardly forming something beautiful. But, beauty has nothing to do with appeal, and I was looking for the pain buried in it. Mistake, mistake, regret, regret; I wonder if these things actually exist in the context of the whole. I don’t know, and since it’s stitching is always growing, I’ll never know. I looked and I saw happiness in the strings of those who had not gone down the advised path; I saw misery in the yarns of wise choices. I saw satisfaction and I saw disappointment,  and they came in all colors and could be found in every stitch. I saw that right and wrong have little to do with the type of string and stitching used, and more to do with its correct placement. I saw strings converge and diverge, and I saw that there was no way to control this, and that I wouldn’t if I could. I saw unhappiness flourish into joy; I saw joy unravel into misery.

I saw choice vibrating through every brilliant strand across history, weaving a cloth through an endless array of action, directed and directionless. I saw hesitation; I saw foolishness; I saw bravery; I saw cowardice; I saw arrogance; I saw wisdom; I saw submission; I saw control; I saw confidence; I saw doubt. I saw beauty.

I looked at the end of the rug, where new weaves traced new patterns with new and old threads alike. I was looking for answers: I was looking for truths. I found none but one, traced out in quiet whispers of colour and shapes from the start, running through every pattern, and culminating at the edge of what was old and what was soon to come.

No matter how things may appear upon close inspection, every string fit its place perfectly in the whole.