Thursday, January 2, 2014

The Thing You Have Become

You didn't know you had it in you, this biting self-loathing. It snuck up on you like a dark-park lurker, teasing, leaving you standing gape-jawed and feeling dirty. The last time you went outside, the sun actually hurt. Your eyes spun, pupils shrinking to block out the fucking light. So, now you stay inside. You find patterns in your thinking and let them spin you right round, baby. It's like a round, actually, the thoughts. Three blind mice ...

The room is abject horror disguised as authenticity. You have record albums on the walls, but you sold your record player long ago. Stacks of paperback books everywhere. Most of them, you have never read. The ones you have, you read over and over until the words corral the roundabout nonsense in your mind.

Cold hands. Your hands are always cold. They are always brittle, dry - when you do have to go outside, interact, you keep your hands in your pockets. Hand shakes are like being stripped naked. Wow, your hands are so cold! Like ice cubes! You want to scream, 'they're my fucking hands, this is none of your concern,' but it is their concern in all likelihood. You worry about the cold hands, too.

Your leather throat constricts. It is leather because it has been cured in grain alcohol and smoked to a fine brown. The constriction had nothing to do with you. It has to do with an old man who couldn't keep his hands to himself. It has to do with the choices you made which, once noble, now seem silly - the playthings of a child. The constriction is your judgement. You do not judge yourself too harshly.

You wonder sometimes if anything is real. You fear that you are a construction of cliche and latte. You probably are - everyone else is - but it doesn't seem to bother them. You wish it didn't bother you, but it's like a hot wind. It's like cold chicken skin.

Every so often, you get so fucking mad. And you punch something. The wall. The table. You always hit it just hard enough to scuff a few knuckles and wish you were the kind of person who could punch an inanimate object hard enough to shatter bones. You wonder why you think this way. Some days you blame your parents. Some days you blame her. There are too few days where your shoulders chafe from bearing some of the burden. Too damn few.

Some days it feels like a blessing and some days it feels like sharp, blood-wet talons down your spine. You twist and stretch and scream at it. You wake up shaking, greet the half-asleep you in the mirror. You shudder and you should. Jesus, you feel for the folks you encounter in your sleep. They must cross to another synapse when they see you coming.

It's the buzzing. It never stops and it is like a million mosquitos in your ear. And sometimes you chuckle, shrug it off, think about the alternatives. Sometimes you worry that the noise is leading you to some buffed calamity - some glittering disaster that will make sense of everything or will finally force you to accept that nothing makes sense.

You'll drive on this route forever. You missed your stop long ago, in a haze of procrastination and bourbon. You'll surround yourself with beauty to compound the ugliness you feel when you are forced to face the thing you have become.

7 comments:

  1. This brings self-loathing to a whole new level. I sure hope you don't look at yourself that way. I don't - look at you that way, that is.

    I have to admit, sometimes I'm tempted to seek out that darkness and dig a spade into it to turn it over and see what the worms are doing there in the dark. Mostly I'm afraid to.

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    1. It's all fiction. ;) I just like digging for worms.

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    2. I think you like digging with fingernails instead of a spade. Hugs.

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    3. You might be right about that. Would explain the pinworms. ;)

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  2. Thanks, Jo. ;) I used to avoid it like the plague, but there is something about 2nd in flash pieces that I just love.

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  3. Yeah, another dark little gem. Jo's right: this is second-person writing at its best.

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    1. Thanks brother. Now I'm stuck in 2nd, though. And my clutch is about shot. ;)

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