Noon

Sea crashes into earth, erodes away the time I have

What will you do when your caves cave in?

Reject what's mine and what's mine is nothing at all

Do you feel the hum, the bass of this slow sorry tune that carries through the trees, heals what's broke and breaks what's healed

Consistent inconsistency. There's always door number two. Travel to the place where light does not bend, where we do the things we do to impress our friends.

Mazes and kings and wool and white

This is what I see

Fingers on metal, a simple tune to pass the time. Lips on glass, I am going to get very very drunk soon.

I read too many drug novels.

Copper.
That's what I tasted when my mind was lifted out of the blackness of sleep.
Sunlight registered through my eyelids, shining bright and fiercely pink on my sheltered eyeballs. They seemed to be the only sensory receptors on my body, for I could feel nothing else. A sharp, painful feeling in my nose as I inhaled through it.
My eye lashes stuck together defiantly as my eyelids creeped open. Immediately I had to narrow them, for the combination of sun and wind on the snow surrounding me made seeing nearly impossible. I was lying on icy snow, packed down hard by the many feet passing through Central Park. My right hand, frozen numb and blue, lay in a bed of broken glass. The cuts had long stopped bleeding.
Taking care not to lay any pressure on my right hand, I struggled to raise myself into a sitting position. My face, though it did not respond to touch, did feel wetness. The copper.
Blood.
I spat on the ground beside me, decorating the surrounding blanket of white with red. Rolling my tongue along the inside of my mouth, I was content to find that all of my teeth were in place. The stinging in my nostrils continued. Out of habit, I swiped at them with my thumb and sniffed. The resulting pain nearly made me drop to the ground again and scream. The blood flowing into my open, sleeping mouth was a result of my nose. My nose was broken.
I sat and waited for the blinding pain to reside. My jeans were soaked and frozen stiff. I took in my surroundings from the ground.
I was a little ways off the main path winding around the trees, shivering in their skeletons, the colorful autumn foliage fallen and crushed under the awesome mass of white. It was November, which meant the snow was a grade school boy's dream. The fields in my eyesight, rich with sweaty, competitive boys kicking soccer balls under the summer sun, now bore evidence of recent snowball fights, a lopsided snowman with a smile even more so, a single lost, forgotten glove, gently tugged this way and that by the wind as it lay frozen to the ground.
To my left, the icy path leads to a clearing, which houses a small pond.
Flashback: holding her small hand, tossing dried corn to the ducks, the pink tip of her nose crinkling as she laughed.
The ducks had long gone by now.
Gingerly I raised my uninjured hand and felt the bridge of my nose. Crooked as ever before, but with an added bump now, a large one on the left. I've broken my nose many times before. It's the kind of thing you have to deal with when you're in the kind of business that I am. Deal with the people I do.
My legs, skinny, frost bitten, sad little things as they were, like loyal old dogs they took up the burden of my weight once more as I stood. I ambled my way down the slippery path, shuffling my numb feet as to prevent the chance of slipping. The broken glass and the bottle neck in the snow receded farther and farther behind me.
As I slowly made my way through the park, I tried to collect my thoughts. My nose began to run, but I didn't dare sniff or wipe again. Instead I gently dab, dab, dabbed with the mangled sleeve of my shabby, miserable coat. Most of the blood had coagulated by now in the cold wind and made breathing difficult.
I attempted to recollect the beginning of my evening. With an extraordinary effort, I managed to recall buying booze, but that happened so often in a day I could barely distinguish the days from each other anymore.
I remembered the feel of a lush shag carpet between my fingers, the enhanced colors of unclear faces around me, the euphoria, the hilarity of it all. I remember doing a line.
My left nostril twitched.
The rest of the evening passed in a delirious, yet familiar, haze. Blackness. Unidentifiable surroundings.
I reached an exit to the park which spilled out onto 5th Avenue. My shoes were in a wretched condition. One purple toe peeked out of the front of my left shoe, while the right boasted frayed, rotten laces, blackened with grime. They had been run ragged. I don't remember the last time I had new shoes. I don't remember the last time I had a new toothbrush.
A snowy phone booth stood resilient against the whistling wind, its shelter tempting and inviting. I scurried inside.
The insides of the windows were marked with black permanent marker, displaying the names of various gangs involving a lot of arrows, indiscernible scrawling and quite a few well-drawn penises. The floor was littered with cigarette butts, a "Roll up the rim to win!" coffee cup and what looked mysteriously like shit in one corner.
I picked up the receiver and placed the cold metal ear piece against my raw, unfeeling ear. A cool female voice prompted me to insert money into the slot in front of me. I fumbled around inside my coat and, with effort, extracted my wafer-thin wallet. Desperately scrabbling around inside the change pocket, I breathed a cloud of misty relief as my numb fingers closed around one quarter. Two quarters. I don't believe in God. I have this thing where, I believe in children. In innocence. And so I thanked every goddamn kid in the New York State I had two quarters left in my wallet.
The machine received my offering with hollow clinks of metal against metal. I struggled to remember my own phone number. Finally, it rang. Once, twice. She should have been home by now. Three rings. Flashback: stringy hair hanging over the bong. Four rings. Yellow teeth displayed in a smoky smile. Five.
A click, someone on the line. The habitual "hello" of answering the phone was lost in the silence.
'Janice?' I venture.
Nothing.
'Jan? I know you're there, answer goddamit.' I was impatient already. I hadn't even had a shot and the sun was already tumbling off its zenith to the west.
'What the fuck you want.' A slurred, hoarse female voice answered.
'How are you, I mean, you doin' alright? You doin' okay?'
'Fuck off.'
'Look, baby," I started, "I woke up in Central again. Are you-'
'Leave me the fuck alone, hey? Where you callin' from, anyway?'
I removed the receiver from my mouth to vomit on the ground. The bile was laced with blood. An old woman walking her inch-long excuse for a dog contorted her face in disgust.
'Hey, you there? Where the fuck you callin' from, anyway?'
My ever-encompassing sleeve faced the unpleasantry of my mouth.
'5th Avenue. Look, I'm comin' home right now, alright, did we get the stuff?'
'Hey, you alright?'
'Did we get the fuckin' stuff, Jan?'
Beeeeeeeeeep.
Flashback: warm hands wrapped around my waist, a delicate raven head tucked neatly under my chin.
I hung up.
Back out on the street, cabs littered the overcrowded streets like fleas on a mutt, big yellow beacons in the midst of the honking, blaring, angry forest of traffic. I took out my battered wallet, and with it dropped out a benzadrine into the snow. I bent to pick it up, popped the Benny, and continued to examine the bill compartment of my wallet. Two crumpled receipts, three dollars and an empty dime bag.
I spat on the dirty ground beside me, lit a cigarette, and began walking the eighteen blocks home.
if I hadn't have felt so shitty, I'd have probably enjoyed it more. I quite like to walk places. Gives you time to think. Cabs smell like sweat and vomit anyway.
I passed a Saks window display and purposely avoided my reflection in the glass. I've always lived on a whim and ignored the consequences. I move forward without looking back at the damage. I walk away. I run. As I determinedly kept my face forward, I began to feel the effects of the Benny. My muscles twitched with energy, my senses were electric. Walking became warp speed and slow motion all at once, the people on the street were hilarious and beautiful and wonderful and I felt like singing and making love to every one of them.
Before I knew it, before I was prepared, I was taking the stairs up to my apartment two steps at a time. As I reached my floor and passed each apartment, I believed I could hear every single person inside them breathing. I found my rusted key and managed to jam it into the lock after some trouble, this making me laugh to myself.
The humour, as with all else positive, was immediately sucked out of the apartment into the hallway. As I closed the door behind me, it only served to seal in the tension.
'Janice?' I called out. Nothing.
I removed neither my shoes nor my jacket. Home was a shabby 300 dollar rent apartment, those kinds where the kitchen and the living room are the same thing. We had a 15-by-22 foot room, the rotted wooden floorboards swollen with yesterday's leakage hosting a moth-eaten green sofa, but you could barely tell the color anymore between all the stains and rips and shit. There was a broken lamp in one corner, a beat-up dirty, springy mattress (stolen from someone's lawn) and a small black and white tv. The kitchen was a counter with a sink and a gas stove oven, and two cabinets on the wall in front of it. The bathroom door was missing. Naturally, the apartment had no a/c or heating, so in the winter, you had to dress really warm. We didn't own anything really warm. I kept my shoes and jacket on.
Janice lay asleep on the sofa, curled under a ragged blanket like an infant. Even through the layers of the blanket and her clothes, you could still see the clear outlines of her ribs slowly rising and falling. Janice is very skinny. Kind of like me. She used to have shiny black hair that perfumed the air when she flicked it, now reduced to dead stringy threads simply hanging down to her waist, frayed and coarse, like a street dog's matted fur. Her hands the size of a porcelain doll's, only not half as pretty. The nails were chewed down until they bled, burn marks and sores all over her fingers. Skin clung to her bones for dear life, as pale as death. Her eyes, when open, were a serene gray green, but even those had lost their expression. The motion of her torso, up and down, up and down, remained to be the only evidence that she was still alive and not simply a corpse. I remember she had a beautiful laugh. Her laugh was rich, golden as it rang out past her perfect teeth. No mouth could match the smile in her eyes. She was tall and willowy, with modest breasts and long, slim legs. She smelled of sandalwood.
This is what Janice looked like before we went down the Rabbit Hole.
I stepped across the debris of empty bags, dirty glasses, bottles, crumbs, dust of the living room floor and opened the cabinets above the sink. Host to countless bottles of whiskey, vodka, rye, gin, tequila, a can of expired tuna, a box of half-eaten crackers somewhere in the back. We don't eat much. I grabbed a Jack Daniels and swigged it as I made my way to the bathroom. The paint was peeling on the walls, cracked and leaking on the ceiling, the toilet in too disgusting of shape for even an ass to look at. We had a shower a regular-sized man would have trouble turning in, but for our skinny bodies it was more than enough room. We could even comfortably fit in there together, those rare times when we were feeling romantic and horny and shit. I walked through the doorway with no door, removed because of the time I got wasted and kicked a hole through it. I forced myself to look in the mirror.

The entire bottom half of my face was covered in hardened blood. From what skin you could see underneath, my nose and cheeks were blue and swollen to the point that I sooner resembled a koala than a human.

I ran the cold water tap and waited for the initial spurt of brown liquid to pass before clear water started to run. Tenderly I rinsed the blood off, allowing the cool temperature to soothe the pain.

When I was finished, I did not look back up at the mirror. Instead, I took another shot of whiskey to take the edge off the pounding in my face. When I came back to the living room, she was laying in the same position, but her eyes were open and staring at me.

'Hey,' she rasped.

'Hey,' I replied.

There was a short silence. She sat up.

'So what happened last night? All I can remember is buying booze,' I said.

'We went to Anita's, her boy got some stronger shit from this connection in California. She said she'd get us in touch with him.' Anita was an extremely wealthy upper-class middle aged New York woman who snorted cocaine and had frequent luxurious parties at her penthouse suite with glass walls and ivory everything. She peddled girls to men for money, in exchange they could stay at her place and get high for free, twenty-four-seven.

'And-and what happened to my nose, d'you know?'

'You picked a fight with some goon from New Orleans, told him to fuck his mother. He punched ya square in the face, you were bleedin' all over the place like an embarrassment or somethin'.'

I felt my nose and tried to imagine the carpet cleaner's face as he steamed the blood out of Anita's white shag carpets.

'Then ya left with Charlie and them, I dunno what after that.'

I gulped the bottle in my hand in response.

She lit a cigarette and I walked back over to the cabinet. I was starting to get the buzz back and didn't feel so nauseous. I replaced the bottle on the shelf, only to notice that it was empty. So I threw it on a pile of clothes on the floor instead and then reached my arm way in the back of the shelf. A metal tin where we kept our dope. I grabbed for it and prised open the lid. Only two baggies left. There were six yesterday morning.

Angrily I shoved the jar back on the shelf and closed the cabinet door hard, turning back to Jan with her red lips, white skin, puffing her cigarette.
I composed my emotions. 'Jan,' I said, 'what happened to the stuff.'
'I sold it.'
The flame of anger ignites inside of me, my voice remains calm. 'And why the fuck'd you sell it, huh? I spent three hours freezing my fucking ass off outside to get that shit.'
'I needed money.' Exhales a stream of gray.
'Money for what, for Chrissake? What else you fuckin' spendin' your money on, Jan? Christ!' My temper was rising.
She became suddenly apprehensive. 'Why'n'cha come here and sit, Elie. Come here and sit so I can talk to ya.'
I was still breathing harder than usual. I debated going to sit. I kicked the wall. I swore. I sat next to Jan.
She put down her cigarette. 'Hey, baby,' she spoke softly, placing her skeletal hand on my leg. 'Don't be mad.'
I turned my head the other way, sitting on our barely-green sofa, fingering a cigarette burn in the seat. This was the couch me and Jan first had sex on. It was the couch we bought when we first moved in together when we were 18. Jan was still 17. I was done school, she couldn't stand living at home anymore, so we bought this small place in a sketchy neighborhood. And we were happy. We bought this little couch and a little coffee table and a little fridge. We used to have a twin bed in the corner since the place was so small, but it was okay with us. We painted the walls ourselves, her sweatpants speckled light blue like a robin's egg. We kept it clean, I made her breakfast sometimes.
This is what our lives looked like before we went down the Rabbit Hole.
We sold the coffee table, the chairs, the bed. Anything for extra cash. We stole a mattress from a lawn to sleep on.
Back on the couch, I turned to look at her beautiful but empty eyes, lined with shadows. We wanted a baby. Two years after we moved in, we wanted a kid. The couch was our first time together. For some reason, Jan couldn't get pregnant. The doctor said that she had a lame ovary, so even on the occasion that out of my zillions of sperm, one singular sperm managed to pull through to the Fallopian tubes, it had only a fifty percent chance of choosing the ovary that would produce a fertilizable egg. Our chances were still plausible, he said, but don't count on it.
Janice was crushed. She wouldn't eat, sleep, she'd only cry or stare. She wouldn't talk to me for a month. I just kept kissing her and telling her we'd have a baby some day. Anyway, I guess while I was worried about her I started drinking a little. It wasn't until I was drinking a lot that I found out Jan was doing crack. Since then we've been getting wasted every day. Booze, chronic, crack, anything. Our bodies will never become as polluted as our minds.
For a moment I forgot why I was mad at her. I wanted to take her icy hand, kiss her, allow her hipbones to cut me as I hug her. I wanted to accept her into my arms, into me. If we eliminated all the space between us, if we got close enough, maybe we could go back in time and love each other again.
'Elie? Don't be mad, hey?' she said. For the first time in a long time, I pulled her into a hug. My face rested in the crook of her neck, shaded by the shelter of her black veil of hair. She seemed uncertain of how to respond, finally resting her spindly arms on my back. We sat like that for a minute or so, then- 'I'm leavin' with Biggie, Elie.'
I pushed her off me. 'What,' I muttered.
'He knows this girl that can really-'
'Who the fuck is "Biggie"?' I hissed.
'He gives me money,' she squeaked.
I took a breath. 'And how do you get the money, Janice?' I asked shakily.
She was silent.
'Janice, how do you make the money?' She was stoking the flames. I was getting scared. I shook her arm. 'Tell me!' I shouted.

Anita.

Anita.
She looked me in the eyes with her dead ones. 'I fuck.'
My fears were realized. I stood up, spun, put my head in my hands. I heard her keep talking, explaining, defending herself, but I couldn't collect my thoughts. My feelings crashed together like two drops of water and ran together, my heart crashing into my stomach. My every breath made a thunderous sound in my ears. I was overwhelmed, I did something I haven't done for years: I cried.
A pale spider on my shoulder tries to console me. 'Elie, I'm sor-'
I spun and hit her. She fell to the floor. I had never hit her before. The buzzing in my head had stopped, I felt clearer, I hit her again. And again. It felt good. This wasn't Janice. It wasn't her anymore. This was some cracked out prostitute. It wasn't Jan.
I hit her for making me start drinking. I hit her for the drugs. I hit her for the baby she couldn't have. Every blow held a different meaning.
Finally, I stood again and caught my breath. I looked down at her sprawled figure, shaking and broken on the ground. Blood trickled from the corner of her mouth, already there were purple bruises developing on her frail body. She was shaking, but not crying. All the while I beat her, she did not make a sound.
But her eyes. Her eyes were no longer dead. Through the hair that clung to her face, under the arm that feebly shielded her, she looked at me and I saw, like a whirlwind, every feeling in the world pass through her to me as if an electric current bonded us both in the space that separated air to floor. Shock, sadness, regret, understanding. She knew what she had done to us. 'I love you,' she whispered from the ground. I didn't look back as I slammed the front door behind me. No consequences.
I took the whiskey with me. I drank and vomited in turn, smashed the empty bottle on a church. I stumbled all the way to the bridge that divides New York from Brooklyn. I stepped between the bars in my drunken stupor and stood hanging off the side of the bridge, staring into the black currents below. My own putrid, alcoholic breath stung my nostrils. My face was swollen from cold and my broken nose.
It was dark outside, no one could see me. My body wouldn't be found until tomorrow, maybe not even for days, I thought. If I jumped.

Right.

Now.
I thought of Janice. I thought of my mother and my father and my sister Maryn. I thought of a small, dark-haired boy with gray green eyes and my lanky build. "Dad," he mouthed. My right foot slipped slightly, sending ice particles floating down, down into the blackness. I did not lower it. I let my leg hover over the abyss. I leaned forward.

'Hello?' A groggy female voice answered.
'It's me, it's Elie. I'm coming home, Maryn.'
I heard my sister's voice through the receiver as I shut my eyes and leaned against the phone booth wall.
Flashback: a laugh. A golden laugh, the brightest smile, the fondest memory.

A short story for Talula.

James grudgingly held his mother's hand as the automatic doors hissed open. He knew that day as he strapped on his Velcro shoes, knew as they drove in silence in the hot, stuffy car, knew now as they stepped onto the mopped tile floor of Home Depot, that this was going to be a very long day. James was only eight years old, but even then he realized that whenever mom went shopping for home renovation items, it took what seemed like forever.

After about twenty minutes (five hundred years to James) of patiently letting himself be dragged along as his mother pored over different tints of wood stain, he had spotted an area with furniture for sale. He plotted his escape route, and waited for the optimum moment to make his break for it, which came in the form of a young man with overly bleached teeth, clad in a funny-looking orange apron, talking to his mother and gesturing towards the shelves which seemed to stretch endlessly on. As her back was turned, James decided it wouldn't be a bad idea to sit down and rest for a while. Just until his mother stopped talking about stuff so much.

It didn't take him long to find the biggest, fattest chair in the room. As he flung himself into the arms and plopped down gratefully on the buttery leather, letting out a loud, dramatic sigh, he noticed just a few inches short of his fingertips a small array of buttons and arrows. A control panel, like a space ship. Timidly, he stretched one arm out and pushed a button. With a quick mechanical whir, the back of the chair had risen for a couple inches. Delighted, James let his fingers dance across the panel, manipulating the chair-ship, to rise, fall, lean forwards, back, up again, to the left, footrest in, out, in, incline the back, raise the seat... James was having so much fun, he didn't notice his mother being led away to view the impressive new shipment of crystal light fixtures. He was concentrated on a man in a long black coat about ten yards in front of him, closely examining a shelf. James locked his space gun on the alien, raaaaaaaaaaaaaised the gun to the target, took aim...

BANG!

Aleksandr jumped, whipping around to find the source of the startling noise. An older man in an orange Home Depot uniform grumbled as he bent to recover the heavy box that had just toppled off the cart he'd been pushing.

Exhaling, Aleksandr turned back distractedly to the shelf which had previously been occupying his attention. He picked up a small can of paint, turned it over in his damp palm, scanned the chemicals. Set it down, took up another, read. Ethyl acetate, formaldehyde, iron oxide. Nitroglycerin, nitric acid, parafin. In other words, the perfect concoction for a moderately destructive paint bomb, when added to a little dry ice. Tonight, his anarchist group would create a dozen or so of these bombs and drop them on the police cars at the station. They would show the Machine what they were up against. A couple shattered windshields shouldn't mean too much to those ignorant war-fighting bastards next to their big guns and their depleted uranium fire. It was Aleksandr's duty to provide the paint, and as conforming to society's consumerism would be against his morals, he was planning on employing the old five finger discount.

Absorbed as he was in his rebellious thoughts, he almost missed the small, raven-haired boy in the blue shorts staring at him from a chair in the furniture-cluttered clearing. Aleksandr stopped what he was doing and turned. The boy, who had been staring at him absentmindedly while beating his skinny legs 1,2,1,2 against the protruding footrest, stopped what he was doing as well. Aleksandr saw innocence and humanity in the boy's eyes, his head slightly cocked in curiosity. Aleksandr looked down at the can of paint still in his calloused, long-fingered hand, looked back up at the boy. The boy's bright, rounded face broke into a smile. Aleksandr's cigarette-dried lips cracked as he smiled back.

Behind the boy, Aleksandr saw a middle-aged, harassed-looking woman striding purposefully towards the chair. She had been crying, and she was breathing heavily as she came around the back of the chair and grabbed the boy. Her eyes registered him looking their way, stooped and began to loudly scold the boy. He sat with her vice-like grip on his arm and his hands between his knees.

Aleksandr placed the paint can back on the metal shelf, walked out of the aisle, past the checkout counters and out the door. He decided he'd give his little brother a call when he got home.

The smile was broken as James felt a violent, and rather painful, tug on his arm. "I've been worried sick, James!" his mother breathed. "I've told you never to leave mummy's side when we're in a big place like this! Oh, what if someone had taken you?" She glared accusingly at the man looking at them for a second before returning her red-rimmed eyes to her son. "Get up, we're leaving. We're going to have a talk at home about listening."

As he was wrenched upwards on his feet and firmly marshaled away, he looked back at the strange, smiling man, who was walking to the exit empty-handed. I guess he didn't find the colour he wanted, James thought. He turned back around and followed his shaken mother to the parking lot, where he sat in the backseat and breathed in the hot, heavy, unpleasant air that only comes from a car sitting out in the sun for extended periods of time. By the time he got home, his mother had calmed down and he was allowed to catch his favorite t.v. program before bed.

He went to school the next day. And the next day. And the next.

Vice

Wish away this coat

A heavy mass that hangs upon my bones

Subtraction helps me gain, but not in that physical sense.

Handfuls, armfuls, ugly things.

My bones would like to shine, gleaming white, sharply contrasting the gray of my teeth. They grit and they grind, resisting temptation. Weary soldiers guarding the winding path of my demise. I train them to open only for what must come out, blocking that which shan't come in.

While it all comes up, I know I'm going down. The irony makes me smile. My bones smile as well, for they have finally won the war. Their victory is sly, cheapened by cheating, but a victory all the same.

I've never been one to play fair, after all.

Disgust

Contaminate, adulterate.

Pollute, Pervert, Corrupt.

Infectstaintaint. Waste, Warp.

Canker, murder, bitter, venom, ROT RUIN SCOURGE SLIME

Debase.

Deprave.

Destroy.

Christianity.

Something vague.

I observe the audience's rapt attention, study their shining faces lit by the searing overhead beam as I announce, "Now, my comrades, hear this story."

The story has no beginning and no end. There is no plot, no gradual escalation, climax, nor a decline. It is simply a state of being. You will understand.

All my life, I have been haunted by a wall. I live on a deserted beach, which hosts a small expanse of forest and enclosed by a massive, imposing, intimidating steel wall. This is the biggest wall you have and will ever hear of. The tallest, thickest, most seemingly impenetrable wall your imagination can muster. Most days, it blocks the sun from gracing the island, from filtering down through the trees to make pretty green patterns on the damp forest floor; it is always dark, always cold. As I bleakly wade to my knees in the little bit of shore provided between the beach and the wall, I let my mind wander sadly to the sea, something I had read about but never seen. I press my palms to the wall and know that something infinitely larger exists just a few meters short of my fingertips, and this knowledge pains me. 

Dark, ominous clouds hover menacingly atop the wall, coating the island in permanent shadow, polluting the air with their foulness. I would scream at them to summon winds to blow down this blasted fortress, my prison guard, but their earth-shaking roars crippled my fruitless cries. Whenever this occurred, I found most comfort in retreating to the forest, enjoyed the large, sheltering leaves embracing me. Oftentimes, my protests began deep in my stomach with promises of power and strength, only to catch in my chest and feebly wither to nothing. The words ceased to come.

I was desolate. I yearned with all my being for the forbidden openness of the sea. The wall simply looked down disdainfully from its cavernous altitude. 

One day, while exploring the shallow expanses of shore, I discovered in the wall a gap. Under the water, there were holes in the wall, barred off of course, to allow the beach water to circulate, to flow. Every day I tugged, pushed, kicked, wiggled the same bar in the same hole, hoping with all of my soul that it would eventually come free.

That day came on a dismally gray morning. 

I stared at the dislodged metal bar in my calloused hand as my heart pounded and almost escaped out my mouth. This was my chance. Excited as I'd never been, my body oozed gracefully, almost liquidly through the gap, like it was meant to all along. My head broke the salted water, I surfaced, and the sight was enough to blind me. 

I had never seen such an open expanse. A mighty ocean, lapping me gently with its ebb and flow, stretching as wide as the earth itself. I lay on my back and swam leisurely backwards, still shell-shocked, into the open welcoming cerulean. The clear, warm, friendly sky winked down at me, leaving the ugly black clouds to grimace scarily at my retreating frame. 

Suddenly, before I could truly savour this new reality, the sea's gentle lapping ceased to be, and was replaced with a deadly calm. The skies darkened. I was a pinpoint, surrounded by miles upon miles of black sheets of glass. I inhaled sharply; the calm before the storm. No sooner had this realization come to me, that I felt the winds pick up. The gentle island breeze had whipped up into a frenzy, the whistling escalating to a scream. I was swept up in ice cold currents which flung me, tore and tugged at my body this way and that. I was struggling to stay afloat, my head disappearing under the surface every few seconds, my breaths coming in gurgling gasps - smothering. I thought this was the end. Before I closed my eyes to accept the finality of my death, I caught in my peripheral vision something big approaching me. Bigger than the walls, bigger than I could ever fathom. I turned and my lungs failed me as I saw the biggest wave you shall ever read about, hundreds of feet tall, reaching high, up, up, over my head. So very high. 

At this moment, for reasons unknown, I was struck with deja vu. Somehow, I know exactly what to do. As the wave reached its colossal peak and broke, I took one spluttering, shuddering breath and dove into the wave. Into the deep, to the bottom of the black, now silent sea that absorbed me so easily. Enveloped me completely. A great black veil. It was freezing, but I was calm. I knew that no harm could come to me here. Down in the deep, I was in my element. I felt a monstrous lurch as the thing passed over me in one huge motion. However, I felt it numbly, for I was in a different reality. I calmly, gratefully savored this underwater peace for what seemed an eternity. 

Finally, when my lungs screamed out for my mercy, I regretfully let my body rise to the surface. All was calm again, the sea was rippled, sparkling, the sky once again smiling its wide-toothed grin, but now somehow with a deceitful air that was not present before. I would come to resent this smile more and more each day, but I didn't know it at the time. I came to find that every night, the sea repeats its storm. The more distance I placed between myself and the walls which had caged me in for so long, the more the sea seemed intent on bringing me back. 

I am still swimming out here.

I am quite alone and have been swimming for a very long time. 

Every night I dive to my calm place, my secret kingdom which only I inhabit. I am the only creature in this sea. 

I am naturally one to put up a fight, so I never thought I would say that I'd be one to dive down to calmer waters rather than brave the storm on the surface. But I find solace in the silence. Its dark, peaceful surroundings comfort me, much like a mother's soft hand, as I wait for the storm to pass. I am not afraid. 

I do not know how long I have been out here, nor how long I shall be. The story has no beginning and no end. I simply know that the tide is taking me somewhere. Will take me somewhere. 

I wait at the bottom of the sea. 

The spring has sprung

It's ironic how when we cry, our mouthes assume the shape of a smile.

Nucleus

I don't want to be the center of my own reality. Looking out for number one, you'll never be happy. It gives you too much time to reflect on yourself, what can be improved, what must be altered. We are all tailors meticulously working, working, working to create the perfect, most flawless garment on earth. Take it in here, let it out there, shorten the hem. Re-stitch the ripped, the torn, the worn. But who are we to consider ourselves the perfect, most flawless beings to don this garment of ours. We will never reach perfection, and yet even with this knowledge we continue to disappoint ourselves with wasted efforts. 

Whether there is a God or not, I cannot say, but I sure as hell hope something's out there. And I don't mean aliens. The idea of a city, a nation, a planet believing in nothing but their own flesh and blood, their own selfish consuming ideology, makes me want to cry. I'm not religious, and I never have been. I don't sit with my ass numb on a hard wooden bench every Sunday, praising a man who, with all the power of God behind him, allowed himself to be demoralized, hammered on a cross and left there to die. Deluding myself with holy water drawn from a sink. 

Or maybe that's just me being ignorant.

But I want to believe in something. A Holy Tea Bag. A Holy Kleenex Box. I don't care. Just as long as I don't believe in just me, just me living and dying. A whole nation of people, living and dying. Constantly concentrating on holding yourself back from something instead of working towards building something. Picking themselves apart until they're whittled down to nothing. It's when we become this nothing that we begin to hate ourselves, for lack of anything else to hate. We all fight some sort of addiction to escape this hopelessness. Your life becomes centered around the effort of NOT doing something. Your life becomes a battle against yourself.

I tried to describe to my mother the sadness I feel, the frustration at merely living in the reality that we are forced into. Our birth is both a blessing and a curse. We spend our lives looking to the future until we find ourselves at the end of the road, looking at the past. Wishing we had spent it differently. We die in self-induced regret. Our free will is as free as a trained monkey. We are programmed to want what we want. Nothing is ever new. I tried to tell my mother that my childhood, this generation could not be more of a polar opposite to hers. She spoke in whispers of a world of kneeling on hard corn, of children polishing shoes, of night terrors involving drunken fathers. I thought of a world of middle class workers working their five to nines, coming home to a dysfunctional, two story home where the mother reads diet books and the kids rooms are empty. With the newly renovated kitchen, the shiny new tiles and the couch dented from the husband's sleeping body every night. Everything is one big show. My mother told me that I had no idea what suffering was. Even in her time, with abusive drunken fathers, with wars and racism and beatings at school, I can say that our world today, my world, is far, far more fucked up than ever before. The drunken fathers were just trying to escape something of their own. The wars were fought by men who still gave a shit about their country. Schools laid rulers on the knuckles of children because they refused to give up on them. I wanted to tell her all this, but the words wouldn't come. A cigarette is just another portal to escape. Our lungs will never become as polluted as our minds. I have a feeling she wouldn't understand anyway. 

"Our generation has had no Great War, no Great Depression. Our war is spiritual. Our depression is our lives."

My thoughts have awakened in ways I never thought possible.

There are, quite literally, no oxfords in this town. 

No meat for the bread.

She swung back and forth on the computer chair for what seemed like a very long time, thinking what on earth to write about. She felt the creative energy, the yearning for some elaborate description, straining for release but there was no outlet. For the first time, her imagination had failed her. This was a turning point.

Maybe if she wrote in the third person, she thought, it would birth some idea. If she played Text Twist on the computer, some word could spark inspiration. Her mind was a dry oasis of blandness. How unfair it was that during waking hours, when the brain is supposedly most stimulated, she could not conjure a single tool to aid in her writing. The more she forced it, the more awful the product of her efforts:

"If stars were flies, the sky would be the most majestic of spiderwebs."

And such garbage. 

How does the night bring about such originality of thought? Those nights during which, tossing and turning, she strained to attract sleep, when the most lucid of thoughts occurred. Which led her to think, is there something about that half-conscious state of mind that helps us tap into unexplored areas of our minds? We only use ten percent of our brains. What if there was a way to access beyond that, something more? That statistic made her analyze the true confines of our limited imaginations. 

No wonder all she could produce was a half-hearted comparison of stars and flies. 

Misery, she concluded, was the best inspiration. Proof was inked into history's highest respected literature. A lack of misery was bad news for a prospective writer. She found that she didn't care much for this observation, however, because having recovered from a very deep, very recent bout of misery, she had no intention nor any desire to revisit it. 

So what to do? 

She took a bath. And read a book. Marvelled at the intricate plots, the beautiful linguistics, the literary devices. She was jealous.

Tattoo removal is expensive.

Since fucking when am I sixteen, with black hair, a driver's license and cigarette smoke in my jacket.

I feel cheated. Time is the most deceptive of con artists, and therefore the deadliest. Whispers convincing comforts in your ear, "You've got all the time in the world," it coos. Programs your brain from the outside to believe that if you mess up this time, there's always another chance, you always have more time. Once you have this mindset locked in, it owns you completely, you just don't realize it. It takes advantage of your confidence in it, because "time doesn't lie". It crawls into your head and now it can truly start fucking with you. Things change faster than you think. You don't reckon time properly. 

I grabbed my keys off the hook that hangs by the mirror and tried to reach the door before I was spotted, but the mirror had seen me and was calling me back. I saw myself as I see myself everyday, squinting in the magnifying mirror scouting for imperfections, smothering them under mounds of makeup as if it makes them any less present. The plain jane face, the hideous bulbous nose that European ancestry was so kind to bless me with, eyelids straining under the weight of painted lashes. But this time, with one hand on the doorknob and the other fingering the hard, smooth outline of the lighter in my left pocket, I saw myself differently. I didn't see flaws or beauty or even hair, eyes, a nose, a mouth. I saw unhappiness. I peeled my face off, tossed it on the floor and revealed my ugly unhappiness, naked to the world. I thought to myself, I don't want to wake up in ten years and have to peel my face off every day. When did this tremendous unhappiness settle into my skin so deeply? I tell myself I want a tattoo but, hah, i've had one all along. It's everywhere, the world's largest tattoo. For not only does it ink every inch of my skin but it covers my muscles, my organs, my bones. 

Dear God, I hope a fucking change comes soon, I said. And so it happened. Time's dishonest, sneaky nature has served me well I now see, because I couldn't have made the change knowing it was happening. It was unconscious, natural. I'm thankful for this because forcible change never lasts long.

Outside, the click of fuel against flint, a hand shelters the flame, ignites. Smoke pervades my mouth, throat, lungs. Inhale deeper still and savour the toxins. I pick my poison of the day. Wind permeates my skin, chills my bones and clears my head. Snow bites at my heels and toes like wild dogs. 

And every day I miss you less. You should know that you will always be in my heart, but even that, my heart, most maimed organ and in being this, also the strongest, will be moving on to greater things soon. 

Lost friend, lover of times past, I love you and I will always love you, but I will not wait. I can't.

This is okay, I think. People are moving and I am still. My socks are soggy and starting to freeze. A strand of hair clings to my lip. 

I'm okay.