Building up boxes is all I feel like I ever do. Heavy lines form on the page, a vacant stare rests on my face. Controlling the pen, held in a light grasp, I slowly stack each one upon another.
The world around me is like a blur. Everything is sped up while the steady movement of the pen is slow and graceful, like a park in the middle of a city. Sometimes I imagine myself like a park. Still and green while the dark and the grey surrounds, slowly trying to eat away at it. I draw deep breaths, each feels stale and burns the inside of my lungs. Each draw feels like another part of me is lost, compromised to a world I want no part in. A land that is being invaded by a foreign country. I don’t want your invasion.
Suddenly, breath sticks in my throat, my body freezes. A split second passes, everything stops. And it stays like that, stretching on until my body snaps back sharply into reality. It reaches out and grabs me, pulling me into its dirty stentch and crazed bustle and sweeps me away. I blink and look around. The noise rushes into my ears and causes me pain. My head strains. The inncessent chatter, raping me with each nattering decibel. Nausea climbs in my throat and I find myself walking. Everything still feels clouded to me, I can’t think fully. I know that I want to get out of here. I work on that premise.
I walk the streets but try to avoid taking in the sights. I feel the grime covering my skin, penetrating my pores. The smoke stings my eyes and I feel them redden. I see different shapes as they pass. The drunk who lies in a doorway, a stream of piss trailing from underneath him. In the alleyway down from him, a whore calls out to her next customer. I stop for a second as I pass her. Maybe I can pay to forget, to not feel the disgust and the revulsion. To stop the knot that has been building in my stomach to the point I think my waist might explode in front of me. I imagine what it would be like to have my guts explode onto someone. Blood and stomach lining slide down the faces of passers by. It isn’t so hard to picture, they look vile to me anyway. She notices I’ve stopped and calls out to me. I carry on walking.
“Fuck you,” I hear her shriek from behind me.
Dogs bark in the distance and sirens wail. The signs of downturn surround me. Trash lines the streets, houses are falling into disrepair. The smell of desperation reeks, it fills my nostrils with sharp acidity.
Wooded areas are only spaces filled with trees, hidden behind its bushled exterior only lies emptiness and void. To hide or to escape, to lose one’s self or to only just pretend that the reality of what is happening is only a distant image. The wind dances through like a bad cliché. She runs through the gaps in the trees, letting her body move around like the lightest feather. She never stops, nor does she ever tire. Endless amounts of gleeful joy bundled up in sweetness and innocence. The saccharine stereotype that taunts me with its sheer savagery. Bile crawls its way up my throat and I feel an overwhelming sense of rage. Fists clenched by my side, the knot inside me tightens even more. My sense of escape has been completely destroyed and now all that I am left with, again, is everything that I run from.
Like rivers that run forever, all I can feel is eternal and never changing. The things in my life only seem like the opposite of what everyone else thinks and feels. Like the world is some anti karma that I have been left with. To suffer on my own, with the world surrounding me like a menacing shadow that silently floats round the bed of a sleeping child. The monsters that hide under beds and lurk in closets are real to me, they are my constant companions as I stumble round the world, always looking in at what I’m not a part of.
Her overly large breasts stare me in the face as she bends over to pour. The top she’s wearing attempts to contain them but only looks at the brink of tearing. I wonder if the slightest surprise might cause the fabric to give way and for her breasts to spill out. Waitresses in cafes like this always look like mothers from TV shows – busty blondes with an overwhelmingly maternal instinct to care. I can see her beady eyes watching me, waiting for me to let out some overwhelmed sigh and reveal all my problems to her. She waits a while before she asks, “everything OK, honey?” She says the end of honey with an accent, making it sound like honee. It only adds to the emphasis of falseness in the question. I can never decide if the will to care is only a mask for a greed of information or to distract a person from their own self-loathing. Not being part of a world of lies only means that I have a distinct personal truth. The downside to this is that there is nobody to share it with. A glittering hope of subverted happiness is taken away. I merely smile back before staring into the blackness of my coffee.
Watching the whiteness of dress turn into a bloodied red I could only feel the exact opposite of what I should feel. It didn’t stop me. I watched as the expression of realisation on her face turned to horror and then into fear and I felt a stillness. Like a mere observer, watching a silent movie. Her screams and whimpers were only drowned out noises as hissing silence rattled through my ears.
I’ve always wondered why pills are split into white and red. I watch them shake in my hand with curiosity. They make an absent rattling sound as they roll around, surfing up the curve of my fingers before returning to the bowl of my palm and circling the brim. I watch continuously, watching more fall on to my hand as I sprinkle them down from my other. They fall almost in slow motion, for a moment holding their space in the air before falling like rain. I almost find it beautiful.
By the third cup of coffee, I can see her chest heaving with exaparation. Every five minutes she would come past, watching me like prey. Pretending to be cruising for another cup to fill, but I knew what she was up to. Now, she stands at the corner of the bar, her fingers tapping impatiently. I wonder if I turn my glance to the cake display for a second, hers might follow and it may distract her. She wasn’t massively overweight but women with issues always have indulgence problems. It makes them easier to manipulate. And every women has issues. I watch her breasts rise and fall for a while. I ponder the similarity between breasts and an ass and men’s fascination with them. The desire, the complete absorbtion by them. There’s a reason that so many men like tit wanks, it’s as close as they feel comfortable with before putting their cock in an ass. Then there’s the men who actually do. Often the first to declare to the world how straight they are, how they aren’t some faggot, always ready to beat on those who are. I wonder how many times my new mother has been fucked up the ass and how much she really loathes it, being made to feel like the man that he really wants her to be, the whole time pretending that she really gets off on it.
Sitting alone in the dimly lit room, I slowly trace my fingers along the floorboards. I swirl around the grain, making shapes out of the patterns in the wood. Sometimes a blister would catch me, the sudden sharp feeling penetrating through me. It was odd to find a reaction. For so long now, all I was used to was a vague sense of loss. Like something should be there but wasn’t, but I never knew what it was. I watch the blood spilling out of the cut, the wood becoming a moistened red. Drips falling like the red side of the pills. Waiting for a moment, I feel the seconds draw out before I pull out the wood and the flowing of blood increases. The falling rain is heavier. I don’t hear as they come up behind me. It’s not until I feel the first impact on my head that I realise anything is going on. It takes a second or two before I know where I am. I fall to the floor and remain there, dazed. I turn over and wait for the blur in my vision to stop. I can only see a figure hover above me, they are still unclear to me. I feel a foot connect with my stomach and curl up in a ball instinctively, the breath knocked out of me so that I can’t scream out in agony.
I gently rock from side to side, willing the pain to go away but before it can I notice that I don’t feel as much. Everything seems at a distance and all I’m doing is watching. I can hear movement and rummaging before I feel the air in front of my face sharpen as something hits off my skull, then the little I could see fades away into black. No matter what happens I always end up in the dark.
He was only young when he first started to get ill. Not very young, but still old enough to merit remark. The odd cough and sniffle here and there but it soon worsened. The cold would heighten it and he would become weaker. Doctors couldn’t find what was wrong and only subscribed palsy advice, to take more vitimans and make sure that he got a good amount of fresh air. It soon started to get to him though, the sparkle began to fall from his eyes and his whole demeanour changed. He was what people would describe as “bright and cheery”, always a smile on his face. Much like the girl. Always the little angel, but only a matter of time would change it. Time always corrupts and one by one, it corrupts us all. Seconds pass to minutes that pass to hours and passing time always brings darkness. Inevitability is a word I despise.
She was much better at hiding it. It was only the boy that anyone noticed, the sick one who everyone fussed and muddled over. It drove her to despair, driving her deeper. Resentment filled her with rage and her mind only became more disturbed, pushing an already warped mind. She began to hate him with every ounce of her being but he was the one person that she couldn’t take it out on. And with everyone’s attentions focused on him, it made it easier to find the next best thing so close by. It wasn’t until I lay on that floor, unconscious with blood spilling from me that anyone noticed a thing. Crouched in the darkness, with a plank in her hand and a face like stone. They say I almost died. It was then that they noticed a pattern, and it was then that they realised it was only a matter of time before I was like them.
My life is a ticking clock. The moment I was born the clock began counting down, already born into something I wasn’t part of. It’s taken longer for me but I exist with more than a distaste for what I’ve ended up with, to what I’ve become and will be. Built up to the point where it feels like I feel nothing at all, but at any moment it will penetrate right through me, searing me from flesh to bone like fire.
As I watch her, I can feel my fists clench by my side. I look down into my coffee as my hand slides down beside me, my fingers grasp the shining metal. Blood trickles from my hand onto the seat and down my face. I stare at the dim reflection on the surface of the cup and realise that it isn’t blood. I feel a dull sensation increasing in my hand, increasing in intensity shooting adrenaline round my body, jolting me upright. I look at mother in the eye as I slowly walk towards her.
“You want more coffee?”
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