Friends

It's the squawking of a million, tiny, iridescent birds. They block my vision when they flock around my home, they blot out the scenery and cover up the woes that beset me as I sit by the window, staring out from my bed. I wish I was on fire, to explain this massive heat that scorches my skin, that leaves me thirsty, that leaves me leaving buckets of sweat in my mattress. The tiny beacons of life I used to cling to have disappeared in a blanket of snow, leaving me left to be thrashed by the waves of my own isolation.

The fever of my depression is not the worst thing, it's my inability to do anything about it, to be completely powerless to defend myself against the ravishing it lays upon my withering form. My bloated corpse floats down the river of life, waiting to snag on some downed tree or hit a sandbank, so that I will finally stop forcing it. The lights and sounds of christmas, the bells and whistles of New Years, I wish to banish it from the very surface of the planet, thrusting my hands upwards and declaring "BE GONE YOU WITCH, I SHALL SUFFER YOU NO MORE!" but in the end, my arms and strapped to the bed and I have been mute for so long that I am not even sure I was born with vocal chords.

The abonimations of my dreams, where my teeth fall out, where former lovers taunt me from collosal towers, where my friends are merely shadows cast by my televisions glow, these dreams, these terrible dreams that sit upon my chest as I sleep, crushing me, they do not relent, they are unforgiving, merely playing out the nightmare scenarios that my mind spews forth. I am so unsure of myself recently, I sit in the shower for hours and wonder if I've been living some terrible convoluted daydream for the past six years, maybe I will wake up and have a chance to do it all again.

There is no penance great enough for me to pay, since I have no real sin, no real crime to be punished for, I am merely persecuting myself, to make my life more interesting. I listen to your laughter on a tape recorder I used to run when we would spend time together, and I scrutinize it, with the razor of misery, I wonder about all the time we spent together and I become paralyzed, I need to know the truth, but at the same time, I am so terrified of it, I can't even comprehend thinking of asking you to be honest.

I'm growing inward, forcing everything to curl in upon itself, to form some hidden, titanic labyrinth where the true me runs in the darkness, waiting to devour the false identities I create and eventually discard. I am merely a monstrous reflection of my own shortcomings, merely a funhouse mirror distorting my own nightmare anxiety as it rises from the ocean, dripping with the remains of my former self. The rotten floor of the ocean is where I belong, in the darkness and unimaginable pressure, with my form distorted and mutated to withstand the very real threat of death.

I love him.


Please, make it go away.

There is no point in admitting my mistakes, I will not do so any way. I refuse to turn myself in for the things I have done with a righteous heart. Being on the run isn't so hard, especially when all the signs tell me to keep moving, keep running, keep spreading the word, brandishing my mark to all who wish to see, blinding those who do not believe with the radiance of my terrible soul. The truth is what bludgeoned all those people, I am faultless, doing merely what has been asked of me, and I do it with a pure heart, a soul unblemished, I am right in my actions, I am merely an extension of the Truth, The Light, The Word.

The vines, they creep slowly, they spread their forms upon the concrete of my old home, they languish in the sun, their secretive lives, the shadows that dwell beneath their covering presence are merely an embodiment of my turmoil. I have been gone so long, that when I returned I recognised nothing of this place, this horrid shell of a home, a mere skeleton of the warmth, of the love that once laboured there, and I turned my head towards the sun and sighed, a sigh that could choke a million people, a sigh that expressed every doubt I ever felt well up in my spirit.

Out of the crooked doorway shambled the skeletal apparation of someone I once loved, in the tatters of her clothing, she extended her arms, the thin twigs of her bone structure so blatant, she might as well be nude. "I can see your bones." is all I could muster in my revulsion. When she embraced me, I shuddered, I whispered secret phrases told to me by an angel with infinite eyes, infinite mouths, and an unbearable light, hoping that the words would keep me safe.

I walked her to the creek, and we sat for a while upon the mossy banks, listening to the spring bubbling, speaking to us in the true tongues of life. She spoke to me in broken phrases, half sentences that would being and end half through the conversation. She was broadcasting over a frequency I only recieved underneath powerlines. She would place her hand upon mine, she would lean closer and I would move away, I could not understand or tolerate whatever had occured in my legnthy absence. I watched the lines of her skull as her jaw moved, I watched the fragile legnth of her hair breaking as she ran her hands through it, I could no longer love something I could barely comprehend.

I was alone when I left the creek, I left her as an Ophelia, left her to the devices of nature, left her to the song she sung, left her to bounancy and science, the only time I trusted what those liars and thieves proclaimed. Walking away isn't hard when you cannot even comprehend the things you leave, the mess you will create when you dissolve into the wind, leaving only hints of your very existance in the corners of a room you barely slept in, I have nothing to absolve, since I am without.