Re-working of a post from months ago....still working on the other story.
___________________________________________
His heavy grip fisted a double whiskey into his gut until his head told him it was not far from bursting. He went home and lay on the couch, staring at the cracks in the ceiling and in his brain. His brain then pushed itself into the microcosm of the parallel life. The one he could have lived if he had ventured free from this day to day, or the one which could have led him astray in its call to survival, or the other one he dreamed of as a child, where all the parts of the dream were clean and unfettered by experience and circumstance, and where fate ruled the day.
But none of those parallel lives happened to him. He lay still and pretended the cracks in the ceiling (and in his brain) were the branches of a tree, the tree that held all he had been and all he couldn’t live up to, so full and tight that it was about to buckle like his headache, down into the floor and through the street, into the nightly sludge of other people drunk-dreaming the same thing. The sludge was the color of lost money, of booze and rot, of old feelings that never leave you, slowly gang greening its porridge brew into a pot somewhere on the outer shore, where the witches stood near the railway.
He had to make a list. A list of things that would save him, a list of prices he could live with paying. He got up and tossed a shoe that didn’t belong to him (it was hers, the only one, how does a person leave one shoe behind) down to the sound of a yapping dog somewhere to in the alleyway, but the shoe hit nowhere near the dog and its furtively confident belchy bark. Bastard reminder of another time and place. Funny how the sound of a dog barking in the country is soothing from afar; could be wild, running in the distance, reminding of the freedom still pacing in each of us. But the measly city dog just happy to shit where it eats and wanting to let the world know it’s fine to do so - well, that just didn’t cut it. But city people, they weren’t much different, were they.
The best part of this late night roll call of tremulous voices, illegible lists and calvinist shakes is that he Wanted to be alone. Escaping all the possibilities that could hurt him. All those people - ego lit their way like a cheap secondhand lamp, the kind that gets marked up for well-dressed, clean couples at the antique shop never having style, nor a place, nor anything that wanted its light. That was most people if you shined the light far enough into them. He felt no empathy for these clean people with filthy, dim souls, shopping for happiness and self worth at the matchmakers. Cluttered full of expectations of what and who their hearts should breathe in. They need and want for a companion, desiring like the worst case of a beholder without a muse. The opposite of a companion was usually delivered and its purpose served quite unextraordinarily so. People often lived together as two burnt out lamps (like a light bulb making a rattling noise, you know you just have to throw it away, its no good...) un-learning the beautiful tides that were offered them before they fucked it up on their own and were forced to stumble blindly into the flickering acquiescence of another fool. The other fool would tell them that this loss of spark and purity was perfectly ok (since they themselves couldn’t even remember what theirs looked like)…it would all be ok…for awhile. Marriage and its backseat companion love (more the scheme of love) shapeshifted into a shady loan offered by the meanest of men in stiff suits. Self created co-signers to bullshit, bigger and more faceless than a man and a wife, or even a woman and hen pecked husband could be - they now only found themselves dirty on the outside, hissing throughout, unaware of each other while standing at the side of the road, with a “Will Work For < hissing >” sign. Bankrupt for someone new to share their same old cracks, self contained skin, unchanging colours, or their original room with.
There was no one in his room. Hadn’t been for a very long time. Saying something to scare them off was usually the best way to achieve this perfect loneliness. But would he ever give in to that other way – tick tocking, rock rocking - you wanting to smash their head in if they said another word about their day, who they think they are, what they want, what they think they need, all while reading the city paper in front of you. How did they lose the sense of the Urgency. Whole food chains eating themselves, universe in constant birth and bloody peril, the mental cases killing their slaves --- can’t two people together know enough to put the paper down, toss it into the fire and devour each other from skin inwards, not just on the first day, but every single day forth? It was too much for most people’s minds as they licked past and flipped pages, people’s ideals were whipped from them hourly without the sexy veil of a lady in leather boots. It usually happened much more quietly than that. The sadder silent whip removed all the warmth, aliveness and heart from people, leaving them to die a little down there every day.
But didn’t he die a little in here alone every night. Or not. It pained him to know they were so asleep in their freedom, and it pained him to know he was too, but for these thoughts which accompanied him on his nightly journey up the bare wall to the ceiling. The branches cracked, reaching out to him - Jesus on his tree calling out as a warning. Better up on the tree in the end, than in the mire everyday, choking up the sickly muck of everyone’s sludge being shoved into his mouth.
How could he share this with anyone? Maybe their cracks were in the bottom of the bathroom trash, or hiding with the feelings he himself tossed into the bottom of the ocean just for the thrill of someone finding them. Still, it’s hard to see deep down to the ocean floor. There would be other nights, other rapturous dreams, other angry slipstreams on which to surf over all our failures both alone and together; there was tomorrow and the night after. The cracks weren’t going anywhere, but would he ever climb on in, or up or over, and see who lay beyond them and if they really saw. Could anyone every shine their light into his eyes again and with it, his heart find rapture, and accord. He passed out before this made any sense. The yapping dog was let back in about 5 minutes later. The last whiskey he barely touched was still at his side.
