Beneath The Light

My head is a library

A library melted into a bushfire. The shelves snap and tumble like cookies between teeth. Books spark and disintegrate like matches, their spines evaporating, pages sprawling across the scenery. 
Many words survive, though some letters and pieces are lost. The ashes taste like the books they once were, of someone I remember being but no longer am. But the ashes lace together and along with it, the stories. They are muffled, bound, confused. Some pictures sing brighter than others, while some have been caught by the wind and washed away.

My toes shuffle through the collapse, nudging the blackened edges of paper. Obsidian eyes pound with hatred, hatred for a child that was too much to handle and too little to love. 
Panting men with cameras press in, they smudge their lips against hollow bones. Groaning, screaming, begging, the voices shove into my skull, sinking in like the heavy, indestructible weight of sweating iron ceilings. I no longer know which sounds belong to who.
Noise like white static. Pregnant ugly nerdy dork fat failure spoiled brat bastard child mistake creep spawn pathetic die cutter disgusting anorexic nobody stupid loves girl you. Words I no longer remember. Dust. I do not remember. Will not remember.
Numbers on a lit screen, my precious light. It guides me through chaos, one calorie and pound at a time. It is my bible and I obey it like its faithful servant. The light chokes me, tears me apart, finger, toe and limb at a time. Skins me, paints acid down my throat and marinates me on a heated grill, my skin sizzle-popping. Devours me until I am nothing. Nothing but food and life is food and food is life.
Maroon caresses the lines, swims from the wounds like a waterfall. It presses its soothing presence against me and like a lover, I beg for more. Its lines clasp my flesh like strings on a guitar, the music lulls the radio to sleep.
My soul melds itself into my best friend, hooks its talons into her and marks her as mine. She laughs and walks with another. I grind like a barely contained evil spirit. The blue that paralyses me morphs into a red flame and bleeds green.  
Smoke encircles my lungs and walks into my mind, putting the horrors to sleep. God’s liquid floods me and gentle powder grinds into my thoughts. My lids open but my eyes are closed. I live and die and live again.  
Women, men, poised on a cushioned chair. Their faces and offices overlap and overwrite. They ask the same questions and they nod in the same practiced manner. The corners of my lips raise and a stream of hyperactive tales flood from them. Today will be the day when I will get better. Today is the day. Today. Today. Today was not the day. Tomorrow will be well. Tomorrow. Tomorrow is the day. Tomorrow was not. Tomorrow never will be. Tomorrow. Today. Yesterday. 
The explosion of glass, cloth and metal against my ear, the lamp’s light severs. Mother screams for me to stop, while she crushes the metal neck of furniture against my skull. A chair’s leg steps onto my stomach and digs in with its stiletto heels, I twitch like a half-killed mosquito. Mother cries and rubs the chair into me again, she begs for me to stop. Stop what? Breathing? Living? Being?

I stand amidst the wreckage and attempt to find a cure. A clue as to how the flower first bloomed and why the flower grew dead, the withered bud opening to uncover withered petals. Existing in its half-dead, half-alive state. 

Black spots of floating dust litter the grey air. I lie atop the cocoon of crisp paper and soft dust. Dress in embers, dark hair morphing into ashes, lips tainted blue where red once lived. I shut my lids, shut the world, shut the landscape of my mind,

And sleep. 

A Beautiful Pain

There is a beautiful kind of pain. The electrifying kind that jolts you awake, like a dose from a defibrillator or one too many shots of caffeine. The soothing kind that one clutches onto and holds to his chest like a teddy bear. The kind that mutters soothing words into your hair and holds you as a mother would. A painful pain that makes you feel like your mind is flushing itself through a blender, like your brain matter’s been turned into chicken feed - the blissfully terrifying kind that bleeds the world from your soul. 

I’m addicted to it. To shredding the world apart like scrap paper through a shredder. I want to live it, hold it, marry it, taste it, be it. Come home each night to find it waiting for me in the bathtub, soaking me in its acid, making love to me like a tyrannically abusive husband on Satan’s drugs. 

“Masochistic?” you ask. Doubtful. It isn’t a matter of bliss or ecstasy but the need to be punished. For something so odious I myself do not know of, and for everything I do know of. For being too obnoxious, too sympathetic, too self-centered, too big, too small, too loud, too quiet, too cynical, too hopeful, too this, too that. For being too much and yet, not enough. 

Life is a disappointment. Or at the very least, I am. I failed everyone and I failed everything. It’s like a choice between saving your son, your other son, attempting to save them both or saving yourself. Whichever road I step on, left, right, ahead, backwards, up, down or diagonal, I fail one way or another. 

I reached for the stars and missed, then missed the moon when I fell. Aimed for everything else and missed, except for a pulsing, spiralling black hole. I held brushes and sunk its hairs into paint, melted the acrylic into the canvas and created. I spent hours on a single section of the background, writing and re-writing, never knowing when to stop. To this day, I feel as if I’ve never completed a thing it my life. 

Agony is sugar-coated, wrapped in silk and duty-free. It licks through your skin and bleeds its impurities. Bloodletting was used to purge evils and I am old-fashioned.

People are apple seeds and pain is the juicy crunch of the fruit’s flesh. Life is noise and pain is music. Scars are tree rings, they are timelines, each one a story of yesterday’s child. 

Yet in the torture, we lose ourselves and our compassion. Sheffield once said “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you incredibly annoying,” to which I wholeheartedly agree. I lost myself in the maze of my mind. Somewhere along the hills of scars, I left behind my spirit. 

But it’s a beautiful kind of pain. And I’m too afraid to let it go. 

Life is noise

I don’t know why I bother to clip the pages between my fingers and flick through. Why I soak in each word, again and again. Why I press my feet against the polished trees and tie my shoelaces each day. How I manage to decipher the noise and slip it into my collection of deciphered noise. What’s the meaning of laughter, I don’t really know. It’s a strange cackle of notes, like a song that faintly resembles what they call joy. A large mural of memories, hiding the tunnels that curl deep into the walls, playing the songs of sound.

Someone asked me what I wanted to do with my life. “Make money,” I replied. “Lots of it.”
“Don’t you have a dream or something? Get married? Have kids? Pursue something you love? Travel the world?” asked the idealist. 
“No.”

Dreamers irritate me. You know, the ones that claim there’s that one person out there who’s your soulmate. That everyone is born innately pure and good. That life will miraculously get better if you just wait it out. That the majority of the human population stays forever faithful towards their spouse.
It’s irrational. And irrationality irks me. They’re the occasional kinks in my never-ending files of precious, insignificant, scribbled paper. 
Emotions are annoying and not to mention, dangerous. They’re a source of recklessness. They make people do silly things - like drink poison, cut off their ears to send to their loved ones, murder entire races and weep over friends with polished nails and poisoned lips. 
Norepinephrine, oxytocin, dopamine, vasopressin, endorphin, testosterone, serotonin and so on. They need to be trapped in a box, sealed shut and hidden within the neat array of reason - of which many lack. 

“Because of God, you receive good grades,” preached a man on stage. Uh, actually, because you studied your ass off you earned good grades.
“Because of God, this woman was saved from Cancer!” More like the woman had shitloads of resilience and a strong desire to live.  
“Because of God, our parents were brought back together.” Not really. It was either your parents, their sex drive, you or money. 
God is like Santa Claus and prayer is like how I used to flush my wish-list down the toilet, because I believed sewage plants led to the North Pole. Maybe sheep do, too. 

I used to run with a herd of them - sheep, that is, - we ran from the big bad wolf. Chasing this star in the sky called Faith. I stepped back one day and observed the wild herd, searched behind them for the mad wolf and found nothing. Looked up at the star and realised it was like a rainbow - untouchable, impossible, useless. 

I’m living in a dream and my dreams are my reality. I wake to find nightmares and I sleep to find peace.

One day I know I’ll disappear. That the girl in the picture, grinning, neck weighed down with medals, will be just that. A grinning girl, weighed down by medals. 
I’ll wake up to find I’m waking to a dream and that somewhere in the reality of my nightmares, I’ve been forgotten. I’ll only be a certain set of connections in a person’s mind. A swirl of neurotransmitters in someone’s prefrontal cortex that invokes some sort of emotional response. Just noise in their minds.
Until they’re forgotten, too. 

One day I will breathe, and prepare to choke on another year’s worth of water, simply to find I no longer need to. 

I will wake up and realise I’m asleep.