White light from the street lamps shone in from the blinded window.
Everything was grey.
The cold, painted brick wall was all I had.
I held my hand against it as I laid facing on the cheap bed.
I had never felt silence like this.
Grey always felt good.
It felt good in my hand.
It felt good on my skin.
It felt good in my eyes.
I could see nothing else.
The cold brick was all I had and all I wanted.
It was the only moment of neutrality in the loud world around me,
the loud pain inside me.
I thought I would never see color again,
and I was realized.
I did not move.
I sank into the conformity of the moment.
I wasn’t unwanted.
The grey did not care.
It held me in it’s arms and accepted me as I was.
It’s gift to me was the cold brick wall.
The only thing that felt real.
It did not pulse.
It did not live.
It was grey.
I wanted to be grey.
I offered my hand to the wall,
but the grey did not accept me.
It was just there for a visit.
It told me it would come back for me.
I will wait for the wall again.

After seeing her stars and collection of astronomy posters, Ellis once asked if she wanted to be an astronaut.
She simply replied, “What would be the point? It wouldn’t be any different than watching it on television.”  
Ellis found this to be a pretty daft assumption but couldn’t find any real reasoning to contest it.
This memory came back to him.
He attempted to empathize a second time as he stared at the ceiling stars when the idea of the glass of an old television mimicking the glass of a cosmonaut’s helmet came to him.
As he peered through the glass, it became apparent it wasn’t that being in space didn’t feel real, but that the television was more real than people gave it credit.
Even other screens, which rarely projected the experience of walking around living, felt more real than reality.
One doesn’t need to travel to see the world, and one doesn’t need to be near someone to feel close to them.
A line that has always be present, that very glass pane, began to weaken.
Ellis began to notice a headache as he traveled down the cavernous hole of existential metaphysics.
He looked down at Ada.
This vision had blurred unknowingly while lost in thought, and he frantically attempted to re-establish himself as a being existing in this plane of reality.

I was forced to sit upon a bench before a marbled statue in an art museum. Through patience and boredom, I traced over the figure before me. It was a woman. Her skin appeared so smooth, and her existence so intentional. She was draped with sheer fabric. How one carves sheer fabric from marble stone, I would never know. She looked so beautiful and at peace. Was I at peace? I mentally scanned over myself. I felt the nervous pumping of my heart and heard the carbonic shuffling of the toast I had eaten prior. I glanced, but not too obviously, at my fingers and the hands they were attached to. I could see the tangled roots of blue crawl between each other and the millions of cross hatched lines overlaying. I looked back up at the marble person. She had no pumping or shuffling. No crawling or cross hatching. She was silken and at rest. I tried to mimic her. I held in my place. Unmoving, unthinking, just being. But the more I tried, the worse I heard my heart and the worse I felt my stomach. I heard my thoughts and my chest rise and fall. I was cursed. I wanted to be like the woman. But my homeostatic existence forced me to continue. I held my mind as I stared at the statue with envy. What an existence to live. Pure, uninterrupted stasis. True stasis. She only moved when moved by others. And even then, she was at rest within herself. No knowledge outside of her oneness. I looked inward again. I was forced to be here. I was forced to be brought here and forced to be taken away from here someday. No one even thought to ask me about the matter. Time is so limited. And here I was. Forced to be here and forced to be here, looking at this woman with more than I could ever have. She was beautiful, spending everyday within a single place being praised by liberal art students and school children who pass through this atrium, even though she did not exist for them. She existed for herself. She stayed within herself, her own scope. Unbound by time or place in her mind. Yet, we all were lucky enough to have witnessed her within her unboundaries. After brushing over her several thousand times, I noticed a chip within her pedestal. I became silently aggravated at the prospect of some lazy dolt who was given the honor of moving her to only do so uncarefully, or an ungrateful adolescent bored amongst the halls of everlasting pieces of geniuses’ minds. But that was just it. They weren’t everlasting. Not really. Not even she, as her perfection captivated for millenia. For the first time, I felt I was her, and she was me. As she has been idolized for her beauty, such as I for the people who loved me. She had a history, as did I. We both have texture and features of difference, but we were to lie in the same bed someday. I would fall asleep much sooner than she, but all things must lay to rest. Even if she spent her entire worldly being in protection, she would still be brought to a close with the setting of the Universe. Two immaculate sisters saying farewell, both so vastly different yet frustratingly the same. Though for both, the daughter of mass and the daughter of time did not cross each other’s paths. They merely felt one another through the beings within and around them that occupy the other. Mass felt time around her, as time felt mass within her. And thus, were one, with no knowledge of the other. I took the first breath I had acknowledged since I first sat on this bench. My eyes attempted to adjust to farther focal points of the rest of the building once I finally pried my gaze from the woman. So many other beautiful beings existed in this singular space that I had no idea about until now. I wanted to spend my time with them, before they had no more time to spend with me. A woman came out of the door to my left. She asked me if I was here to interview for the security guard position. I nodded. She invited me to follow her into the room, and I did just that.

Lines of scar tissue trace from the edge of your lips back to the end of your teeth. You run your tongue from one corner to the other. Right to left. You can’t be the only one to have this. Your desire to probe another’s orifices has close to overwhelmed you in the desire to relate to other people. Was this normal? When the fan runs wind over your skin it crawls to create peaks and divots. As they fade, one patch remains on the outside of your forearm. You pick at every little one until the whole population turns red to purple to green. Was this normal? Your teeth poke holes into each other. A corner of a molar no longer holds up a roof and with your tongue’s help you can just barely make out the inner cavity. It felt like porous webbing. It reminds you of the animal skulls you looked at in your biology class and their delicate nasal cavities. Looking at those cavities used to make you very sad. Was this normal? You once had a hangnail on your hallux. They had to numb your foot to break under your skin and pull the left section of it out. It took twice the amount of anesthetic for you to not feel it. It felt good to know you were being mutilated.  Was this normal? You always felt a dip in the upper back of your head. You once heard that newborn babies had a soft spot in that area of their skull, but that the hole closes as they get older. Pressing on yours incites headache. Was this normal? You once formed a cyst on your thigh. It did not want to be drained like its smaller companions that littered your back and face. You are determined to remove the blemish. You dig around the outsides and press inward to find the source. It seems deeper than you thought. You continue to scratch away at the layers of skin as you start to bleed. It doesn’t really hurt. You just want to find the cyst. After about thirty minutes you give up. You’re not really sure why you couldn’t find it. You must have took at least an inch into your leg. Was this normal? For weeks you slipped in and out of lucid dreams. You only got up to use the bathroom, check the news, and take your medicine. Some of the dreams were enjoyable and others less so. You almost started to forget which world was more real, but it all started to become unsettling. Even when you didn’t care where you were, every state felt as if it were decaying around you. And when you did care, the panic caused you to start to shake. In quiet, disabling anxiety, you spun counterclockwise to the world around you. You grabbed the razer from your shower. You gently rubbed the blades against your forearm. Erratic slices cut through the outermost dermal. There was no blood, just redness. It was only to make sure you were still there. But it wasn’t quite right. Your arm was there, but maybe the rest of you wasn’t. You had to make sure. Was this normal? You raced the blades up your arms, over your chest, down your torso, down and down. Certain curvatures ran strange and caused blood to pearl to the surface. Others barely upset the dead layer. You looked at yourself in the mirror. You always felt like your face didn’t look quite right. And right now, it was the face of some sort of estranged family member. Was this normal? You gently glide the razor sideways across your face. It’s the most sensitive yet. You remember some random piece of trivia about the temples on a human head. You start to slide the hand razor to the right side of your temple. It doesn’t hurt as much as you thought it would. You experiment with more and more pressure until blood starts to arise. The little bit of it running down the side of your face made you feel the most comfortable in your skin for a long time. You start to rotate from your forearms and your temples and your stomach and again. You’ve forgotten about the dreams. You’ve forgotten about the world. You’ve forgotten about the trivial division between reality and non-. You’ve forgotten about normalcy. You feel good. Was this normal?

At first I didn’t know if I was just daft or
What
Every poem I read sounded exactly the same
Tone
And I realized that
Of course they did
I’ve only ever been me while reading them

No longer is an article a joy
Each bit elicits crisis
Each piece closer to the end
I now understand
But disrespect
Those in the dark
They do not know yet

My flesh crawls, and my blood flows
As I attempt to turn to marble
True stasis
Homeostasis
Oh to maintain beauty to be gawked by muses
And to never have been alive, merely beings of retired faith
But unsurprisingly, just as pointless
I sigh…
I may parish in mind and finally body
But marble will diminish slowly
******
All while watched and attemptedly preserved
I breathe.
Homeostasis