How does it feel when all your dreams are crumbling before you? I breathe ashes and dust; my lungs are clear.
My heart – my traitorous heart – beats a steady rhythm.
How can I feel? These words aren’t enough. Looking out of these eyes, writing with these fingers, breathing with these lungs.
Lay your heart bare on the table, and bleed.
And after, with my inky life-blood leaking onto the table, it’s not enough. I slice my soul apart, and it is never enough. How can any sequence of words be more genuine, more real, more vulnerable?
We are replications; forged in deceivers’ minds, we remake ourselves.
To stamp on my pride, my honour, my soul again. To deem myself a number, lesser than.
I’m so tired.
I’m silent, wordless, floating – no, drifting – in this oblivion, this space between worlds. The wooden floor is steady beneath my feet, the ceiling light bright and cold. What else can I do but describe? Words are so meaningless.
A construction, a reconstruction. Memories like smoke, flimsy like those summer days I have imagined and reimagined a thousand times. A summer flock clinging to wet skin, the scent of grass, the sun. Which one of these is real?
Fragmentation does not make for a good story. Sequences and plot and purpose. What senseless wandering is this?
Insubstantial. Inconsequential.
These empty eyes like fish peer unblinkingly at the ceiling.
The stench of death follows you. And what do you know of death?
I can build a thousand broken images. Incomplete and insubstantial, they float away.
Every sketch, every iteration. All false, all true.
All not good enough.