Say It's All Right, Part II

A vague sense of recognition at first. And then, his furious and frightened facies defied my awed gape with a groan.
Immobility. His shiny eyes looking hard at me. And the most unsettling feeling of not being sure of which I was. He or I. The hollow cheeks, and thick nose, square though delicate jaws, green almond shaped eyes with a bronze ring around the pupil. Looking hard. He or I. Like standing in front of a mirror. But he would not move like me. He would not bear the same expression. I could not tell who was to reflect the other. I should maybe reflect him, for he looked so much stronger, fiercer, as he stood up, knocked into me, and sped away. I took his place against the tree and let myself fall on the ground. Rest at the foot of the nearest tree. My brain felt like a cold orb of glass and chrome, heavy and useless in my head. I looked up.
He had stopped dead in his flight.
His features still pictured the same wild and forbidding scenery, with something more. Hatred, I thought. And pity. He was me. He was more me than I, and he could tell me how to be me, I wanted him to tell me how to be me and make it easy. But I did not know how to phrase it. I did not know how to talk to myself. Afraid of my voice.
Afraid of his.
My turn to stand up, despite the lack of air in my suddenly withered and painful lungs, despite the dizziness that made me feel as if someone had just pulled the earth under my feet to try and throw me into space. I meant to near him, but I was afraid to let go of the tree, afraid to stand up alone in front of him, like him. I held out my hand. He took one step away. I could not let him go. I could not be alone, without him. My bowels shuddered, and I closed my eyes and set upon him, and my fingers felt the pale oily skin of his left cheek, and my nails lacerated the tender flesh, and I fell flat on the dark and moist soil. My eyelids parted just in time to see the red cut I’d made flash away into a leafy maze. Stand up and follow. Now I could see him, and then I could not, now he took a wrong turn, and then I gained ground, now he tripped into emerging roots, and then I tripped into his legs and fell over on him.
He or I.
He did not try to set himself free. We did not try to break eye contact. The fascinating landscape of the iris I knew the most. But I could almost touch it. No glass surface in between. I could smell his breath, his smell of cold drugs and anguished sweat. That smell of dirty sugar and rotten wood. I could feel his thin and hard limbs through his sticky oversized clothes, his prominent ribs against mine, and I was overwhelmed with anxious ecstasy. I knew him and his body better than anyone in the world. And so did he. His lips so close to mine, the same temperature. But there was blood on the fingers I laid on his left cheek, and no scratch whatsoever on the latter.
A snap of broken wood echoed just behind us. Footsteps on humus.

To be continued...

Say It's All Right, Part I

The car sped past me with the startling whoosh of a racing spaceship. Ducks unanimously flew off a nearby pond. My eyes turned to them faster than my head, and my brain swayed in my skull with a feeling that the world has suddenly reached its end. But no darkness ensued, and the feeling cleared away.
Grey cottonous worlds lingered above the woods: snowy mountaintops floating above ghastly pined slopes down to wintry valleys. All reflected in a lake of vacuity, and I at the bottom of it was alone setting a weary foot on the long fetched Atlantis.
As I turned around, another car silhouetted itself against the horizon, under an archway of branches. Unreal in the distance. Right thumb up. Look at me. They might not see me in the pale light of the late afternoon. They might decide to stop at the very last minute. Usually do. “I’d not seen him! Let’s give him a lift!” Or not. Look at me. Keep going. “That poor kid. Does not look good to me. Junkies they are. I’m telling you!”
Keep going.
There was no more than two miles left anyway. Might as well enjoy the walk. Countryside.
Something moved in the wood.
A loud snap. Must have been something big. My eyes wandered amongst the indifferent greens of overgrown thickets. And then I saw it. There was skin in between the leaves. Pale sickly skin. Somebody was watching me. And when they knew it, they ran away.
I started running too, not knowing why. Something fun was happening. Or at least something exciting. I jumped over the ditch, stumbled my way through nettles and brambles, and ran straight to where the patch of skin had disappeared. Follow the sound of broken branches. But they were scarce. Whoever they were, they must have been used to the woods a bit lore than I.
And soon, all was quite. Out of breath. I wanted to sit down, relieve my legs of my own weight, and let my pounding blood cool down through my temples. Rest at the foot of the nearest tree, like a fox exhausted from an unfruitful hunt. But a snap resounded a few feet ahead. I was about to run for it when it occurred to me: there was no other noise coming from there, no subsequent footsteps, and no one could hide just there, or I would have seen them from where I stood. So I turned back to the nearest tree… and knew.
Somebody wanted to distract me.
I could feel their breath through the tree, their stooped eager presence, their anxious eyes looking down not to meet the intruder’s. I walked around the tree, and thought I might be insane, a lonely paranoiac in the woods. But the hedge of the trunk uncovered a pair of wrenched bony hands and a trembling profile that was so familiar to me, almost too familiar. A vague sense of recognition at first. And then, his furious and frightened facies defied my awed gape with a groan.

To be continued...

Urge to Live

To Sir Ben Yoda.

Friedrich laid nauseous in the bedlam of the room he had grown to hate, the room he would leave soon, for another, in another country, which he would hate too. His muscle clung tight onto his painful bones, stiff with the excitement of a night’s thinking, of hours spent in dismantling long built metaphysical superstructures, of days fumbling through the darker and darker paths. The sun seemed farer with every endeavor to repeal the dazzles of artificial gleams. And yet.
He closed his eyes. He had to. At some point. And his thoughts kept flowing, leaked out his control. Erosion. Bits of values were swept with contempt into sub aquatic dumps of holy fireguards and other moral relics. The riverbed got bigger and harder with every blast, mud and loose particles chased away. The crystal clear water ran with unprecedented violence, paying no heed to obstacles, shaping falls and rapids, never to be overcome, hinting at the birth of its own measure, beyond good and evil, over dams, will to power.
Urge to live.

Rid of Me

Hugh looked up while his fingers froze above his computer keyboard.
They froze so much he thought they would shatter like a vase once he
moved them again. Brisk rustle of movement had stopped his mind from
escaping from itself. But everything was as quiet as it could
possibly be in Melbourne. So he resumed.
His fingers steadily and successively lowered on the lettered plastic
squares like the legs of a fleeing spider. His face I will not
describe as he is, for what I know, totally faceless. But amidst the
blur, there floated an intent pair of eyes and a mouth from which
corner protruded a very painstaking tongue. He would every now and
then suspend the flow to look through the window and check if his
muse was by any chance approaching the front door. But no one did.
And so he resumed.
The screen filled with black characters, and the phrases he thought
clunky quickly stringed together. Liberally chosen words spun a web
that got vaster with every new addition, and that would trap any
flying-by semantics to liquefy and digest their rich ambiguity. He
fought, as always, against his weariness, against his punctual
disgust for the style he recognized and often loathed as his, and did
his duty as a regular updater. And as he did, the edges of his prose
scraped his pressed against the desk body, and worn out his clothes,
leaving him naked to spread and dilute some of his intimacy and
dearest convictions in between the fragile narrative layers and curls
of casual fiction.
As I stood floating behind him, I crashed my head against the
ceiling, and he started and turned to my ghastly ghost.
‘Oh, it’s you. I knew there was some one. What are you doing here?
‘Well, being a 25 year old ghost is quite a bore, so I thought I’d
try and live by proxy, and paid you a visit. I mean, you know, since
you are the one who made me die and all…
‘Oh yeah…’ he nodded. ‘And what do you think of it?’ he asked,
pointing at the busy word processor on the screen with mingled
enthusiasm and dissatisfaction.
‘I like it. You know I do. I want to write again too. Would you mind
my resurrecting?
‘Not at all.’ He answered absent mindedly, as he went back to his
keyboard.
I sneaked back through the mines and to my body, dug myself out and
came home in time to make the first comment on his new post.
And so we resumed.

Untitled

The following text was written on October 29, 1999. It is one of the oldest short piece I possess, for I did not use to keep it.

Things stopped growing up a few years ago.
Or later.
Is it so important?
Is it real?
Maybe it was the sunshine dancing on our foreheads, maybe it was the trees dancing in the soft summer breeze, branches waving in the most dazzling blue emptiness, maybe it was the blood on that tiny wretched body we did not even see.
Whatever.
We were. We knew it.
It was now and here. Really. For the first time.

Maybe the nightmare is not supposed to end.

Maybe, in a sense, isolation is what keeps me alive.

Remember.

Remember
It smells like breath.
Sounds so,
Moves so.
Kill or die
Kill or die
Kill or die

Remember.
We were kids. These were laughter. You did drugs.
You fell
You felt
The truth
Was there
One kill
One win
One lie
One die
You killed
You knew
The truth

Remember.
We were kids. They had teeth, they had smiles. You had things in your eyes, and your veins.
Hadda die
Hadda die
Hadda die
Hadda da-hie

It started raining.

Something… I think…
Something was stuck in my throat.
It never came down. Neither out.
It’s been there
ever since…

fists.

The Prophecy

The hallway is packed with students, cheesy smiles and tasteless clothes. I like to come here, and act, as if one of them. But sometimes I stand in a faraway corner, in the shelter of irrelevant whispers and amplified ramblings of bipolar teachers, while my pen vandalizes full notebooks with more than philology. Like this day.
I enter the empty amphitheatre. Its proportions are incongruous, and yet fail to surprise me. On each side, the room fades into the distortion of distance, whereas the front black-boarded wall only stands a few feet away. The hard wood floor varnish has been worn into disappearance and the bare boards now stand parched for ink and muddy shoes. Neon light. The uncomfortable churchlike tables and benches are older than the dean. I sit down, anywhere. Faded names have been carved and then polished on their dark surfaces. The poorly updated infrastructure of a French monument.
Time passes. And no one shows up. Except a pretty ugly girl who tells me the lecture is cancelled, and closes the door as she goes. The empty room is now mine. Almost home.
But a strange roar comes from behind the black board. Hyper localized earthquake. A dazzling purple light suddenly erupts from the whole surface of the wall, like a veil of energy, and makes its way toward me. I do not move. It reaches my fingertips, and proceeds through my arms and legs, as if scanning me, as if scanning everything in the room. It does not hurt. Not until it gets through my brain.
The amphitheatre disappears behind a flash of light, and is then replaced by an infinite spread of dry crackled ochre earth and threatening blue sky. I am floating in midair, and I feel like the heart of the desert. A sharp wind blows around me, with a quality that is neither coldness nor warmness and yet very close to temperature. It bares the signature of the purple light. I feel my skin get thinner, and my bones stronger, my muscles gaining definition, while loosing suppleness. I want to cry, for I am seeing things in the wind, things I could ignore if only my eyes were smaller. Time flies in the wind, and knowledge presses against my lungs with every new blow, nourishes my every limb with more and more ipseity, floods my eyes with the odds of disillusion and discovery. I am with every millisecond more and less than I was the previous.
I wake up.
Such a long way to go.

Insomnia

The brain will not go to sleep.
Heavy sheet and misshaped pillows. The weary limbs are cumbersome, just don’t fit. Yet, the eyes are exhausted and refuse the light, refuse the words from the pages of books, reject their semantics with harsh impatience, turn away from a TV set that provides no image of interest. The body wants rest, longs for immobility. But the brain denies it.
Arborescence of thoughts, succession of ideas, and blooming of inspiration rendered sterile by the drop in energetic resources. The brain suffers from its own obstinacy at wakeful clarity. It overheats with the constant scanning and analysis of memories and sensations, with the ongoing endeavor to elaborate relevant reactions.
For a few seconds, the flow of synaptic activity runs unprocessed, and flings into delightful absurdity, while representation of the body is distorted back to its early stages, thicker, smaller, unstable, vague. A plump baby under a tiny blanket.
But soon the brain starts to stare at the inadequacy of the information, and marvels at the evocation of its evolution. Apt again, it rambles restlessly through its shelves and drawers, looking for keys to its own composition, reinterprets its past, and emit hypothesis on its future, building a model of its life between now and death, with projects and achievements, obstacles and blows. It leaves the body behind, wretched, feverish, in the bed it has grown to hate.
After hours of speculations, the brain gives away, unwillingly. It slips from of its attempt at live architecture into unconsciousness. The body and the brain wake up in the morrow, reunited in headache and nausea, more than ever unable to rise to the brain’s expectations.

Soundtrack: "Telephasic Workshop", Boards of Canada