I can hardly write anymore.

 

And It All Stops

Every morning I wake up into it. Unwantedly forced back into consciousness at unbearably cruel, early hours. Stale coffee spilling out of my sliced throat that has yet to scab over. My upper arm ripped away from the dried pool of blood coagulating between the bedsheets and my serrated flesh. Outside, the birds scream out their innards in a thin stream, surging from their broken beaks as the horizon melts away like an incinerated veil. Behind it are the tar-black trees that so few can see, hooking their anorexic branches around the falling clouds. The scene from my window is like a crudely done autopsy of the corpse of the world. Everything appears to have been torn asunder by some cosmic hand, only to be haphazardly sewn back up with little care, precision, or grace. Just good enough to hold together all that is rotting and expanding with gasses inside so it can be filed away in a sliding silver cabinet with the rest of them. Waiting for someone to claim the lifeless thing, someone to come along with a plan to dispose of it, but no one ever comes. 

Stumbling through a foundation of dust and fallen pieces of the moon, I navigate the days in a frightening delirium, a panicked fugue state, tip-toeing on the precipice of the perpetually calling abyss with broken legs. At any moment, without much of a warning at all, I can crumble completely. Sinking into the mire of irrevocable loss, all perfumed with the little vials of strange carnival scents and autumnal air that I would always gift her. My disintegrating head, hair shorn off from the acidic tears of stars that have repeatedly bored holes into my scalp, lost in a miasmic cloud of desired rot. Serpents of the past hatch and coil their way out of the head wounds, spewing allusions to all sordid aspects of my demise. The night sky, sculpted from burning red clay, lies in jagged pieces - sunken into the putrescent sewers, scintillates and beckons for me to fall into it. There is nothing left among the living. There is no time allotted for me here anymore; there never was. Each scar and newly scabbed cut down my arms marks each passing day where I have unintentionally managed to survive. It’s no wonder that I feel myself slowly losing more and more of myself. Why it has become progressively more difficult to find value in anything, to connect with anyone, to feel a part of this plagued circus of humanity. And I sit here, as days turn to weeks, and weeks turn to months, and months turn to years, still unable to write anything that feels like it has any worth whatsoever. More recently, however, that did not stop me from at least being productive and proficient in my writing. But that too has stopped. Wheezed a solemn and pathetically quiet death rattle that cast off tiny reverberations inside my hollow chest cavity. And I barely noticed…and I barely cared. 

-

I wonder if she still uses the gifts I gave her. All the strange little alchemical mockups of candy corn, patchouli, and rotted-out carny teeth. And what of the poems I bestowed upon her? All the words bore out of my very flesh, splayed out on the page like a crime scene. Each and every syllable still squirming and palpitating with an uncanny semblance of impassioned life that she was somehow able to distill into me. Beyond my understanding, I was able to feel something positive that was grandiose, divine, and all-encompassing. So much so, that I am fairly certain that it destroyed me. There was no way it was ever going to last; and maybe we both knew that. Maybe we both knew that and feared for the inevitable grim fallout. I have to believe she felt it too. That undeniably life-altering feeling that wedged itself inside my bones and gnawed at every single connective tissue of my mental and physical being. The bizarre biological thread that hooked itself into all of my nerve endings, stretched out through the ether and the impossibly dense dust cloud of humanity’s flood of mediocracy and hideousness and found her on the other side. Latched on to her and pulled me in. We were entangled, twisted together in a malformed and beautiful monstrosity of feverish love and frightening dependency. A connection I never felt prior, a connection that gave me an unmistakable place and purpose in this lightless boneyard of a world. Uselessness was no longer a plague upon my withered heart. But I don’t think she noticed. I don’t think she was capable yet of truly seeing the significance of her existence and how utterly detrimental it was for me for her to be removed from my life. Relationships end, everything changes and everything dies, and I am one of billions to experience such commonplace heartache. But there are a myriad of aspects of her that will forever haunt me. She will forever stand atop the rubble and heaps of rotting human meat that is choking the world with insignificance. She will always be absurdly unique and immensely important to the trajectory of my life. Without her, I would have been dead. But with her, we were both unknowingly hurtling towards a shared destruction. Now, without her once more, it is nothing short of nonsensical that I am still alive after everything has been said and done, torn apart and buried, burnt up and evaporated in the rotten, scorched atmosphere. 

Now it is autumn once more. The air smells increasingly like her and the little vials of oils and scents she would carry with her and wrap around her radiant aura. And, once again, I find myself in an inoperable stasis. Lying back into the shadowy embankment of all that ails me, I watch the ripe smell of decay rise in the air around me as I squander every opportunity in front of me. I can’t write, I can’t think, I can’t create, I can’t connect, I can’t function. And I can’t stop, after more than a year and a half, fixating my mind on every single second of every single day of all the years that I knew her, talked with her, spent time with her, cared for her, loved her, and felt her slip further and further away. 

All my limbs are smashed in the dreg heap. Strange little foxes with the voices of children crawl over my wounds and whisper to me that it is only bound to get worse. Fogged-over horizon rolls over into total tenebrous blackness, and in my dazed dwindling half-life, I see your face behind each and every blink. Looking around the apocalyptic enfoldment - the entire globe rendered into a pathetic morsel of still-living organ tissue, squelching in the shadows - I see that it is all as I have always expected it to be. Nothing, nothing, and more nothing. Once I thought that I finally knew for sure that I was wrong, there was more to life, there was something within me that was worth holding on to, there was something in this world that gave me a definitive rebuttal to the uselessness I was stricken with since birth. But then it all stopped. There was no refugee in your absence. There was no deliverance from the monstrosity slowly destroying me from the inside. We dragged each other down, 

We chained ourselves to each other, allowed each other to sink into the voiceless, shadowed imperium at the lonely bottomless pit of the world. Still entangled in each other, I was still in awe and completely enraptured by you, we had no choice but to perpetuate our now rapid rot. I have to believe you have since escaped, I can’t find you anywhere in this slaughtering NIHIL. It all so unexpectedly stopped. And I fell. 

At the bottom of the world, there’s a rusted hospital bed stained with our blood. A silhouette of you ghosted into the decaying walls, all I can find here now are my rotting bones discarded and abandoned. Scented with dried, dead leaves, honey-covered corpses sticking out of a pumpkin patch, moonbeam-bathed burning tree branches, and lined with impassioned inscriptions from your painted fingernails. 

I’ll never escape.