The folding and the unfolding keeps it all going, between circles of fear and misgiving and wide-eyed mystery, all of it just spilled into the thankless abandon of wretched solitude. I have waited and I have prayed, and nothing seems to stem the tide or spin the chord in the right direction. This may be the greatest day of your life, it would whisper, but the sarcasm in its voice was drippingly obvious. What appears in its place is a Shadow, a soot lined specter drilling upwards from the nothing black cascade of an empty room, chosen at random from the ones in your head and the ones in your heart. A little diorama of bleak void filled with porcelain doll faces cracked from worry. It will lead fate into coincidence, faith into doubt and anything pleasant or comforting somewhere into the region where all terrible things go when bitten by the dust of sleep. My monster, I called it. My best friend.
Does it make you angry? Do you hate her for what she's done? How do you sleep now? Is it that difficult? Why can't you just move on? It shouldn't be this hard. You shouldn't have this much trouble. Life goes forward. Nothing changes. The world never stops spinning. Get a grip. Get yourself together. Stop worrying so much. Stop trying. Hold on. It will all get better. Time heals all wounds. Nothing lasts forever.
This too shall pass.
The minutes drag with an imperious sense of their own righteousness, and they collect in the hair trap drain of the shower. I've watched it with giddy and monstrous illusion, praying for it to come visit in the night, even as I've prayed for just the opposite. The stagnation of my own self preservation and all of the accompanying naive world views I'd pushed on with the militant voice of a firecracker commandant have left me without tools to fix the gaping holes, to make sense of what might not have anything sensible in it. I drive aimlessly, I watch wind pouring waves and I see time seal itself into musty vaults and old graves. I watch the Sun set behind the silhouettes of churches and I beg myself for strength to weaken enough. But I don't. I cling tight to the dock, to the posts slippery with Seaweed and I barely breathe. The summer has been over for a long time. The autumn has left and now all that's left is a white chill spike hammered into my temples, completing a long and dissonant symphony with one thunderous clang.
Too much. All of it seems too much. As if there aren't enough spiraling swathes of pretension and arrogant dribble sounding off through the airwaves, under the water's swift current or just in the notebooks of silly children trying so hard to be seen, now there is this. A commitment, and a romance of the awful spit-soaked, dry lipped, wet-eyed blur of days that seemed destined to go on forever, this is sickness, do you know that? It's the fever dream of my monster, my best friend, and it still licks at old scars, opens them with the vicious assault of a pack of wild wolves and fills them with the black Moonglow of backwards intention, of futility's pretty fragility, of the exact opposite of hope masquerading as its antonym. Too much of everything. It needs to stop.
And there is no story to it, no arc that can be traced, I suppose, because it's a lingering, bubbling cauldron sort of underlying drift. Wherever I go, whatever I do, that blood-soaked grin is always a step behind me, a mile ahead of me, glistening overhead with polished but still-stained fangs that consume the sky and all of its promises. I whisper little spells to keep it at bay, sure, but I have no authority over what my addled spinal column has birthed. I don't enjoy it, but in my own gross way, I love it. I value the discolored tissue of my scarred skin, not for anything aesthetic or proud, but because of the memory infused into the cut, the lovely-in-retrospect veil and fog that gauzes the infuriating misery that I've plugged into every light socket and outlet. There is a fissure between him and me: my longing for something pretty amidst the ugliness, and his need to rip asunder anything calm and replace it with the snatched lightning seeds stolen from fairytales and books with sour endings.
I call him He-Grins-Bloody. I remember the songs he would sing me when I was just a baby.
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