sorry i didn't lj cut this right away...
I returned to the spot where we had spent hours just talking. The conversation seems unimportant, insignificant now, and I can’t recall a single thing that might have been said. I stood and leaned against the same exact concrete wall that you and I had shared, staring out over a gravel lot with a thousand houses, each with their own visible nightmares, sprawled out before me. In the distance the cityscape loomed over the night, just as it had then, and its light illuminated the clouds above it so that you could make out definite shapes in the water vapor. A few moments passed and I realized that I wasn’t thinking anything. I put out my smoke and crushed it under my foot. I turned and walked back to the stairs, realizing the place hadn’t remembered me. I descended, waiting for some sort of epiphany, but nothing came, I felt the same. That was when I knew existence had given up on me.
Following I felt like a skin toned skeleton inside a great expanse of Earth, as if the world had been dug for me after my death. Day to day life felt incomprehensible, ungraspable, and drug abuse made me think I might still be a human being. This is how it feels to have no idea what you are doing or why you are doing it. This is how it feels to live twenty years of study and monetary accumulation and realize in a single night (on top of a garage, overlooking a city) that you have no real explanation for why you have been doing it. All events following are distorted with memory or nightmares or Hollywood. I cannot be entirely sure what significance or reality they possess. I only know that they are what I perceive and that I do perceive them.
Exiting the small room I had named home dead bodies lay throughout the hallway and I had to step over them to get to the restroom. I peed. Someone lay over the toilet in the stall over one from my own. She had no face, and instead had a smear of blood where her mouth would be. I could hear screaming, or laughter, from outside, and I walked to the sinks. The lights were flickering on and off as I stood in front of the mirror, washing my face. My reflection looked stern, which was puzzling, because I didn’t feel overly critical or analytical. Exiting, and the bodies were still in the hallway, reaching out for something, each other? I went home, shut off the lights, and god was waiting for me in bed. This is an account of every single night of my memorable existence, but that does not account for too long of a period of time.
I sat on a couch in a room staring at the wall opposite of me. The wall was white, but was not blank. There were three pictures, all black and white, with people I do not believe I recognized in them. I could not focus, and dared not move for fear that I had an expendable amount of movements, and wished to use them wisely. I believe I was surrounded in chatter, but it could have been moaning, or hysteria, or laughter. I fell asleep and woke up standing in a smaller room, staring at the wall opposite of me. The wall was white, but was not blank. There was a mirror, taking up exactly half of the wall. I stood over the porcelain toilet for a bit, and when I felt I was done I left the room. The following is an account of the conversation I had after leaving the second room:
“Hey are you all right, did you throw up?”
“I feel fine.”
“Cool man, hey, Happy New Years right?”
“Yeah, Happy New Years.”
“You want a beer?”
“No.”
“Where are you going?”
“Downstairs.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
And thus I was in the basement and there was only one other person there and he did not seem to comprehend my presence and I went across the room to a couch and felt blank in it for hours until I realized how much pain I was in.
I walked down a street. It was dimly lit and appeared as if a thousand criminals could be hiding in a thousand places. I recognized only automobiles and sidewalks. This is how I was not run over. Outside of the local gas station a man stood, he yelled out to me.
“Happy New Years friend!”
“Happy New Years to you too.”
“Care to spare a quarter or two after you shop, friend?”
I walked into the station, and bought water and cigarettes that I did not plan to smoke any of. I also purchased a lighter so that I could not light the cigarettes I did not plan to smoke any of. I paid, the cashier was shaky handed and distant, I thanked him and he did not reply, and I left the station.
“Happy New Years friend!”
I kept walking. I went home, put away the cigarettes and lighter in a drawer, drank the water, and went to bed, where god was waiting for me. I spoke to him briefly. I told him about how I had prayed once today that it would not rain. I thanked him for letting it not rain. I slept, and the next morning the sidewalks were wet from the night before.
Smiling faces all around me, I sat in a chair. The smiling faces smiled at me, I moved my lips and the smiling faces smiled more. I could see down their throats. It was like their heads split across at the mouth, held on by only a tiny slip of skin at the back of the head. I sat more and the television was displaying an advertisement for torture. You could go and watch the torture. Supposedly the torture had horrified people enough to be hospitalized. You had to pay money to see this torture. Suddenly, fever erupted in the room. It felt hot, panicked, on the verge of destruction. Looking around, the smiling faces were shut and displayed an emotion that I could not place. Their brows were furrowed, their mouths turned in towards the floor, their eyes seemed dilated and darted throughout the room. In the middle of them one of their kind lay face down on the floor, a stream of blood exiting their mouth. I sat, watching, displaced. They tried to help their fallen friend, but could not keep their balance enough to move them. I sat, watching, displaced. They cried and shouted out a name. I recognized the name. They kept screaming, and yelling. The name dug into me. Blood kept erupting from the person’s mouth, creeping across the marble floor toward my feet. I felt something stirring, I concentrated on it, the room took shape. I felt everything over again, the faces in the hallway, faceless, the blank white walls, pictured, the long dark walk, illuminated by street lights. I fell to the ground, onto the middle of the floor, exactly where the person they were screaming at was lying. They screamed, my mouth bled, and nothing was beneath me but cold marble. I recognized the name they yelled at me, it was my own. Pictures suddenly became pictures again and I felt my head aching, I tried to speak but only more blood came out. It was not blood. I could not breath. I started to black out. I felt myself climb off the floor, but I could see that someone still lay there, bleeding. I climbed into my bed, where god waited for me. I talked to him, I told him I had prayed earlier in the day to find a dollar on the ground because I wanted to buy a water. I thanked him for letting me find a dollar and told him how nice and cold the water was. He spoke back to me.
“When the water evaporates it goes into the sky.”
“What happens if it is not water.”
“Then it goes above the sky.”
“I do not believe you.”
“You have never.”
“Where am I going?”
“You choose your own path.”
“I did not choose this.”
“No? So it was not your feet that carried you to the station? It was not your hands that held your aching body above the porcelain? Was it not your eyes that saw only dry branches and fallen leaves in every puddle?”
“It was mine, but I was not myself. It is not my fault, it didn’t remember me.”
“What did not?”
“The place. The place near the clouds and the gravel lot. I stood in it and it would not recall me, it would not comfort me. I stood there for hours and all I did was begin to forget. I feel like I’m still standing there, forgetting, like I can’t make a single new memory.”
“You are on a path now that cannot be reversed if you do not leave it.”
“Help me, please, please help.”
“I am not here for you, I have never been.”
“You stopped the rain. I know it.”
“It did not rain because rain did not exist on that day.”
And so I turned my head, the smiling faces had turned the body on the floor on its side, it struggled to breath, heaving out liquid breaths. One of the smiling faces was trying to speak on the phone, yelling something, and now people stood in the entrance to the room, expressing something I can’t explain. Their faces were wet, but it was not blood. The person’s mouth leaked. It was blood, but yet somehow I knew that it was probably not. I got out of bed, the body convulsed on the floor, I stood, and walked to the center of the room. The body shook, its head began to move back and forth. I stood over it, the smiling faces screaming and crying and yelling and shouting into telephones and rolling and saying things I had never heard before.
“Come back,” they said, “Come back and smile with us again. We would have you smile again.”
I stood over the body. I said, “ok.” I let my knees buckle, and I fell onto the floor again, vomiting and convulsing. I stopped both. I wiped my mouth, and I raised my eyes. They stood around me, quiet now, watching. I said, “It did not rain because rain did not exist on that day.” And I stood up, they began to laugh, or cry, or shout at me, and I left the room, and left the building and walked across the street, people chasing after me. I flew up the stairs and when I got to the top I went to the concrete wall and stared out over the gravel lot, close to panic, looking for reassurance but I was uncertain of what I was being reassured. Standing at the concrete wall, surrounded now in puzzled expressions and concern, and I looked past the gravel lot to the cityscape. I heaved a sigh of relief. The city was lit up, and you could still see the shapes of the clouds. My knees buckled, and I sat against the wall. My ears opened.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes, it’s ok. I feel different now.”
“What are you talking about?! What’s WRONG with you?!”
“I feel different now.”
“Different?”
“Better.”
end.