Solaced (2)
approving your actions. It all made sense, if only by modern society’s dictation. Even so, they walked with a kind of caution foreign to the truly self-controlled, self-believed, and entirely self-unaware. Their steady steps seemed haunted, shortened, unsure, unsafe—unsound.
Oh silly boy, since when has anything ever been safe? Don’t take off your hard hat, don’t doff your blessed zucchetto, you might find your head lost some unpleasant day.
Violet alligator-skin and leather briefcases hung from their hands like white flags, and I hadn’t the gall to ask them. Maybe this isn’t what they want? Society needs men of purple, obviously, because it thrives on their meticulous purple hearts. But I questioned their motivation. I pondered their reasoning…maybe a steady income to attract a woman? Maybe to soothe a conscience wounded by a parent’s pride? Maybe just to do something?
They trudged on in formation, glassy eyes fixed on vague points beyond their offices. Mortgages and car loans and retirement funds hung about their necks like leaden shackles, one end around their souls and the other soldered to their desks.
I pitied them tremendously. As I turned to leave, my body found itself transfixed. Brown eyes washed in red watched me from behind the crystalline panes of the third-floor of an Antaean bank skyscraper. Immobilized, I stared back. Am I turning purple?
Behind me, the lonely church exiled into commercialism on the downtown square sang a sad song, a little lilting lament telling the land about the arrival of 3 o’clock. That siren’s song ensnares the lost and leaves them there, swollen purple faces forlorn and asphyxiated.
Oh God, I don’t know if I’ve breathed in years. I don’t know if I miss it.
Stop. Breathe.
Listen: The Empire falls. It always falls. Your empire is going to fall, it’s a matter of time, and you’ll see it coming. Rome fell, and Romans became Venetians or Genoese or Neapolitans, and eventually they became Italians. Don’t fall back on the old bi-chromatic rationale–just remember. The empire will fall, but the people will change names and live. Take a pittance of comfort in it, and rest assured that the empire lives on in its renamed descendents.
Exhale. Stop.
“When I lie awake in bed tonight, I can’t help but think of all the memories you’ve silently commandeered. They no longer focus on the subject, the main character, the plot. They all focus on you.” My words took on a hue of soft blue, the tone of melancholia and longing and sickly-sweet hopeless desperation. What did I do to you, then, that makes you think you can do this to me now?
Never breathe again. Promise.
Her words were like snow the second before it starts to melt, just as the sun finishes sewing sequins on the fresh white carpet. I couldn’t flee that slow torrent.
“Grow up. What? You’re immortal? You have time to waste? You don’t.” I could see her mouth move, but no sound came out. I knew what she had to say, anyways. “What’s with the charade? No one even knows or cares that you’re hiding. Ambush us—come out, smile, say a few words, bow and leave. Do something, for Christ’s sake, but don’t conceal yourself forever in the same piebald petals. They scatter to the wind and lose themselves to history—just a collection of soft, mottled organic materials making a mess across the middenheap landscape.”
“Oh, I know. Don’t even bother saying it.” Her words shone brighter and more intense, stripping away the layers I’d donned over the years. “You’re tired of ‘caring.’ Well, I don’t want to sound careless or heartless, but so what? Grow up, you idiot boy.” The invective, while superficially harsh, carried
with them concerned undertones. I found it incredibly endearing. “Value is caring, and caring is vulnerability. There’s value in the heart you expose to the world around you, and there’s holiness in the way you risk injury to existence at large. Just grow up. Become something more. You’re so goddamned confusing, I don’t know what to do, and it alarms me. I don’t want to have to leave. Don’t make me leave. Grow up.”
I reached longingly for her delicately curved jaw, only marginally surprised when my beseeching hand passed unfettered through her filmy face.
I wanted her God I wanted her and I don’t know what it is I didn’t have that she needed I wish I could’ve known so I could’ve at least pretended I would’ve faked it my whole life and she didn’t need to love me so long as she stayed around me and let me love her is that smart or wise or feasible or fair no but it’s what I wanted so very badly…
I collapsed in hapless confusion, tears tracking mud across my seditious face. All these shades were me, and they existed in equal measure, and I didn’t know what to do about it.
Scramble, scumble, and scream.
Oh my God oh my God oh my God. Where am I? It stinks here. Musty and old, aged and aging still. Just blackness unbroken. I heard running water and slow steps. The steps ceased, and an idea of suspense materialized. I stopped to pray for illumination, details, anything. Maybe I’m alone?
You silly boy. You always seem to forget—it may be dark, and you may not see anyone else, but there are always plenty of people in the same spot as you. Don’t stop searching and you’ll find them.
Screaming echoed from…somewhere? "Mitch!" The reverberations felt nearly internal. "Mitch? Mitch, where are you?! What are you doing?! Batten down the hatches, boy! They’ve breached the walls! They’re coming!"
I called out faintly, "They’re coming to where?" The vastness of the black quickly smothered out the words.
"They’re in! They’re in! Your inner sanctum, man, and these barbarians come to defile it!” Wild whoops of vile belligerence echoed down the unseen corridors. Lost and nameless friends screamed, terror-stricken, confused in the darkness, confined to nostalgia, and left to the violent hands and sordid plans of these faceless formless strangers. Old dreams hastily abandoned to pedantic reality unfolded around me, the things I could’ve done to realize them becoming apparent in the opaque clamor. Obstreperous and obvious—it’s how I’ve always felt. “Arm yourself, my boy, and greet them with something approaching courage. Come now!" A banshee’s stentorian shriek: “Come on, man! With haste! Fear and faith, my boy, and we’ll find ourselves vainglorious in it.”
The sounds of vases shattering and flowers dying filled my senses. The odor of ancient manuscripts burning, the crackling of a blazing tapestry, and the blunt blows of spiraling years; they crashed through the air around me. I didn’t know. It was all black. I couldn’t see. I need to see. Light, light, light. "A torch! Someone, a torch!" In the confusion I felt my stomach rebel, stubbornly refusing its poisonous contents. I vomited, seeing the purplish glint of jug cabernet sauvignon for an instant. My rioting mind flirted dangerously with a level of irreversible entropy.
An indecipherable presence sidled up next to me. I turned an indiscernible angle in the endless void, spying a pair of floating brown eyes, orbs specked with floating motes of a color constantly redefining red. Sweet whispered words found my ears, a feminine soothing voice: "A torch? Of course, dear. Anything, right? Anything, if just to see." I heard metal scraping, and a small flame flicker down by my feet, a pale hand holding it. “One thing,” she prefaced herself, “for when we finally see, only then will we ever come to pass.”
A clock became visible in the nothingness. Its digital face flashed three in the morning.
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e=”3″>The lithe fingers calmly and deliberately set the flame to my pant leg. I gasped as the corduroy went up easily, and the fire spread from wale to wale without restraint. A bloody street stretched across my vision, vital crimson from periphery to periphery, top to bottom. I was burning alive. My skin sloughed off my legs in crumpled waves. Blood steamed through my contorted mouth as if mist on a cold day. My eyes melted like cheap plastic down my exposed, charred cheekbones. I was dying. I ran towards that carnal avenue, leaving a trail of viscous skin behind me. "Anything, if just to see? Right?” her gentle voice questioned, “isn’t that right, my dear?" I realized that she still hovered right beside me. She smiled with solid certainty, whispering, “We are all so ineffable.” I gazed at her, sure of love and nothing else.
I entered existence in shades of red and brown, a world where I might meet myself once again.
Redeemed. Relax. Sleep and Dream.