#683

I slip and slide through life just trying to get a grip on the rail, grasping in the dark finding nothing. I walked for a long time on the roads outside my home. The sky was dark, the sort of night with full cloud cover, and snow flurried around me, glimmering coldly in the streetlights. I left at ten; I came home at one. I didn’t realize the time. Just one second it was gone, like someone stole my body for moment then suddenly I’m standing there at the edge of the woods and it seems like everything is alright, that the walk was enjoyable, a great idea, a great success and all is well in the world, but now it’s time to go home. And so I did. 

Now I’m not so sure. I unlocked my door and came indoors, felling the strongest need to smoke. I don’t have anymore cigarettes though, nor the inclination to buy them. I bought a carton once when I became of age and gave more than half of it away. I didn’t want them, I’ve never enjoyed the rasp in my throat, the cough or the flavor. I wanted to be able to say I had them, to realize that milestone foolish teenagers judge each other by. Mostly I didn’t smoke them. As I said, I gave many of the packs away, more I’ve bummed to others. But sometimes I had the inclination, always when I’m in a mood like this. A dead mood, a feeling of unformed intensity. That’s how I felt when I walked upstairs, sat at my table. I deluded myself that creating an atmosphere to suit my moody inclination might assist me in….what exactly? I don’t know. It just felt right. So I lit candles, a smattering of everything I have left, one white and tall and thin, another dark red and round and fat, others. And so I sat in the room at the top of the stairs, my private anteroom. The air I created was thick, so thick you could feel it. The flames of the candles dancing, the boxes from the move over a year ago still yet unpacked, an old dresser covered with the accoutrements of my past, more symbols now than actual objects of a past (powerful only to me), and the paper and pencil in front of me. 

I wrote something but it all felt wrong. It didn’t sing like I needed it to. It didn’t reflect my soul. I scribbled it out and began again. And again. And again. I wrote til I was disgusted and tore out the page, crumpled up the paper and threw it in the corner. Then I chased it with the notebook itself. I did not begrudge the notebook it’s role in my melancholy, it surely did everything one could expect from it, but the display satisfied me anyway. So I was pleased. I just sat inside myself and was still. At some point a thought struck me, as they are wont to do, and I found in the corner the crumpled page I had so rudely deposited there not long before. I also picked up the steel garbage can I have sitting in the corner of that room. Then I burned it. First I had my hand above the flames, but as a flame licked up towards my wrist I realized my folly and flipped it the other way. It burned with a black smoke that strangely reminded me of the cigarette. As it got closer to my hand I tried to put it out by grabbing the flame with my good hand to impromptu smother it but that didn’t work. I tossed it in the can instead and covered it. Out it went. It was very satisfying. 

I put out the rest of the flames in the room and sat in darkness sitting outside waiting for the sun to rise. Out my window I could see my city, the treeline and nothing else. Apparently the snow had stopped. I sat for a long time. 

And now I’ve come down to write these vacant ghost-drifts down. And now I’ll lay down and force myself to sleep so that my heart doesn’t kill me.