Perching Lights

Perching Lights.

Perching myself up on two pillows I can feel the swell and strain of the heavy meal I forced myself to eat, too late to be useful.

I hear my neighbour from the flat next door turn the key in her lock, she has brought someone home with her, she’s giggling at something he just said.

I lean down to scratch my knee, an awful dry scratch, the sound of which irritates me, so I stop.

The regular buzz and whoosh of the traffic outside my window is a constant background distraction to me.

I imagine dropping out in front of one of the vehicles. Seeing their gleaming, blinding headlights roll towards me, feeling a tonne weight through two crushing rubber tyres, bearing down on my legs and chest,

crushed,

Popping and exploding,

My eyes bulging out of their sockets and my guts rushing from my mouth and ears.

I don’t make a noise.

I cant breathe.

I turn over onto my front and pull my covers up round my neck, pushing and curling my pillows up under my neck.

I sneeze from the dust in the air of the room, something in my neck strains and pulls, and I hear cats start fighting outside. Their Scrawny paws claw into each other, as they scream and my neck throbs, and the clock ticks on towards 5am.

I have a dentist appointment in 6 and a half hours.

It’s my wisdom teeth, they may be compacted. And it feels so uncomfortable.

I have just noticed that I’m breathing very heavily, loudly. But I’m on my own as usual. Next door she’s probably painting him with cream while he fucks her with an empty wine bottle. I watch a fly repeatedly strike the light bulb, each time going back for more.

I move again onto my side. My feet are cold, bad circulation, like ice.

I stare t the cracks in the corner of the room, which travel up the walls and across the ceiling, my mouth is open, my arm going dead under my own weight, I’m seeing double.

I’m less then half way through three books at once. Several others I have already given up on lay stacked, dustily, under the corner of my bed. Other people don’t inspire me.

Well. Most other people don’t inspire me. They are – generally – unimpressive. Even the impressive ones have their faults.

But they are structurally different to me, both mentally and physically. They exist. I am just a whisp. A daydream. A dark cloud of steam.

My presence feels temporary, unfleshly, a punishment for having been too proud in a previous life perhaps.

I was taught, and memorised in my more impressionable days that God, the Gods, never let us put up with more then we can bear. We must learn to carry the weight, to share the burden.

I’d prefer to shoot it, or stab it, or boil it to death.

In seven more years, I tell myself. If it’s still no good at twenty-seven, go for it,

But do it in style.

Park in a remote car park and set fire to the car.

Drown yourself in the neighbour’s pond.

Shoot yourself on Tony Blair’s doorstep.

Fire a nail gun into your temple in a crowded rail station.

Make it easy on yourself.

You’re always making it fucking easy on yourself.

Like the time you pretended to be indifferent, while a passion burned inside.

Or when you revised for one hour, when you had all day free.

The times you got a cab to the pub instead of walking.

You are lazy, I tell myself.

One day I might finish this story.