I opened the doors and stepped out into the night, onto the moist ground which had slightly crystallised, the dark tarmac lake. The black grass individually detailed, black blade by black blade, I loved the colour of everything under the night lights, it turned everything into a sepia mist, the illuminated sides of buildings, the flash frame significance of the cars who have rested, the humming vibrations of the electric boxes, languid felines lounging heavily on their roads, the silent midnight soliloquys of the solitary.
I began to walk, my footsteps muffled and tacky, wet on the concrete stones, colliding heavily on the elliptical pavement, forcing me into the rhythm of my body, my own particular gait, and with it I began to pick my thoughts from the ether, panicking loudly through the thin veil gauze of despair in which I lived. I would loudly declaim everything I had ever known or could remember. This seemed to calm the corrugated rivulets of anger and confusion which had grown from nowhere one day, like pre-fabricated structures containing dreams and life and false pigs and old bladders, consecrated soil and perverted dreams that develop once you have been defiled, and the thin metal walls and the brown and green doors which only opened one way seemed to judge the very colour of your eyes and then nothing could be said.
So no one said a word.
Except for the fir trees that lined each side and held all of the secrets, all of them soaking and reeking in sin, and the smile on your face you once used, the deracination and delinear concept of my soul fell silent that night. The snapped branch of a pointless history.
A million memories floated like a schmetterling/butterfly, elusive and irritating. I felt less isolated when I walked, my thoughts that seemed to hover always somewhere above me, needed the motion of my body for them to fall into my mind, in whatever order they chose, I was acutely aware that I was in no position to choose them for myself and at night I noticed the wind, felt it brush past me like the face of a dead wife, and when I walked it pulled at me like a discarded waxy limb in a canal. I walked. I imagined as I strode , that I somehow evaded the radars and the jutting gargoyles that emerged invisibly in my trajectory, that the swquarling actresses who laid they’re dead lines down tried to engulf me in the dreams of the spider, the locust and the moth, each winged problem a part of they’re internal categories, the layers, the winds, the sea.
The paths that I took no longer seemed to take any conventional form. I would sometimes walk in an ellipse, then a circle. I would see how far I could get in ten strides, and on the darkest of nights the shadows seemed longer and the lights turned quickly into mirrors of lengthy questions. I sometimes caught glimpses of my shadow on the walls or on a car, lengths of rope and hacksaws left blithely on the floor gathering nothing but dust and regret. Remembering that space. Realising the space beneath me always gave me a certain hopeless safety net. A polemic voiced amendment.
Three by five I turn the corner. Twelve by six, I pass the shiny if frightening car, and I’m free of something I sense, that the last bond to a past that I never quite understood has been released, I looked over my shoulder and can see my house, obscured though it was by the webs, and locust wings, and the thousands of moths that seem to always happen. They just happened.no movement occured within the mothalian language, they’re oblate noises withered in the sun but by then it was too late, and because of this a vast wave engulfed my house and I screamed so loud that the very liquid in my bowels began to run from my mouth like a personal river, I looked into the past everyday as a childhood dream began in earnest to happen and fade, to destroy itself under the ivy.
My legs like erroneous pistons charged me on, and the cellophane quality of the night burned me, like a deliberate attempt to cauterize the loneliest portion of the planet, or the view of the sun seen through broken fingers, I found myself looking at my hands as I walked, they’re shapes and veins and elaborate patchwork nothingness seemed to quell an internal riot and reinstated my fear of loss, I stopped on the pavement, between two parked and idiotic cars, and crossed the roads own linear machinery. I felt a gear change in the night just then, the moisture and light spears changed they’re angular dominance. I glanced down to the edge of a step, it’s height seemed impossible to me, and to some atomic elements it was, I sighed deeply.
The lamppost lights seemed stranger than before. esoteric. conglomerate. articulating they’re own particular anger towards me, I kept my head tucked into my coat and kept moving, and now the darkness really began to pile it’s heaviness onto me, it’s murky entrails probing my every gap and opening, I denied it, I denied it as it attempted to drive me indoors, my hands came up to my face, and I ran the fingers of my left hand over my nose and under my glasses, rubbing the right eye. As my eye blocked all the remaining light from that side of me, words began to tumble in front of me like falling masonry from a broken church, broken archways and malignant spires, a terrible sense of loss.
Your mothers hand on your face. Tears that fall for no reason. pick holes in yourself that nothing can fill. Brick walls and demolition. A fire that burned the garage down, and the fire burned so brightly it wakes you up from a deep atomic dream, the same dream you have every night, your arms poking from the bed as ‘ the bomb ‘ goes off, and you survive but your limbs don’t, just a skeletal version of your arms, and you awake from this, terrified once again, but this time there is an intense bright light from the window at the end of your bed and this time, this time, this time, you are totally convinced that it is happening, happening right now, and your first thought isn’t your parents and you feel guilty about that, your first thought is yourself, and you close your eyes so tightly that it hurts behind the eyes into the brain, and after a few seconds you realise your not burning or melting, and that the light is just the garage in the backs that is burning to death, you stare from your bedroom window, and feel relieved and fascinated, but mainly guilty for not thinking about your parents.
I focused my eyes after what seemed like hours of ardent climatological disclosure in this comatose passivity, and I paused, seemingly to teeter over the edge of a black abyss, my legs feeling leaden and lamp-like, inverted and exposed: I sat down on the tip of a small wall, my relaxation underwhelming me to the point of subscription, I looked around me at the silent streets, the air seemed to stem from the left of me, nothingness on the right, the street on either side of the road seemed to stretch so far into the distance as to be absurd in length, I squinted and tried to see the end of this road, the street lamps were and endless line of lights stretching into the far distance, like an elongated American landscape, no horizon, just vista and panoramic banality, an endless line of houses broken occasionally with mysterious gaps, black teeth in the mouth of the night, opened invitations lying recklessly on a dining room table, the timelines that ceased, the endless years of inertia and confusion, white moths fighting for the darkness, the wooden sideboard holding its own particular secrets, the letters from dead fathers and pictures of dead sisters, long before buried in an unmarked grave, the mist crop, Eden’s parks mistaking themselves for pitiless echelons: I remembered the mist as we walked one day through the abandoned looking Germanic streets, the feel of a late 1970’s documentary lingered long in my memory, as if we were grabbing at straws to understand our own individual past, the green railings to my left cutting the lemonade sunlight into slithers of secondary light, I remembered it all in silence, a memory without sound, eerily reconstructed actions, we crossed the road to the graveyard, jagged lines of stones declaring the pitiless paragraphs of life, you dragged me around that maze of graves, in a counter clockwise motion, each revolution taking us closer to the church, I didn’t really understand why were doing, what we were doing, looking for the place of your dead sister Eva, and you had no idea where it was you said;
‘I asked you why we were looking for it and you said you didn’t know, and that you didn’t always need to know why you were doing something to keep on doing it, a certain demented logic of maternal worship ‘
The mist that had veiled the light from us lifted in the afternoon I remember, and we walked uphill towards the park, the brown teutonic houses masking some middle class nightmare, for a while after this my mind seemed to rest, unhinged or unlatched from this memory alley diptych, the digital nightmares which surely would follow could wait in they’re bunkers, wait in the holes, of Golgotha, Bethseda, in the place of the skull, I felt present at this point, accurate, the memory victims deriding my profligacy, setting my watch to the beats of my heart seemed to be a delicacy which I could now afford.
I slowed down, my legs stiff, burning, a measurement of youth, I stopped outside three enormous windows attached to a structure, the invisible answer lay in the reflections I cast in the opaque surfaces, I was replicated three times in the Indian ink pool, each version slightly less exonerated, my heart now an empty cast, encased in its own black shadow, hollow and uniform, obliterated and flat, I knew these roads and houses, knew these old shapes and diversions, from my room in my four walled conservation tunnel I had observed everyone and everything in these environs, the patterns they would weave, the times they spoke and fought, the journeys they took every day, the facial expressions and futile efforts they wrought on each other, the noises they all made, which at first seemed to be one homogeneous cacophony, but with each hour I forced on myself, the nuances and peculiar tic’s became apparent, the slight buzzing that some people caused, or the shrill smooth hiatus a number of people could cause just by walking, wheezing like a lighthouse, seething without a cause or reason, because its what they do, and all the time I spent just watching them or my hands in they’re perfect asymmetry, or studying a cup for hours or a lemon as it dissolved into thick green dust, days on end I went unnoticed, un-rewarded, unnerved by the lack of attention, peasant formed, arch back, glycerine high multitude, congression, positive-negative- I am, you are, we are , they are, I am, you are, we are, they are, this dark mantra pulsating slowly through my shrouded soul, it’s conglomerate benevolence beyond control. A pinpoint of light through a break in the wall. Yellow ribbons falling like honours and coal, I watched holes in the air grow like sensitive light, a burden to me, this control, lack of control, this diaspora of images invading my mind from whichever angle I chose to sit, whichever position I took, all these desperate images hurling themselves at me unknowing and cynical, my wet face concealed below the radar.
I walked furiously, as furiously and quickly as I could without running, without drawing too much attention from the unseen eyes and discarded limbs, I dug my hands deeper into my pockets, clasping and unclasping the cloth with a rhythm I hadn’t thought real, I realised my teeth were tightly clenched, the memories of my parents had affected me in ways I didn’t really understand. I didn’t understand. My recognition of the landscape started to meld silently into my coat pockets, I was barely human anymore I felt, just a shadow in the dark light, a shape, a liquid tenth of soliloquy, I wiped my forehead with my sleeve, the moisture of the air or the sweat that dripped suddenly blinding me with sodium sharpness, I took off my glasses and wiped away these metal tears, without my glasses the night seemed very different, like a dream I once thought of or a fear I never understood, the shape of everything changed in the blurriness, nothing started and nothing ended, just a continuous flow of metallic shocks followed by lights that made no sense, I put my glasses back on, and strained in the clarity to understand where the shapes began, in the wind that howled through my bones in the moonlight I decided there and then I wouldn’t go home, I couldn’t, it was purely futile to even think of going back indoors to my home again, in the short journey I had made, I had already changed, my brain was different, I had to pound these incandescent streets until something gave in the psyche of the night, until something snapped or frayed and snapped like death marches in distant European cities, and weak faces that punctuated the night, sleight mannequins involved in murder and solitude, I looked behind me and even now I found it hard to pick out my own house amongst the others, it’s amorphous shape melting softly in the darkness, I imagined I was a point of light like all others, individual until viewed from a distance, walking in indecipherable patterns around the cars and the hills ….
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