In Articulo Mortis

Eyes cast upwards. Choking my sight. My vision starts to blur. The walls around me start to bleed. I see myself. My own body before me, crumbling. I see the loss of self. The Ego dies. The Super Ego ends itself in grief. The Id runs wild before it is killed by its own carelessness. The symphonic harmony is upset. It is dissonant, made now into a demonic cacophony, pulsing through the emptied skull, reverberating off the walls. Cracking it. Breaking it.

The Psyche is no more. It calcifies into a statuette of what I once was. What I will be. It shatters. Breaks with the beat and disintegrates into a powder-like dust. I breathe it in. I breathe me in.

Eyes cast upwards. Choking my sight. The Vision starts to blur.

Stronger. Stronger than fear, I stand alone in the cloying darkness. Lapping up my insecurities merrily, clutching them to its frozen maw, it smiles a car crash in my direction. Taking my secrets far from me. He is the kitten, and I am His milk. But I am sour.

Stronger. Stronger than lead, I head into its jaws with reckless abandon. My outsides reflect my insides perfectly now. I give into the silence, but do not lose my resolve. It falls into me and I to it, and we both give up all we have to combat the other. And as I give the last of me, and all else turns away from me, I know. He has done the same. He is lost now too, to the dark. To me. This is our self-fulfilling prophecy. And it is bittersweet.

Stronger. Stronger than Him, I stand alone in the cold void. My smile fades as my last companion withers before me.

Stronger.

Seconds down the beaten path, he smiles more heavily than lead. The barrier is not in place to protect from harm, it is to keep the endless dark inside. Its beaten, blackened, wounded, but it still holds fast. Only diamonds can break this shell. Crystal shards in another’s eyes, piercing and stripping away this restraining force. But this world has no diamonds anymore, and he walks onwards.

Hours down the beaten path, his smile has long since died. Curled up inside itself and lost its battle with grief. Nothing remains now but the taciturn mask of one who has lost everything dear to him. His freedom, his dignity, his emotion. Only the lines that build his frown mark his sickly skin. Festering wounds in his flesh. But still he walks onwards, never stopping, never sleeping, and never trying to find his way off the beaten path.

Fall from me. Break away, foul shell encasing my last breath. Choking my body, starving it of light. Of love. Of life. You that keeps all from me. The things I love. The people I used to care about. Now those tings are a distant memory, and only a synthetic resonance remains. A small Reaper in my mind, chiming the bell. It suffuses my being, cracks the surface and finally, this dark net surrounding me begins to crack, like glass. Skeletal splinters erupt along its surface, and I hold my breath and wait for the glorious moment that it lies broken at my feet. The second when rays of sunlight, unseen for so long, permeate through the newly formed holes, and warm me for the first time in waking memory. Excitement bubbles up inside me, and I feel my moment draws close. The moment I’m released from this prison.

In an instant, the field around me explodes in a vortex of darkness, eclipsing the sky for a brief moment, blinding me for the last time. It moans as its form crumbles into nothing, revealing the world to me for the first time.

A knife in my spine. It was a lie. Hope in my mind. It was a mirage. A glimmer of heaven. It does not exist. Longing in my bones. It remains unfulfilled.

The web broke away, revealing beneath its surface not the glistening world, ready for me to taste, but another, identical veil, hiding me from view. Hiding the good in the world from me. Hiding the good in me from the world.

Longing in my bones. It remains unfulfilled.

You always thought I was strong. A quiet monument to deflecting life’s assault. A barricade, a barrier against all that might do harm. You knew that sometimes, something would silently worm its way through the shield and upset the balance, but you always saw me ride it out. Recover.

But the convalescence you witnessed was a lie. Falsehoods generated by a decaying soul in a frozen prison. Illusions designed to ease other’s troubled minds, while this one rotted. The strength of the walls could not protect from it’s own contents. My delusion is your medication and my medication breaks down this malignance and disrupts the mirage. So does that mean I hurt you? Am I wounding you with my anguish, released by acknowledging it?

I don’t want to hurt you. I never want to hurt you.

You always thought I was strong.

You were wrong.

         Drink.

My bones are yours now. Swim in it. Drown in it.

Eat.

My blood is for you. Remember to chew 100 times.

Break.

My mind was my own. But now its been taken.

Feast on my body and soul, as it falls in crystalline sheets from me. Ripping through bone and blood and sanity; slicing through the chaos held fast in the maw of change. Change. Sweet, merciless change. It is you who betrayed me. It is you who swore to protect me and show me the light, and instead you enslave me and strip away innocence. I have been shown the light. But the light is black, and I choke as I fumble for my keys in the back-alley.

I escaped, but only by a chance encounter with the Stranger. But alas, I know now He was theirs. And so it takes me. Change. My bones liquefy and my blood calcifies and my mind is forever lost to the light. It burns.

Drink.

Eat.

Break.

Do you ever get the feeling that you’re waiting for something? You know you’re waiting, but you don’t know what for. It might not be wholly conscious, like waiting in a queue, for water to boil, for your favourite show to start, or to hear the bad news. Its something else.

You just … Stop.

Everything you were doing, just freezes. And you stare, vacant into space, thinking about what it is that you are waiting for. Have been waiting for all your life? For a single solitary moment to make or break you, and all that you are, were, and strive to be?

Will you wait for me? Will anything wait for me? Will the world stop as I take time and desecrate it by questioning existence? Will the flow of time linger like the last grains of sand at the lip of the hourglass, while I search through myself, trying to find the answers that are painted around me, which I can’t see? Will the robed abyss think twice before claiming me for his own, as I dive into and swim through my thoughts and delusions and hope that I’m dreaming?

I think not. The world does not wait. Time does not wait. Death does not wait.

So I will be left behind. My memory will fade into the stream of the endless. A smear on the Akashic Record.

And still, I am waiting.

Whispers. Hideous susurrations echoing through my empty skull. Tiny, hoarse suggestions burrowed deep into my flesh. Demonic chatter bending its way around my head.

All I can hear is him. I try to block it out, try to escape, but like always my plans are cut short. I am diseased again. I am tainted by their constant moaning, the endless symphony of hatred directed at all life.

It consumes me.

And though I tried to resist, they knew better and found ways to break me down and drag me under and enslave me with nothing more than hushed words carried on an intangible, abyssal breath. And now I do not fight anymore, for we share the same body. My shell filled with their freezing ooze. Like tar. And as days go by, I will slow further and further, until existence will terminate. It will become one extended lacuna and I will lie, isolated. Listening to the Whispers.

What can thrive in a vacuum? What manner of organism is it, which, against all odds, manages to survive in the place nothing else can? Mineral? Plant? Animal? Perhaps only those with a little nothing inside of them can live like that. But then, what oddity of natural selection might have produced such a creature? How can we explain the indescribable monstrosity of that which is one with the void. One whose insides are as black as night; a pulsating, chaotic storm that should rip through their exterior and leave them nothing more than a memory.

A memory. Is that what it is? Is it that only memories- events ripped from the inside out by the ceaseless march of time (left as nothing but a smouldering mass marring one’s once unblemished mind)- are capable of being in an environment as hostile as the bodies they inhabited before they were demonized. Before they became anathema to reality. Before they became fleeting. Meaningless. As abyssal and eldritch as the embodiment of emptiness itself. Obscure, shifting, and loathsome.

What can thrive in a vacuum? Only I.

Being Alone. That hideous, almost palpable force that fills you. Consumes you. Its real, and its grotesque. Like thousands of needles pressing outwards against the vulnerable flesh underneath your shell. You feel despicable for feeling so lonely. You feel like you should make more time for people, things you love. The guilt is an immovable stone, latched to your body, weighing you down. Everything is in place. Everything is good. Excellent. So why can’t you connect? Why can’t you feel good? Excellent?

Sit by yourself. Eat by yourself. Walk by yourself, and talk to yourself and shop by yourself and breathe by yourself until exhausted, you drop dead. And then they will see. When all else has been squandered, or melted into something more precious, or just sold to the highest bidder. Then they will see you. And it will be too late. You will already be gone.

I’ve written these words before. Can’t remember when, but I did. Or maybe I didn’t. Perhaps I simply thought about it. Whatever the case, I’ve been here before, somehow, and the words, though fresh, glide from my pen like oil. Or blood. Is it possible I’ve never even thought these words before? Never even thought about thinking them, either? No. If I hadn’t thought about thinking them at least, then how can I be writing them? Even if I hadn’t thought them before, I must be thinking them now or I couldn’t be writing them, could I?

Could I? No. If I never thought the words, where did they come from?

I’ve been here before. I know I have. Perhaps in shimmering night-sight or day time visions, but I know this place. I know this room and I’ve said these words. They came to my mouth like they were destined to be said. Their sole purpose to be spoken in this instant. To fill me up. To overflow from my mouth onto the floor. Or else stay rooted inside me, rotting. How can familiarity feel so unsettling and distant? My hands shake as I seek the obscure date. The memory.

But no memory comes, and I lose this round.

Where do they go? When each solitary one finds its way into the dark. Do they scream, as they fall? Do they hold on to the white with all they can? Do they go, of their own free will?

Where do they go? Do they save damsels and slay dragons, or are they consumed by the dark and never seen again? Wasted? Abused? Who can say?

Where do they go? When their purpose is fulfilled and they are finished here? Do they know they are washed away, expended? Discarded. Or do they think they yet have purpose? No, they know their last second has passed. Their time slipped through their fingers.

Where do they go?

A face. Almost a man, yet still a child.

Too thin. Pale skin, pale lips, pale eyes with an abstracted gaze. Everything about him lacks colour. Emotion. He is a ghost. Questioning, yet absent. Sharp, yet blunt. The glass between us is dirty, imperfect. Warped. I squint and try to uncover the truth. One of us is encased. Veiled in a solid mist that cannot dissipate.

It doesn’t matter. We are one and the same.

If he lives in shades of black, it is only because I stripped the colours away. If he manages to clutch a moment of clarity near to him, a single second of freedom from the cage, it is only because I myself failed to catch it as it flitted by and out of sight. I stare at him. He sees through me. He pulls down all the blinds in his eyes, but the rise and fall of his chest betray him. He yet lives.

My face in the mirror. Almost a man, yet still a child.

I’m just flesh, powered by a dimly lit corner of my mind. An old, crumbling building, with an older, more decayed patron. A flickering bulb, piles of paperwork in a language unknown. Don’t pull back the moth-eaten curtain. Don’t look out the window. Its deeper and darker out there. And it will swallow you whole. So he paces. And he dreams whilst standing. And he scries through the pages of arcane tomes that he hopes will deliver him. He squints at the text and feels he is rising. But then he falls. He can’t read in the dark, and the flickering bulb, the piles of paperwork in a language unknown, the crumbling walls and moth-eaten curtains, the rickety floorboards and broken glass all begin to fade away. And he is left alone, in the dark, clutching to himself the piles of paperwork in a language unknown.

Whitewash the walls. The flame burns, then flickers into black.

Take. Take. Take.

Its primitive. Endless.

Puerile thoughts in hollow shells.

Rattling around like the dice of a game long lost.

White noise. The ice cracks, then erupts into a billion parts.

Give. Give. Give.

Its all the same.

Look out across everything.

See what it has been reduced to-

A game long lost.