Recently I am finding it difficult to understand longing
Recently I am finding it difficult to understand longing
I want this moment in its entirety. I want this moment to condense into a shower of liquid which I can then absorb into the pores of my skin and even deeper than that so that it soaks into the marrow of my bones. I want this moment to be plastered over the bedroom walls of every angst-ridden teenager in place of genre-appropriate bands and ephemera. I want this moment to be processed into an expensive skin cream in a container with a twist-top lid which I can rub over every square millimetre of my body. I want this moment to sew itself into a full-body suit with a thread count so high that neither air nor sound nor light can pass through, then I will wear this forever. I want this moment to replace all of my vital organs so that I will rely on this moment to keep me living for however long. I want this moment to replace the sound of a heartbeat. I want this moment to be playing on a projector screen at my funeral and a DVD of the moment to be placed in my coffin. I want this moment to be photographed and for those photographs to be burnt to ash which I will then snort using rolled-up, limited-edition 500 dollar notes made in celebration of this moment. I want this moment to be digitally captured and then printed out, the printed image put through a paper shredder, then I want to eat the moment, once digitised, now shredded, in an assemblage not unlike a bowl of plain spaghetti. I want this moment to be seen only in complete darkness and complete light and everything in between. I want this moment to be a recurring dream that I never wake up from. I want this moment to be depicted in every cloud and every constellation and every fatefully arranged bird shit streak on the sidewalk. I want this moment to replace film and television and books and the internet and maybe even more than the internet if that is possible. I want this moment to become a tumor that grows from my frontal lobe until it gets so big that it pushes up against my eyes and I am blind save for seeing this moment. I want this moment to replace what my piss smells like. I want this moment to be every prayer and every song ever uttered or sung. I want this moment to be interrupted by an atom bomb explosion so that when I close my eyes the image of this moment is burned in shadow across my cornea and also across the walls and the ceiling and the floor in the places where people and things and I once stood.
I want this moment
A warning for those who are too impatient to spend time waiting for eyes to adjust.
In the dark, when you open your eyes there’s not much to see at first. Wait, and soon enough but not soon enough, you can make out edges of edges of walls catching the light. Your eyes will continue to adjust to the darkness and soon those edges will become lines that form shapes. Those shapes could be windowsills or doorhandles, lampshades or maybe ceiling fans. If you’re lucky those shapes might be fingertips or a pair of lips.
Eventually all will be lit, and you’ll find yourself alone in a room on a bed or a couch or a mattress; no matter the environment, it will always be too bright. Your eyes will adjust again to compensate for the light pouring in through the windows and slipping through the blinds, flooding and filling the tank made of glass, wood, and brick you live in.
Your eyes will itch and irritate and you’ll feel like a thousand microscopic hands are clawing at the surface of your cornea. You’ll stare around everything you’ve accumulated: all hanging, standing, sticking, resting. Things. In silence you’ll wander without moving, until your eyes get tired.
In the day, with your eyes closed there’s not much to see at first. Wait and soon enough but not soon enough you can make out the light passing through your eyelids, as if thousands of layers of red cellophane were taped over your face. Your eyes will continue to adjust and soon that tinge of red will become a beating crimson. The crease of your elbow over your eyes will paint it black.
If you wait with eyes closed long enough, breathing receding to a slow beat, they’ll adjust to see everything. The colours you’ve never seen and the people you can’t remember and the places you’ve never been to. You’ll see it all if you just wait, and breathe.
Scrap from a writing project I never finished in high school. Won’t go into detail, but in the story dreams would have different typography and layouts to reflect the surreal nature of it all.
This was a a sort of proof of concept.
pdf if you actually want to read/without straining your eyes
this is a test.
a shot in the dark, with only light bleeding from the monitor to guide me. fingers stumbling awkwardly from key to key.
i want to be able to write with voice that isn’t parsed through what seems like a dozen others; my thoughts processed through some infernal machine that wheezes and screeches then spits out words and phrases that never seem to be wholly mine.
i understand, or at least think i do, about the influence of all that i have consumed, created or communicated; listened to, overheard, or ignored over the course of my relatively short life, and how that shapes, among other things, my writing.
but that’s not what i’m talking about here.
i’ve always felt so frustrated when i write, if only in the aftermath. some lapse in apathy, and the following surge of motivation would lead me to begin scrawling as if i was there, in amongst those moments where my aspirations met reality.
but then i would read over it and genuinely wonder who wrote it. it was me, i am sure, but there was an omnipresent sense of taintedness, a fragment of something left unsaid, i don’t know what to call it.
in every instance of writing i would need some sort of voice to adopt, a box to solder onto my neck that would be discarded the next time i would need to say something.
i guess i just want one that fits. or even better, to not feel like i’m wearing it.
when i was younger, i’d buy anything aniseed-flavoured, savour the taste for mere seconds, then cough it up without impunity, wondering why i thought the taste would be any different.
maybe if i could bear that overwhelming wash of blackened saliva on my tongue a while longer, i would enjoy it. i thought that maybe if i kept with a singular voice, or at least attempted something with a semblance of consistency, i’d end up with not a smear of tar-black sludge on the bitumen, but the primmed black ink of words on paper.
i’ll try.
i still can’t stand liquorice though.
