Some days become too practical.
You sink into the quicksand of old quarries.
Tasks that you just have to do.
You can’t argue with them any more, they have no ears to hear your reasoning.
They aren’t too heavy for you, just extremely awkwardly shaped.
Take a flat breath and blink for several seconds longer than usual.
Move your muscles before you open your eyes.
Some things aren’t really worth looking at.
Laughing Gas
I found the rage, alone in the middle of the night. Balancing on the crumbling rim of sleep, I wobbled and leant on thoughts from spent days. The fan strummed my leg hairs and the heat didn’t respond. I proved like dough under a dampening duvet and my thoughts grew to double their size. Their conflicting scripts cancelled into thick droning noise, and I knew it meant that really I was empty inside. It was a single ply of psychic wallpaper pasted cheaply over giant holes in my structure. I gave hours to impulses. Impulses give nothing back. The hollow should be allowed to sleep.
And then, a back-bench nerve tingles from an undisclosed location. The audacity. Yet, I am without surprise. youcouldfeelbetter. And this is why I don’t. youwillnotfeelbetterwithoutsleepyoucouldgetyourselfsomeeasysleep. I know in myself that the ease is the emptiness. thiswillfeelgoodandyouneedtofeelgood. I will feel worse when I’m done, but I do feel lousy already. feelingbetterisnothardyoucanmakeyourselfbetterwheneveryouneed. I wish I felt something at all, I’m so empty. youdonothavetoremainunsatisfiedyouarechoosingtoanditishurting. I just want to feel something, maybe…
This is the trap, and the part that really shreds my dignity on every entrance is that I recognise this ditch. From each of my desperate flails in. From each injured crawl back out. Selling energy and respect for cheap, impurely cut slabs of dopamine. It might as well be laughing gas, it’s so funny, dissipates so quickly, and is really more anaesthetic than anything else. As its warm tide washes back it carries off your own warmth with it.
A Letter From Your Reflection
Dear [REDACTED],
This is the version of you in reflection, we haven’t seen you here in a while.
I’m addressing you like this because this is a strange time, maybe the most turbulent of your life. And, because of both situational and psychological barriers, you haven’t connected with your inner self in a while. The world is forcing you to look outwards. Things are changing and you must be there for them. It’s natural to feel like you need to escape, but you are escaping in all the wrong ways.
When did you find this thirst? For attention, for gratification? For confusing emulsions of both in dissonant mixtures. I grant that after a decade of singular female attention, it’s natural to find excitement in the prospect that you are no longer excluded from possible advances, but even if it were that simple it would be a newly appropriate thought at the most extremely inappropriate time. You know this dude. Your excitement at it is attempting to take over you, spilling into the positive impulse vacuum that you’re finding left inside yourself. This isn’t the way out of it. The way you begin to recklessly pursue when your rationality pops like a flat tire impaled on a nail of emotional pain, is only going to rip you open wider.
You aren’t a bad person for getting sucked in by it all. But how easily you back out, retch, and find yourself repulsed after you’re done should really tell you all you need to know about why this is a bad idea right now. You will be free to explore, but just because there won’t be anything standing outside of you to halt for (except for the money, time and potential risk), there will always be your emotional physics creaking inside you. Cheap attention and cheap gratification will not fill the hole they promise to, and honestly I think you know that the odds of actually finding any are so low that you are almost certainly aimed squarely at solid rejections, further tearing you up. And even if you did, argue with me that you’d be able to go through with it? Without something invisible holding you back? I wonder what that is? You’ll use your money, your time and your energy to get something that only makes you more drainingly nervous, sad and alone. This is the road to loneliness, not the solitude you promised yourself. This is the path to the darker side of the dangerous place you are already going. Lonely single males don’t last long here. You aren’t even anywhere yet and you’ve already begun racing towards it.
Casual parts might be ok once you’re in a position to be casual, but you aren’t even. You aren’t even free and you’re nearly burnt out on this freedom because you are using the idea of it as a vice, and for that it will never make you happy. You are simply ruining the promise of a new dawn. Risk is ok, but you are so cut up right now that you just can’t measure it precisely enough to know what you’re doing. In time you might be ok to experiment, but right now you’re about to explode. Right now you need your wits, your vigour, your spare money, your energy to pursue, your spirit, your confidence, your self-respect, your dignity. All the things you’re throwing blindly into a grinding dopamine machine for a quick boost. I’m sorry it’s hard, I’m sorry you’re struggling. But you can’t let it warp your view like this. You need your vision, and as soon as you step back out into the world and remember your place in it, you remember too that that desperate person alone with wide eyes in that lonely room, chasing empty, degrading connections, that isn’t you. That isn’t you.
Sincerely… you.
About The Author
[REDACTED] is an East Anglian head-rush with a translucent blonde moustache. Unlike most writers, his facial hair actually makes him look much younger, and usually leads to an embarrassing smirk on the face of the cashier as his ID tells them he isn’t in fact just a dark-eyed fifteen year-old who’s had a hard life. The paracetamol and coffee make more sense now, as they wash up in the conveyor belt’s tide. Fifteen year-olds don’t buy coffee and painkillers with a fake ID, they buy vodka and fireworks. And they certainly don’t have trouble finding a dentist when their final wisdom tooth wakes up every six months to try and lift itself agonisingly out of their skull, impotently like the last skeletal grandpa out of the pool after 10am water aerobics, every other Thursday at community leisure, which so happens to be on the same street as three separate dentists that all have waiting lists so long that you’ll be yourself signing up for the senior’s water aerobics (and the Monday afternoon seated jazzercize if you can handle it) before you’re ever going to get seen. And, if you still somehow have any teeth left after fifty years since your last appointment, then you and your bridge buddies might as well blow if off for wheelchair yoga on Tuesdays and Fridays. And that’s a big commitment, because if you miss even one session they’ve been known to assume you’ve dipped into corpse pose and give your place away on the spot to someone with even less teeth.
–
Hey, to break format for a moment here and address the theme above, I just wanted to say thank you to anyone that at all cares about this blog enough to read it on occasion. You may or may not have noticed that new writing has stalled a little lately, this is because I recently quit my job to begin studying as a school music teacher and as such have been pretty slammed these last couple months. I’m not giving up on this though, and aim to still try to upload once a week – hopefully this can be the start of that. Again, thanks for reading any of this at all if anyone ever did. I do this for me, but I’ve had a lot of fun sharing.
– W
You’re Dead, Says the Wall
First of all, anxieties that burn until they suddenly disappear unresolved, why do they do that? Only to return home like a swarming cloud, awoken from their sleep to sting and swell on you like mouth ulcers, painfully brushed with every internal movement of logic. If they’re helpful let them stay so I can shoot their source dead, and if they’re not let them loose to fuck off and dissipate from neural pulses into static electricity. But like every wall I’ve ever sat across from face-to-face, it’s not that simple. The only truly simple truth I’ve ever learnt first-hand is that complication is sewn in the fabric of anything that has ever moved, and that’s everything, ever. It’s death, I think. You have to think about your own consistently delayed death to survive for any amount of time, but you have to forget about it too, as an aching, unresolvable worry, to ever really live. And so that’s why I have the psychological apparatus to feel utterly and existentially spooked by the record of my accumulated decision making until the horror loses its voice and hushes and I just forget to keep up the worry and I go off to make a few more decisions.
Secondly, I want to be on my own. I want to be alone but my brain is playing cards, in a secret back room it thinks I don’t know about, but of course I do, but if this game has to happen then honestly it needs to remain out of sight. This is a controversial exploration, and I can’t stop this personification of my brain (as if it’s separate from me, which it’s not) from travelling into this dangerous territory. It is a delicate system and a delicate game and I want to be alone, but the stakes let no question rest and I don’t know all the rules and I never could and the players could be bluffing, but I’d tell because I can see into their heads because they are me, but I’ve looked and I still can’t tell because they don’t even know themselves. I have done the equations and refined the calculations until the emotional science remains stable enough for a verdict, and I know what the answer is in as much as anyone can know anything is true in any science; That is that you can never know anything, you can only give your best estimate based on repeatable evidence. And that’s all I hang onto in this chemical storm.
I want to be alone, I have weighed it up. But there’s still weight on the other side too, and because of that the decision was awful to balance. The other side is not empty, a part of me lives there, still in this relationship, unready to leave with the rest of me. And so I have these visions of a thing I don’t want at all. A thing it is dangerous to even speak of, painful to hear the pronunciation. Categorically the wrong thing, the thing none of me wants. And yet the visions appear. The auroras of meshing physical forms of two conflicting sides of me. My internal atmosphere screaming for harmony, mixing dissonant ideologies to find the few straggling, disjointed parts that will emulsify with each other, creating an ideal drastically unrepresentative of either side it is made of parts from. I don’t want to be with another, in fact, a desire like that is the one thing that could most devastatingly blast this all to hell. Both sides in conflict agree on this. And yet, in trying to break up the fight happening deep inside me, some busy-bodied solutionizer element of my subconscious is combining the want to be out of this relationship (from my winning ‘leave’ side) with the want to be with someone (from my losing ‘stay’ side), rendering both angles meaningless by stripping them of their context and jamming them together crudely like action-figures to kiss and make-up into something condemnable. It’s all wrong and I want it out of my head. Its comfort isn’t real and it’s so volatile a thought that it’s a serious liability to mention even here, just to get it out of me. It’s deadly and futile and I want the nonsensical path to it eased from my brain. I want to be alone.
Bad Dream
Simon found the news unbearable.
His expectations began all to simultaneously rise and pop like the bubbles in his fresh beer.
“Wow, that’s fantastic!”
The words were sincere, but after they’d left him he had to shut his mouth again fast. He couldn’t let escape the sounds of his insides creaking under their own weight.
“I’m really happy for you!”
The words were made of staccato wind sliced in his chest. He felt his woven ego flutter and strain like a bedsheet hung out against the April wind.
“Congratulations!”
Something sleeping in a depth of him was tossing and rolling through a bad dream. He wondered in a ripple of this grinding turbulence.
The Beauty Of Internal Accomplishment
Yesterday you were a machine and it felt good. You didn’t ask permission from your fragile emotional makeup, you just did what you had to and it felt bad and then it started to feel good. You struggle to build speed against the resistance of the day, but with each step, it hurts less until you are running. And you realise that the work isn’t getting easier, you are getting stronger. You are building up speed on a slip road, and when you’re shooting fast enough that you no longer notice, you’re ready to merge into the lanes of the flow state. This is the highway that really takes you places, blasts you further than the distracted surface roads of the day ever could. Your movements become elegant and the effort becomes fuel for the engine. Speed isn’t really even in your consideration anymore, the way rich people don’t worry about money. The struggle to start isn’t forgotten but sucked up into the equation with the pain extracted and the rising pattern reinforced. You know you’ll feel it again tomorrow and it will shred you to start, but right now you could lift that initial starting responsibility with your little finger. You remember the pain now, and when you face it again you will remember the beauty of internal accomplishment that sings within the strength you have summoned and embodied on a day that started painful like today.
e4
Today is a game of chess. Breakfast, shower, brush teeth. Book moves. Today can’t be beaten with brute force determination. A day unfolds at its own pace, event by event in shifting landscapes. Each step in its traversal influences its terraforming shape for thousands of steps ahead. Every new minute is born of one past. You will lose until you learn that the bad moves matter as much as the good ones. And even then you will still lose a portion of the time. Your opponents are powerful players and they are experts at getting inside your head. Their whispers are always lapping at your strength, eroding the shores of your concentration and battered judgement. They are simply the wrong sides of you, and their identical genetic makeup can cancel out every one of your efforts in exactly measured opposition. Strategy is all you have beyond this. Knowledge and consideration of basic truths. The immediate benefit can leave you open. The best moves come many previous moves in the making. It is tedious to get into the strongest positions. You have lost every game you have begun recklessly. You have lost every game you have moved straight for the exciting pieces, just to have them bounce off a brick wall. You have to think ahead. You have to adapt to the flowing change, it is not an inconvenience, it is a fact. Trading pieces just to progress the game will end with you losing out, even if it feels like it might be what you need – that sentiment is your opponent’s mind game.
I Found Myself In The Garden
In the garden I found myself. It’s been above the sink all along as I washed the hundreds of dishes in a year. And this one quiet evening I stopped the taps and felt it the same, passive and cold behind glass. And yet it called for me now, in a voice I’d never heard. This first solitary dusk was a calm breath after drowning. There was no coughing or gasping, just a long slow draw from the new air back to life. And as I broke the surface tension, the water drained from my saturated senses. The liquid blur blinked out and the pressurised muffle poured from my ears, rupturing pulsing occlusion from a skull that had numbed to its squeeze. I heard above the gargling bubbles, the echoes of promises I’d made to myself in different times. The call was my own, distant now, from before. And with nothing hanging in the fresh twilight air, I followed it out into the night.
Drop In From A High Ramp
They always come together, the opposite sides of the same thing. Maybe not in the same week, but soon enough you’ll feel one side and then the other comes later. Drinking coffee for the rush or the lull. I want it no less, but I have become sick of the word FREEDOM. I want what it means, but its shape becomes caught in my mouth and needs a few tries to fully spit up, like toothpaste froth in the morning. The word COMFORT fragments as it spins away from me, no longer cast as a cohesive structure that glows warm, blunt, dull, numb. A ready-made life stretched out across a lounger chair. The shards of shattered comfort suddenly become sharply defined. The harsh edges and gaps and stops shoot me afraid as the particles behind them shiver and swim. The static was not as blank as it seemed from within. The edge shows you that you were somewhere. And you have just embarked on a journey through nowhere. The fear is crucial, but it’s worse than it seemed through the windows. Waking up alone. Waking up panicked by the gamble. But as the sleep falls from your eyes, wide and yet still shut, you see this world and this life for real. There is no balance and there is no tonic. What’s out there is scary, but staying here with no future is chilling too. To face one is to miss the other, and my god is it exhausting to miss everything all at once. You miss the control every road-mapped day of your life, but the highway is underneath your treads and the underlying parts of life are supported, so progression is easy but its direction is rigid. It isn’t your direction, but an approximation you accepted from a distance. And with every mile approaching, the acute angle between its course and yours widens and opens like a jaw off into the unknown. The decision to stray was a hard-won battle, and now as you idle at the mouth of a rough, bumpy lane off into the obscure and unseen, the word CONTROL isn’t in the front seat of your mind anymore. Now instead it’s this word COMFORT again. And you look back over your shoulder towards the highway junction exit and begin to flood the engine with nostalgia for the lanes you could see clear where you were… But not where you were going. And as it becomes too much to bear, breathe, and stare back down the entrance of this new coarse trail, where there’s nothing to help you across the loose surface and no detailed maps to show you the turns or the way. This is your direction, and you’ll feel where you’re going, but you won’t know where you are. And you know it’s right. You know that even as you look back and long for the easy route, the moment you rejoined it you’d be looking straight back off into the wilderness directions. You know it’s right, but your heart will not land, and so you are frozen at the mouth of a new life. The breeze on your face is the only reminder that time has not stopped still as you perch back foot on the lip of a high ramp. It will feel impossible to drop in until you’re already halfway down.
Quit Vision 