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.
Those Kids
He didn’t like the look of them. They crossed the road right into his path and spat globs of fluid flat into the street. Swaggering slow and clustered, they flicked chins over shoulders to grab sturdy glances back at him. They were very obviously together, uniformed in unfit sport suits and the first three numbers from the barber’s catalogue, and yet they are climbing the pavement spaced and separate. Shaved sides duck as one stops to examine an artefact on the ground, left a few steps behind in the wake of rustling polyester. A coin, or maybe a wasteful butt still tall enough to re-light? Worry strikes and he slows to a shuffle, not wanting to catch up with this kid and become surrounded as he passes. He doesn’t think they will try anything, but if they were to, this is the empty section of the street they’d do it. This is a channel through the centre of advanced civilisation, and yet his thoughts become primitive ones. They all look to be occupying that age that unnerves him, that age where alone there is little danger, but in numbers their threat accumulates and their intelligence does not. The age where they would probably try to kick rather than punch, an age where if he grabbed a leg as it flew at him, he could use it to throw a vicious kid across the pavement. Or more usefully, he could use the kick’s opening to smash his own shoe into the vulnerable crotch of someone only just old enough to understand what it means to hurt the way it would. The tracksuit bottoms would offer no protection and the first maggot would crumple and stay down.
His blood pumps and his fists tighten as he feels a surge swallow him. He is a pulsing organ of animal, bracing to squish and be squished. A pummelling circuit that fires without asking as his eyes dilate. But as the moments start to drag on his oversized shape, it doesn’t happen. He remains in the air un-squished. It still isn’t out of the question, but the breath comes back and his hyperfocus begins to erode and cave in on itself. The awkward muscle falls away leaving only the skeletal silhouette of his humanity, and he thinks for an exhaling second that maybe his assumptions were too harsh. They hold themselves intimidatingly and arrogantly, purposefully stripping away anything goofy and naive from their image. But perhaps, behind that facade there could be an insecure kid, trying to fit in by dragging themselves up out of their own childhood. Maybe whatever was on the ground momentarily cracked their expression and a sense of wonder breathed for just a second. Maybe it wasn’t money or trash, maybe it was a cool insect? Or a weird-shaped stick? Or a single unguarded frame of childlike curiosity from a kid forgetting not to be?
Quit Vision 