*Cosmic Mist*
Bluelighter
On a clear, calm, and quiet day, you can almost hear it, that faint irregular thudding. It follows you everywhere, plaguing you as you work in you dim, dingy little office, stalking you as you wait for the peak hour train to whisk you swiftly homeward, haunting you as you lie your weary bones down for an evening of lonely insomnia, and drug induced sleep. You cannot escape from the dogmatic sounds of your own depravity – you spend your days fruitlessly living from hour to hour and minute to minute. Nothing means anything to you anymore. Not the pictures hung on your walls in happier times, or the tokens of affection you still sport. Not even the books still unread on your shelves. You ripped out the pages, tore up the bindings, and burned them all before you even reached the end of the story – you gave up before you’d even begun. It’s all lost to you now… it’s far beyond you in a cloud of smoke and dust, and you cannot get it back if you tried…
Now you are paying the price for your apathy. Now you live your life alone in your own private cloud of smoke and you cannot share it with anyone. The hours seem like minutes, and sometimes the minutes seem like days. You fill your life with empty recreation in order to hide from yourself, others, and the pragmatism of the real world.
Why should life make sense?
What difference should my actions make to the people they involve?
Why should I mean anything to anyone?
These questions make their way through the corridors of your mind in lazy, yet reassuring circles. As long as you maintain your separate path away from the others, away from their clean consciousness, as long as you can live within your own private hell without their annoyingly practical points of view, you can maintain your lifestyle, and your own personal warped perceptions of reality and sanity, whilst living within your nauseous cloud of burnt and broken dreams.
The dull thudding that stalks you day and night persists in its constant draining assault on you, draining your energy so that you’re no longer capable of sensible thought. You sit in your office day-in and day-out, hating the work you do… hating what you have become. Your only consolation is that it will all go away in the end.
Thud…Thud….THUD.
The noise continues, louder than before. It grows exponentially louder, to the point where it becomes all you hear. It consumes you day and night. You smash all your clocks and destroy your TV in an effort to make it stop. You begin to work longer and longer hours, throwing yourself into your work in order to escape from the torturous bludgeoning assault upon your precious senses. The haze of smoke in which you live thickens each minute of every day until it grows so thick you cannot see two feet ahead of you, and slowly you begin to choke, asphyxiating on your own delusional nightmare existence.
From out of nowhere; suddenly she appears before you, right in front of you, asking if you are alright. She waves her hands in front of your unfocused eyes, and asks you for your name. She drags you from your hazy, smoke-filled existence where at last she can see you clearly. She sees your ragged, ripped clothing; your dishevelled, dirty face; and your barely shod feet. She looks you directly in the eyes without your consent, and without warning she states plainly:
“I don’t love you for who you are, or what you have or have not done. I just love you.”
And as you become lost within the two soft green pools of light opposite you, you look at yourself. For the first time in your eternity of lonely, empty, longing degeneracy, you notice the image that you project unto others. You whisper gently:
“What have I become?”
She does not answer, but merely holds you tighter and closer than ever you remember being held…
You share your life with the girl who loves you for many years – the years pass like hours and the hours pass like seconds. You watch her, studying her every move. You observe her rise and fall. Sometimes you even try to catch her, to cushion her plummeting decent. She is an enigma – a mystery. Still you have no idea who she is or where she came from. She floats through life in a cloud of mist, and when you pose her the question of identity she simply replies that the label she has been forced to carry from birth is not relevant – all that is relevant is that the love you share remain strong, in order to protect you both.
It is at this point that you realise something is different, something has changed. The thudding has stopped! That horrible, hauntingly familiar thudding that had plagued you for so long, driving you to the very edges of your own sanity is gone – faded into obscurity, silenced by the love you now share.
This realisation fills you with ecstatic pleasure, and yet, for some reason unknown even to you, the identity of this woman intrigues you still. Your desire to know who she is outgrows even your desire to know of her love for you. While she wanders her life in a haze of tender love and affection, you wander behind her in a trail of loving emptiness, sure that this once piece of knowledge will lead you one step closer to her – that, in knowing her identity the two of you could melt silently together into your own private world and be free of the persistent pragmatism of the modern world.
So endlessly you search in vain for the answer to this question that, by all rights and privileges, you should not even be asking, carefully plying her with questions that she refuses to answer.
Finally, in your now restful sleep, it comes to you, and you realise who she is. You remember everything, from the very moment you first saw her, to the moment she dragged you from your endless restive wandering. You realise who she is, and what’s more, you remember her name.
In the morning, you turn to her, and attempt to gently rouse her from her sleep, softly calling her name – a name you’d, for so long, forgotten and searched for fruitlessly for so long.
But your words do not have the desired effects, and suddenly she is awake, screaming unlike anything you have ever heard before. “You know not what you say! You know not what you do!” she cries as she thrashes around in a desperate attempt to escape form your confused loving grasp. A mirror is smashed as she unknowingly collides with it, and an antique vase many centuries old falls to the floor, shattering instantly and spreading its memories to the winds. In her vehemence, she allows a candelabrum, still lit from the previous evening, to topple and fall onto the bed you shared with her for so long, sending it instantly into a blaze of smoky flames.
Swiftly as she had entered your sight, she is gone again, and once more you can see nothing but smoke…
Now the thudding returns, as loud as it ever was and as fiercely irregular as it had previously been. And as you wander through your smoke-filled home, all alone, searching in vain for the panic-stricken woman who loved you above all else without knowing how, nor why, as you search knowing that you will not find her, the noise increases in volume and speed, and at last you realise what it is…
It is the sound of your own heart, slowly breaking…
Now you are paying the price for your apathy. Now you live your life alone in your own private cloud of smoke and you cannot share it with anyone. The hours seem like minutes, and sometimes the minutes seem like days. You fill your life with empty recreation in order to hide from yourself, others, and the pragmatism of the real world.
Why should life make sense?
What difference should my actions make to the people they involve?
Why should I mean anything to anyone?
These questions make their way through the corridors of your mind in lazy, yet reassuring circles. As long as you maintain your separate path away from the others, away from their clean consciousness, as long as you can live within your own private hell without their annoyingly practical points of view, you can maintain your lifestyle, and your own personal warped perceptions of reality and sanity, whilst living within your nauseous cloud of burnt and broken dreams.
The dull thudding that stalks you day and night persists in its constant draining assault on you, draining your energy so that you’re no longer capable of sensible thought. You sit in your office day-in and day-out, hating the work you do… hating what you have become. Your only consolation is that it will all go away in the end.
Thud…Thud….THUD.
The noise continues, louder than before. It grows exponentially louder, to the point where it becomes all you hear. It consumes you day and night. You smash all your clocks and destroy your TV in an effort to make it stop. You begin to work longer and longer hours, throwing yourself into your work in order to escape from the torturous bludgeoning assault upon your precious senses. The haze of smoke in which you live thickens each minute of every day until it grows so thick you cannot see two feet ahead of you, and slowly you begin to choke, asphyxiating on your own delusional nightmare existence.
From out of nowhere; suddenly she appears before you, right in front of you, asking if you are alright. She waves her hands in front of your unfocused eyes, and asks you for your name. She drags you from your hazy, smoke-filled existence where at last she can see you clearly. She sees your ragged, ripped clothing; your dishevelled, dirty face; and your barely shod feet. She looks you directly in the eyes without your consent, and without warning she states plainly:
“I don’t love you for who you are, or what you have or have not done. I just love you.”
And as you become lost within the two soft green pools of light opposite you, you look at yourself. For the first time in your eternity of lonely, empty, longing degeneracy, you notice the image that you project unto others. You whisper gently:
“What have I become?”
She does not answer, but merely holds you tighter and closer than ever you remember being held…
You share your life with the girl who loves you for many years – the years pass like hours and the hours pass like seconds. You watch her, studying her every move. You observe her rise and fall. Sometimes you even try to catch her, to cushion her plummeting decent. She is an enigma – a mystery. Still you have no idea who she is or where she came from. She floats through life in a cloud of mist, and when you pose her the question of identity she simply replies that the label she has been forced to carry from birth is not relevant – all that is relevant is that the love you share remain strong, in order to protect you both.
It is at this point that you realise something is different, something has changed. The thudding has stopped! That horrible, hauntingly familiar thudding that had plagued you for so long, driving you to the very edges of your own sanity is gone – faded into obscurity, silenced by the love you now share.
This realisation fills you with ecstatic pleasure, and yet, for some reason unknown even to you, the identity of this woman intrigues you still. Your desire to know who she is outgrows even your desire to know of her love for you. While she wanders her life in a haze of tender love and affection, you wander behind her in a trail of loving emptiness, sure that this once piece of knowledge will lead you one step closer to her – that, in knowing her identity the two of you could melt silently together into your own private world and be free of the persistent pragmatism of the modern world.
So endlessly you search in vain for the answer to this question that, by all rights and privileges, you should not even be asking, carefully plying her with questions that she refuses to answer.
Finally, in your now restful sleep, it comes to you, and you realise who she is. You remember everything, from the very moment you first saw her, to the moment she dragged you from your endless restive wandering. You realise who she is, and what’s more, you remember her name.
In the morning, you turn to her, and attempt to gently rouse her from her sleep, softly calling her name – a name you’d, for so long, forgotten and searched for fruitlessly for so long.
But your words do not have the desired effects, and suddenly she is awake, screaming unlike anything you have ever heard before. “You know not what you say! You know not what you do!” she cries as she thrashes around in a desperate attempt to escape form your confused loving grasp. A mirror is smashed as she unknowingly collides with it, and an antique vase many centuries old falls to the floor, shattering instantly and spreading its memories to the winds. In her vehemence, she allows a candelabrum, still lit from the previous evening, to topple and fall onto the bed you shared with her for so long, sending it instantly into a blaze of smoky flames.
Swiftly as she had entered your sight, she is gone again, and once more you can see nothing but smoke…
Now the thudding returns, as loud as it ever was and as fiercely irregular as it had previously been. And as you wander through your smoke-filled home, all alone, searching in vain for the panic-stricken woman who loved you above all else without knowing how, nor why, as you search knowing that you will not find her, the noise increases in volume and speed, and at last you realise what it is…
It is the sound of your own heart, slowly breaking…
