I was so happy that evening,
but it passed by and left nothing.
In the mornings
I cannot remember my dreams.
Forgotten rooms, abandoned spaces, full of rubbish. Rubbish that drives you mad. Leave it there in the dark. Leave it there to rot – ugly feelings, broken relationships, things you had to forget in order to forgive… Lock the door and throw away the key. Phew… Isnt’t it better? You can start with a clean slate, clear conscience, honest gaze. Aren’t you nice? You can be happy now. You can be whole and pure. You can flower, a beautiful snow-drop, untouched by the rotting rubbish. Oh, but it gets in through the roots, it fills your fruit with poison of all that festered there, in the dark, in the abandoned spaces. You try desperately: keeping your thoughts pure and your living clean… but the poison coursing through your veins makes you into a deadly nightshade. All that you touch withers and dies, it turns into rubbish. Rubbish that drives you mad. You build them up, layer upon layer, abandoned spaces, forgotten rooms. How many layers now? How many more can you build, before you realise that you can never start over, never be clean, never become a snow-drop… before you scream, shrill and ugly, through tears and despair, bending over the withered remains of another broken relationship. And there is no way back, no way to clean out the spaces that feed your roots, for they are the forgotten rooms, the rooms that you locked and threw away the key.
“Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil” (Psalm 23, ESV of the Christian Bible)
Death always rides on the back of the living,
unnoticed and unobtrusive,
but ever-present.
Sometimes we become aware of it
through a shiver down the spine
and sudden tightness in the chest
that catches our breath
and holds it.
But then we breathe in –
a deep breath of relief –
and forget;
those who don’t
become insane
or insufferable.
We forget until the moment
it’s time to turn our back to the world,
take our final bow
and let our death face it.
Huastec statue from the Tampico region (México), artist unknown;
displayed in Louvre Museum, Paris, France
They say your heart aches.
Mine doesn’t. My back does.
There is an uncomfortable feeling in my spine.
It doesn’t hurt, exactly, I just know it is there every second.
Tears occasionally leak from my eyes, like pus from a wound.
They have no meaning and bring no relief.
My mind is desperately searching for something:
words, feelings, escape –
but there is nothing there.
Just a body:
stupid,
mute,
incomprehensible.
Experience unmitigated,
voiceless scream,
feeling that has no name:
not sadness,
not pain,
not anger –
nothing eating at my bones,
squeezing my tear-ducts,
stripping off words,
exposing the emptiness inside and out.
My thoughts go into familiar grooves
and then slide off again – into nothing…
I feel old.
I feel chilly with understanding
that most things just are.
Not for something.
Not because of something.
They are – and there is the end to it.
Here.
Now.
It.
Their bodies litter our roads:
expected, almost unnoticed, left by the wayside…
not murdered –
killed accidentally by inattention to familiar routes,
too trivial for pathos, too pointless for tragedy.
We live our lives next to each other,
leaving behind little corpses of our selves and of others’,
unseen, extinguished by inattention of habit:
road-kill.
I wonder how much will be left alive
by the end of the day?
