The Blog of Lone

I had to escape, get away from it all.  The grime encrusted buildings of rotting grandeur I saw from my curtainless window every morning as I woke, hulking obscenely across the street, decaying monuments to forgotten industry looming tall while the endless throng of the faceless masses walked blindly below.  There had been no fuss, no problems.  All the possessions I thought worth saving now rested in a worn backpack across my shoulders.  I had packed the few items of sentimental value I still had, the thin silver necklace, the first collection of poetry, as well as my old tent, a folding cooking pan and sheaf knife along with some tinned food and the majority of my clothes, rolling my stash deep in the centre of them away from prying eyes, having no idea when, or if, I’d return, or where I’d end up.  The rest lay scattered like leaves across my now vacant flat.  During my evacuation, while looking for a discarded shoe, I had come across a small wooden cigar box under the bed, long forgotten and dusty.  On the lid of the coarse aromatic wood the word “Photos” had been scrawled in biro.  Your handwriting.  Continuance.  Pain.  I had long since rid myself of anything that reawakened your memory so physically.  Feeling numb I sat back against the cupboard opposite the bed staring at the little wooden box.  Bending down low I stretched my arm under the bed, keeping my face averted from the dust this raised.  Slowly sliding the box from under the bed I held it in my hands, weighing it, feeling the wood grains texture rough against my palms, gazing blankly at the solitary word signifying so much.  The desire to open the box and revel in the lost past inside crystallised within me, becoming an ache, a desire.  But where would that lead?  An hour’s happy reminiscence, and then darkness.  I’d let it slip, the fragile hold that I had on it all, all the emotions and black thoughts would well up in an uncontrollable tidal wave that would wash my fragile sanity away.  Standing and walking to the sink as though dreaming, I lifted my Zippo from a pocket.  The cool metal and weight of it reasserted the real, pulling my mind from the dizzying heights it had been occupying back down to somewhere near normal.  Taking the photos from the box, slowly, one by one, I lit each with a flick of the thumb and a rasp of flint.  As the photos fell from my fingers to the sink full of water, flaming like failed angels, I caught glimpses of us.  Pictures floated down, falling, always falling, to land with a hiss in the water.  The smell of burning plastic stung my eyes to tears as a small wisp of black smoke arose from each flaming scene.  As the silent parade ceased I looked down to see you staring up at me, as though through a pond full of charred lilies.  I turned away.

Finding the photos of an extinct past had not been good for me.  Drinking started earlier than usual and I set to it with an unusual vivacity, feeling the acute need for oblivion.  The off license owner had grinned as he saw me enter his shop earlier, maybe I’d been stuck in one place too long?  When local drink merchants start calling you by name perhaps its time for concern.  Knocking back Scottish whiskey, cheap, strong and painfully rough, doubting it had ever been further north than the Watford Gap despite its pseudo Celtic name, I sat back against the bed, comfortably numb, faintly feeling the metal frame digging into flesh but not caring.  Lager washed the whiskey down, replacing an acidic burning of the throat with an unpleasant taste on the tongue.  The empty can noisily joined the pile of its dented brothers flung in the corner, scoring three points for bouncing off both walls.  A small trickle of residue from the cans open mouth slowly dripped onto the carpet.  A laboriously constructed joint rested in the filling ashtray balancing on the torn knee of my jeans, filling the room with a sweet exotic scent, the fat cylinder releasing slow lazy smoke that danced intricately towards the bare light bulb and through which I stared at the ceiling.  I looked down, staring at the ashtray, bringing my head nearer to focus, trying to count the joint butts.  After several failed attempts I went back to staring at the ceiling.  I could feel the weeds effects pulling my mind back, baring it to the burning air, peeling back skin and bone, separating thought and action; giving thoughts precedence over sight.  Memories and fantasy slid before my eyes, more realistic than my own lying senses.  People half forgotten and places little visited paraded past mixing incongruously, while all the time my body seemed to melt further from my bones, creating a lightness that is impossible to describe or understand unless you’ve felt it.  I could feel myself losing my grounding, spacing out, a victim of my own treacherous thoughts. Death by consciousness.  Isn’t that always the way?