It's amber waves in your head, the quiet muffling blanket wrapped between your ears. You're choking out, crawling between the walls on millions of scuttling legs. A fly between the screens buzzes helplessly, bashing itself upon the wireframe and in it, you see yourself for what you are. You're smiling as it pulsates, little flashes of blue and white rolling at the edges of your narrow vision. It's around your mind and in your soul. Thinking as a physical act, as a maddening scramble to tame the languid beast. Thinking of nothing but the process, the self analysis failing you.
Watch as the evidence drains from your head, so slowly. You're sloshing out, drowning in the whirlwind of unfalsifiable emotion. You're the dripping stream of fluid from the cup, rolling along the edge of the table tantalizingly slowly. You're kissing your arms with all the passion of your last twelve lovers combined. It's in your brain, your barely processing brain. The light dances along the wall, the clouds drawing patterns through the slatted blinds. Close your eyes and count to ten. Luxurious.
Feel it ruminate, the thoughts shaking loose like worms from the soil. They twitch out of the depths of your mind, pressing through the dim mesh that marks the end of your image. You're a twitching drifting ocean and it's low tide. You're at a low ebb. You're adrift, rocks visible, waters receding. Standing on that great beach and watching the days flick by, the moon yanking you side to side. It's violent and angry, persevering through the toxic agonies. It's a crawl. It's a lunar dance. Her fingers are going through your hair. There's a tear down her cheek. She doesn't understand. Can't understand. You don't understand either because you're already so far gone.
The droplet spills so slowly and it reminds you of something. It's like falling glass, falling ashes from the cigarette spiralling through the night air. Little sparks dancing below big ones, the colourful firework bursts casting illumination over the moment, the stationary seconds. How long until it ends? It's all just soup, the surface broken by an aggressing spoon. You stir slowly, steam cascading upwards shooting up your nose and fogging your glasses. The glass rolls along the edge of the table, teetering slowly. The liquid is blue, like the corners of your eyes, like the hem of her dress, like the tears welling in her eyes. You're like the ocean. You're on fire.
The clock ticks so slowly. Hours between each move of the hands, hours between each ringing bang. It's ricocheting through your empty head. Where are you? You're watching the scene from above. Your body is so distant, so small. It's okay. You're so slow, so large. You're a cloud drifting through space, cotton wrapped between fingers, thoughts collecting in nets between hard truths. Rocks under fingernails digging in, scraping down your sides. Her hands in yours. She's begging something maybe. The words are a foreign language, one you never knew. One you never could speak. Your tongue lolls loosely through your mouth, the traces of saliva on your lips. The ruins of a long lost friend. The quiet salvation of a course long given into ruin. You think you're falling. You think maybe it's normal.
It's like a wall. It's like a brick. It's like a hammer beating against the narrow frames of the house. You're a wire dancing through the drywall, holes poked through to bear empty picture frames. Blank and white, the colour of sanctified flesh, the colour of shameless corruption and poison. It's toxic. Peeling. Black sludge dripping from the cracks where the walls meet the ceiling. It's screaming, voices slipping between the cracks in your mind. You're a spider's web. You're an egg about to hatch, a dam about to burst, a lake about to freeze.
It's so cold as it moves through you. Down your throat. It comes in flashes, the future and the past colliding with the force of a freight train. The tracks buckle with the weight, the millions of gallons of impossible chemicals geysering into the air. The trees will burn for a million years, their smoke curling into the atmosphere as the headstone on your grave. It's a ruin. Fire licks stone, leaving scorch marks on the mountains. Taste the continents with your tongue, licking the soil up to enjoy the salt on your tongue. You're standing on a beach, up to your ankles in the receding water. Winter is long gone, the ice drifting away downstream. How many years left? Too many.
How is she still holding your hand? There's a spider on the walls, little legs flailing wildly as it struggles upwards, defying gravity itself. Your eyes trace it slowly. It's toxic. It's pulsating through your blood, the freezing march of chemicals down the rivers of a body, the factories dumping their toxic waste on the unsuspecting town. It's in the lakes and rivers, running through taps and showers. It's blue and it's brown and it's boiled for hours to make it safe. Bottled, plastic fragments, sound seconds, long goodbyes. Tell me that you loved me. Watch my heart shatter to pieces just like that. Promise that it'll be okay. That we'll all be okay someday.
You want to die in flames. You want to die gloriously, powerfully, needfully. You want to martyr yourself in all the ways that you promised you would, smiling all the while. Why should it hurt? Why should it stop? Why should your brain dissolve? It's alcohol and it's weed and maybe it's something stronger. Lack of sleep suppresses the mind, long hours of the night turning over to madness. Logic and madness are not opposites. Logic is the enemy of connectivity, of communication. The madness is when you're most tuned on, most turned on. You flick a switch and watch the moon. The ocean laps at your ankles. Someday it'll be gone. Someday it'll be good. You wish we could burn the sky down. You wish you could fall.
The glass falls from the table and shatters into a million pieces. Your brain is so very empty. There's nothing left, your fingers stretching out loosely. It's a break from yourself. It's a shattered moment stretching through time. You're counting the sunbeams on the wall, your eyes fixating on the way the golden light bisects the room. It divides in two, one for him and one for her. Your eyes are blinking shut, automatic and instinctive. It's warm inside your heart, inside the weakening muscles of your body. The aches are slowing down finally, stopping finally. It might be silent for once, when the voices stop their yapping and the dogs stop their braying and the winds stop their howling. It's so fucking loud. It's so fucking loud, right?
The fallen glass grows silent, fragments of a life scattered over the floor, like a landmine for bare feet. You think she's asking you what you drank. You think you're trying to move your hands. It isn't working.