dirt
I’d been sitting in the room for two days. Nothing had changed. The world outside was just as intrusive and belligerent as it was when I had closed the doors originally. The room was hot and stank of stale cigarettes and close quarter shits. Occasionally I would sneak out, pulling the collar up around my face, and my hat down around my ears. I would walk, head down, to the liquor store, pay, and then run back with the hot love of my friend tucked in my breast pocket. I read books, and drank and smoked cigarettes and drank and read books. I sat and stared at the computer screen, waiting for genius, or love, to appear in tiny black letters. It didn’t.
The world had grown too loud. Too bright. The colors made me want to vomit, and puffy red faces made me want to cry. Conversations became difficult, and I would sit there and stare in disgusted fascination as they spewed forth the torrential emptiness of their minds. I’d felt exposed, raw. As though I’d been stripped of my protective rubber insulation, and all that was left were some stray, bent wires, crackling and popping with every piece of settling dust. My whole body hurt with the loneliness. It is worse to be lonely amidst a city full of people, than it is to be truly alone.
With the last empty, pathetic word from a red-faced fool, still echoing in my ears, I shut the doors of my apartment and made no plans to open them again.
The whiskey was good, and hot. I would poor myself a small drink, sip, and feel the beautiful burn as it slid, hot and glorious, down into my stomach. The solitude was good, and it made me focus, which isn’t that difficult a task when all there is to focus on is yourself.
I had been worried that I would loose myself, or worse, that I had already lost it. Every day I woke up, I would dress, go outside, and be washed away, piece by piece. First it was my happiness, next my thoughts. All mixed into a murky tub of brown. Then it was my confidence, my self-assuredness. Mix. Stir. Boil. I felt my whole being breaking apart, disintegrating into this slop bucket in which I’d been dropped like so much shit.
This room, my domicile, was my last chance. If the solitude didn’t work, then it was true. I was forever and irreparably lost in the cesspool of mediocre minds and dull, grey lives. Terrifying.
Alone in my room, I wrote about being afraid of being stirred in with their shit, and I ignored the smell of my bathroom, The pile of whiskey bottles, staring spitefully up at me from the bottom of the trashcan. In an alcoholic stupor, I wrote about how terrified I was, loosing my mind in a world full of idiots. My ass aching from my hard chair, I cried about how loneliness is the most static of all despairs, frozen and unwilling to move. Preferring its cramped, hot, shitty room with the view of a looming concrete wall, to the brisk wind and frenetic energy of the outdoors. I was very pathetic there in my room.
I just realized that there is no way to end this story. I finished the last paragraph, looked up and saw that nothing has changed. I will forever be in one of two places. Out there, loosing myself, piece by piece, or I will be in here, writing about it in filthy isolation.
The world had grown too loud. Too bright. The colors made me want to vomit, and puffy red faces made me want to cry. Conversations became difficult, and I would sit there and stare in disgusted fascination as they spewed forth the torrential emptiness of their minds. I’d felt exposed, raw. As though I’d been stripped of my protective rubber insulation, and all that was left were some stray, bent wires, crackling and popping with every piece of settling dust. My whole body hurt with the loneliness. It is worse to be lonely amidst a city full of people, than it is to be truly alone.
With the last empty, pathetic word from a red-faced fool, still echoing in my ears, I shut the doors of my apartment and made no plans to open them again.
The whiskey was good, and hot. I would poor myself a small drink, sip, and feel the beautiful burn as it slid, hot and glorious, down into my stomach. The solitude was good, and it made me focus, which isn’t that difficult a task when all there is to focus on is yourself.
I had been worried that I would loose myself, or worse, that I had already lost it. Every day I woke up, I would dress, go outside, and be washed away, piece by piece. First it was my happiness, next my thoughts. All mixed into a murky tub of brown. Then it was my confidence, my self-assuredness. Mix. Stir. Boil. I felt my whole being breaking apart, disintegrating into this slop bucket in which I’d been dropped like so much shit.
This room, my domicile, was my last chance. If the solitude didn’t work, then it was true. I was forever and irreparably lost in the cesspool of mediocre minds and dull, grey lives. Terrifying.
Alone in my room, I wrote about being afraid of being stirred in with their shit, and I ignored the smell of my bathroom, The pile of whiskey bottles, staring spitefully up at me from the bottom of the trashcan. In an alcoholic stupor, I wrote about how terrified I was, loosing my mind in a world full of idiots. My ass aching from my hard chair, I cried about how loneliness is the most static of all despairs, frozen and unwilling to move. Preferring its cramped, hot, shitty room with the view of a looming concrete wall, to the brisk wind and frenetic energy of the outdoors. I was very pathetic there in my room.
I just realized that there is no way to end this story. I finished the last paragraph, looked up and saw that nothing has changed. I will forever be in one of two places. Out there, loosing myself, piece by piece, or I will be in here, writing about it in filthy isolation.