A Work of Fiction

Feb 13, 2006 08:34

I sat on the back porch of the house, looking in through the prism of light rain falling overhead. These people seemed so careless. So free, so drunk on the very passions of their lives. I could never understand it myself... these people were beautiful tributes to their own ability to be reckless and immodest. As much as part of me wished to be like them, the other part knew better. It knew that their golden hue was only temporary, and would subside and leave them as empty as I was, sitting there watching through the thin veil of rain.

I had almost forgotten about my cigarette, burning and crumbling as it rested captured between my fingers. I chuckled a bit at my own melodramatic streak, imagining how much like the cigarette the rest of my life was. All the booze, the dope, the emptiness... day in day out and burning me down from the inside. I was running from something, but I wasn't sure what. It had me scared for my life, and I just blocked it out through the amazing use of chemicals. There was never any escape from that feeling, not entirely; I was never too drunk or too fucked up to know that this thing was still sitting behind me, merely waiting for the haze to die away so that it could resume breathing down my neck. Twenty one years old and I already was under the suspicion that I'd lived more than I had wanted to, or felt more than I needed to. All that leads me back to the same question, with the same silence echoed as an answer. I wondered to myself if all those gleaming idols of vitality inside, dancing and drinking, felt the same grim presence I did. Some icey specter drumming his tingling cold fingers across the back of your neck when you have too much time and not enough to do with it. Part of me hoped they did.

The other part wished they were just happy.

I dropped my cigarette in a nearby ashtray and ventured back over to the door that had all that pulsing life on the other side, melting into it and hoping to forget myself for even a moment. It was a party, after all.
Previous post Next post
Up
[]