“And you, in your turn, will be rotten as this:
Horrible, filthy, undone,
O sun of my nature and star of my eyes,
My passion, my angel in one!”
– A Carcass, Baudelaire
Half drunk, he painted the circle on the floor, inscribing the sacred gematria appropriately within, in the hopes of attempting some occult fix to the decimation around him. His heart was blackened and lost, life now wearing down upon his soul like the flesh of some desiccated corpse, though he was still very much alive. Standing in the snow covered graveyard of yore, beneath the glowing pink sky of a year grey with dismay, he pondered the vortex of existence.
It all seemed like a stunningly designed Ouroboros of Pain, with no rhyme or reason as to it’s whys and wherefores. It merely seemed to permeate with a petulant and consistent static gravity, a weight disproportionate to that of the rest of existence. It was all very much a cosmic joke, a puzzle box of universal intelligence with sadistic intent to him. But who was laughing? Did the answer even really matter? Ultimately all there is in this consciousness is the flesh, and the systems that guide this flesh, as strange ethereal whispers almost indistinguishable from that of a love, a friend, or even sometimes a nightmare fiend. Holding you in a paralysis called existence.
Existence meant you were alive, and life meant survival, a painful universal truth, unavoidable. Something he’d never been particularly good at, though somehow he’d made it this far. Primarily alone, at that. Meeting her changed all that. However, feeling he’d had a kindred soul made life at first that much more tolerable, and perhaps even enjoyable, though he’d had no clue as to how to properly show it. It was new. The whole of his life until that point had been filled with such an involuntary abject misery that it did come off as almost comical to those who were incapable of understanding.
To those who at least tried to understand, this pain was tangible, a thick lifelong angst smoldering his aura and locked parasitically into his psyche, eating through his life like a psychological cancer every chance it could get. It wasn’t depression, or schizophrenia, or any of the other usual suspects. Depression was involved, of course, and an almost inhumane level of anxiety, of the variety where the flesh feels like it’s burning from the inside out. To those who could see it, it was nothing less than tragic in the true Greek sense of the word. Whatever this was, it had no name. But it was there.
This nameless abominable thing, this Beast, grew more controlling each time it decided to regenerate, to recycle back around. It had become an all consuming force of para-nature, something plugged in from a place to only which he believed he was connected. It was a terrible way to live.
Something was generally off the day she’d left. The air didn’t smell right, and the world around him, particularly outside, had taken on the strange appearance like that of a high quality matte painting, acting as the background to some deranged work of quasi-philosophical meta-crisis on celluloid. He’d been awake for a few days, his intuition in the red–but he wasn’t sure about what.
Regardless, he well knew that wasn’t the culprit. Everything about all of this seemed to be wrong. This matte world moved and functioned in a similar manner to the standard 3D world of two weeks or a year or even a yesterday ago, but it wasn’t that. No, this he felt was a manifestation of something beyond the grasp or understanding of the common person, or even himself.
First and foremost, he’d previously considered the thick white trails left by grey jets in blue skies that spread out indefinitely throughout the day, eventually creating a kind of unnatural sepia-net skyline as the haze-veiled sun rolled under toward dusk. To even think such a thing out loud in the wrong (or sometimes even in the right) environment will often elicit reactions of disdain or even disgust from those it’s not meant for who may overhear, an obvious oh, another crazy person apparent in the roll of the eyes, in the inordinately loud sighing exhale of disapproval they’re bound to present.
But she didn’t, and that was just one of many things that made her so special to him, so endearing and genuine. She was the rarest of the rare, a dream being that many would long for but none would truly deserve, himself included. She understood, unlike any singular other being he’d ever come across, romantically entangled or not. The heart, honesty, mind, beauty and indeed strength of resolve and Will had drawn him in, eased him, like no other reality had.
There was a connection, like a cord, between them that grew into a spiritually inseparable bond of trust, intimacy, and a kind of love that humanity at large thinks is the stuff of fairy tales and horseshit, but for them it was a very real and intensely strong mechanism of soul by which they felt they’d be forever joined, connected on a level far beyond what the average Tinder-fucker could even conceive. It isn’t codependency, it isn’t insecurity, it is a true love in its most undiluted form, spiritual. They were, in fact soulmates. That much is certain. Or at the very least it seemed like it was.
IT CAME BACK NOW TO REAP A STRANGE HARVEST ON THEIR SOULS. ONE OF THEM HAD DONE SOMETHING, SOUGHT SOME KIND OF DEAL, BECOMING INFECTED WITH THE SPIRIT-BLACK KARMA CULL OF WHATEVER DARK THING THIS WAS THAT LURCHED IN THE DOORWAYS. HE KNEW IT WASN’T HIM.
But this Beast that haunted him so maliciously wanted nothing to do with any of that. As with the rest of life, it harangued, harassed, hissed obscenities of disillusionment and self-disinformation, clawing incessantly at the underside of his skull with talons of the blackest obsidian, ripping at the pink-turns-gray matter that constituted all of his thought, his rational behavior. They seemed to have always wanted to serve for the ruin of his existence in any way they could.
It was something that had been such an implacable portcullis to his life it actually almost ended it on more than one occasion. But he was too stubborn. The black nails were something of which he had to incessantly combat through alone, throughout the entirety of the course of his life. They’d perpetually been there as long as he could remember, abating only for periods shorter than that which yielded the opposite. The talons of the Beast cast endless doubt, self- loathing, and pains so deep as to be indescribable in words.
And that day had come, when she’d just watched too much of this complicated oxymoronic Beast tightening its grip around the good soul that truly encompassed his inner and outer being. For as much as she loved him, it was something that scared the absolute hell out of her, to watch him become almost an animal from some hideous other place. His body would even seem to change when this would happen.
He’d look bigger, the color of his eyes would transmogrify from their usual oceanic greenish blue to becoming squinted and dark, a deep hazel with red hints setting in, his pupils constricting to laser-pins of finely focused rage thoroughly obliterating whatever caught his gaze. But she was going to run from it for the wrong reasons, her flight response based more on a series of sudden bizarre material wants she didn’t even understand, a sudden disdain for intellect she’d so long prided herself on.
Even before his blow, her personality that day felt like reality had shifted, like two dimensions had overlapped, creating one awful menagerie of confusion, complication and stress. Like something was there that shouldn’t be. Perhaps there were others affected, everywhere, and others astonished that they woke up feeling as depressed or angry as they did, knowing only that they felt that way and not why, reacting to any one person or any particular thing with such a disdain or compressed inversion and ill focused rage that sharp words were dispersed like cheap hateful poetry, both parties equally guilty.
Though in his personal situation, his guilt was far more confusion regardless of whatever weirdness he occasionally believed the government or municipalities to be using. Fact is they didn’t create the situations they manipulated so much as seized them with opportunity when it presented itself, much like she’d just done, he felt his thoughts go wonky. Much like what the unnamable thing was doing inside his psyche as it consumed endlessly plans and progress and autonomous functionality, it’s hateful phrases spearing through his Will like some kind of javelin-lamprey.
Nothing new, this was the nature of the Beast. It nipped and chewed and burrowed and dug in like squatter-scabies, unseen at first, uncomfortable. But within no time you can see the tracks of burrowing that the scabies leave, like a fine little road map coarsening the length of your flesh wherever they may travel. It was different from lycanthropy, nor was it drug induced like Jekyll & Hyde. This was from places unknown.
She had seen it, this Beast, felt it with her own soul, and it still scared the living shit out of her. She took it quite personally when in fact that was never it’s intention. It just employed destruction randomly, insidiously. This was not what she had expected, not what she had wanted. This was a sickness, a possession, boiling him in esoteric oil and caging his true psyche every time it decided to allow. It was a Beast that fed on irrational mistrust and insecurity, feeding on whatever it could destroy and take from him in those horrible moments of psychic claustrophobia, including her.
Whatever strange dark thing she’d done, and at this point she wasn’t even sure as they’d been racking up, had tapped directly into this fury of darkness within him, and surrounded them both, connected so viscerally as to slightly alter his appearance, and slowly begin to drain something from her own. His Beast had attempted multiple and often successful attacks on his career and already stunted love life, but this time it was different.
When her intentions of destructive egotism hit the already charged air and engaged with his darkness, some horrible mutation of their beings had occurred. It actively messed with the future, the past, and even the real-time now, with those blackened and chipped-razor talons ripping everything they could from not only his mind but the foundation of his life, his guts, and beginning to tear into hers in a way she’d never understand.
She pulled away, his Muse, cutting like a guillotine everything they had worked for and put all of their hearts into for the past two years. There are things I want out of life, she’d said. The most beautiful and genuine thing either of them could’ve ever hoped for, crushed by the ill-communication and pleasurous torture-exhibit of his living sickness mixed with her ill-focused Will. I have to do this, I’m so sorry. Even she wasn’t sure how sorry she was at that moment. This new and thriving darkness seemed now at times in full control of him, and growing in her, yet still beyond both of their reach.
Her little games with forces she’d never understood were no help in any of this either. The depth of this existential horror was too much for either to outright accept, his mind veering to white-catatonia disbelief upon the mention, coupled with the constant feelings in his gut that this wasn’t over yet, nor should it be at all. Her mind and life veered into a downward spiraling shutdown of her soul as after the first few days, a horrific guilt draped over her once glowing lavender aura, now a sludge of halo turning a slick rotten gray.
Most painful of all, she never really did stop loving him and full well knew that he was her Other, the true love of her life, yet was denying it to herself because of her own Unnamable Thing, this ancient hell of the human condition that warped lives and destroyed all. Its mere existence disturbed her greatly seeing it in others, in her mother, in him. But to think that she may be possessed of this was something her jittering mind couldn’t accept.
She cried often at night about it, or in her car on break at work. She did what she felt she had to do, but sickly came to the realization that it was for all the wrong reasons. She realized that it boiled down to nothing more than career advancement, and what she felt she had to be to fit into the world of scarred flesh. It was for an acceptance she was very bluntly learning was not genuine, not what she’d thought it had been. She had become something she loathed, a chameleon, but in no way could face up to or fully recognize it.
And it crushed him, all of it. But it also showed him a mirror, and she unwittingly had given him a hidden key to defeat this Beast, so special as to find the esoteric puzzle and release it, bring it to the surface. Dispossess it. He had trusted her above all creatures, all sentient beings, he trusted her. And she’d betrayed that trust beyond all rational bounds, her panic over the direness of the situation she’d incurred turning to an inexplicable cruelty. Within that he’d found a certain new freedom, odd as that would seem, that freedom being the key to his release, the key that had released the Unnamable Thing from out of his soul and into the icy confines of hers.
In the windy and abnormally cold snap on lonely winter nights she’d lay awake, alone, contemplating the odd lattices of soul and connection that seemed to extend out to all things. She’d play on her social media accounts and flirt with weirdos and practice surface piercings on her soft flesh to try and alleviate the dreadful sensation that, cosmically, there was something now coming for her, only she wasn’t so sure what, but she could feel it leering from black shadows in the darkness, and hear it calling in the whipped-ice winds outside.
What she thought would be so different in her days remained a rotational drudgery that brought even less happiness. There was no longer any reason to use her mind, as conversations with dolts and drones all day added up to more aggravation, and anyhow the piercing profession in and of itself was at its base a rather mechanical one. Only now did it begin to occur to her that this whole thing was beginning to amount to a crime of what’s perceived as Karma. Except this was much darker.
In little ways she’d try to soften the situation, when not so tensed up she was involuntarily making it worse. She was staying with her mother, merely one hundred feet from where he still lived and she’d once resided. She did everything possible to avoid him most of the time, but in some ways still tried to help. It’d began to occur to her that she was slowly killing off the most important parts of another being while doing so with her own.
She watched from afar over the next couple of weeks as he prepared to move out, her heart equal parts hurt and anguish, and gazed silently as other parts of him fluctuated in a turmoil of which more growth could come. She realized his Beast had almost spontaneously lifted, and that his world was coming together around him without his even knowing it. She took a good and hard look at the situation again and a new feeling of reinvigorated stagnation kicked back in. Time, just the day, had become a long and arduous affair of endless repetition and a complete lack of ability to connect to anyone or anything, not like they had before.
It was a day or two after she’d driven him to his new destination, the roadmap of his life developing on to great things. It was a tough drive, watching his wounded heart feign being just fine, being funny, her resisting the urge to scream out Don’t Go! and turn back around, to hold his hand. She cried violently on the way back home, his scent still in the car, and back at the apartment, in the bed, the clothes.
The two of them intended to remain friends, but they both knew distance and separation would resign that to most likely holiday communications over the internet. A chill set in as she realized there had been an inner warmth in her that was no longer there. She now felt alone. She drove back in silence.
Once back at her apartment, the silence was deafening. The still emptiness of her new existence didn’t feel right. There were things swirling in the shadows, slithering cool breezes casting profane judgements, wrapping around her body and soul, that weren’t just a draft. Looking exactly the same, this once caring home was now an unrecognizable hovel of her own creation, her own insecurities. Even she felt she didn’t belong in there. She laid down exhausted, fully clothed, and essentially passed right out into an almost catatonic sleep.
At three in the morning she spontaneously, groggily awoke. She wasn’t entirely sure why, as her sleep was deep and rather dreamless. Her tongue felt like rugged sandpaper in her mouth, and she slowly arose to get herself a drink. She noticed then three immense figures of darkness surrounding her bed, one flanking either side and one at the foot. She jumped back and rubbed her eyes, a white stark terror infusing her being.
They looked down at her, wordless, faces seeming to be made of nothing more than formless shadow like the rest of them. There was a faint white light of yellow and blue hues emanating from the walk-in closet, and the shadows reached their cold solid hands to her, helping her gently up and off of the bed. She realized what this was, just what exactly was happening, and a sickness welled up inside of her like none other.
They guided her to the glow in the closet, fully opened the door and stood her before it. As she looked in she realized there was no reason now to say sorry, that it was too late for any of that. In the closet was a stairway where there was none before, right there in the middle, almost hovering. The angles on it were off, as it seemed to swirl on forever, though neither up nor down nor to any particular side. It was just there, a bridge of stairs hole-punched out of the fabric of reality and connected right into another one. She looked at the shadow beings, not entirely sure why, almost hoping for some guidance. She was on her own with this one, and there was no choice to not go into the stairs. She inhaled, silent tears streaming down her high-set cheeks and around her artfully aligned sparkling dermal piercings, the eternal tears she’d had scarred into her face when this all began.
In this moment and this moment alone, for a flash, she understood what this atonement was. That oft times the cosmos does have certain matters in place, certain inconsistencies and eccentricities, certain laws that pertain to the spirit more than numbers, to the soul more than logic. These shadow beings were the three essences conjured and invoked from the lower places of the cosmos, the Three Beasts: his, hers, and the awful mutation born from the inability to properly communicate or connect, to work the Wills in unison as opposed to imparting division. There was in fact a reason for them, and her rash decision did throw off the cosmos’ set line of action, not necessarily a fate as we usually think of it, but something of a purpose that humans could never comprehend. She then took three steps into the gateway and out of this place.
görüntülü.show
ReplyDeletewhatsapp ücretli show
U4BX