I. Step Forward.


II. A Dream.


Fall among the sheets like they’re leaves. Alcohol mixed with your drug of choice dancing through your veins. The cigarette falls from your fingers into the ashtray. You can feel your heart laboring to pump the nicotine and the alcohol and the drugs through you.
It’s warm, eyes closed, the light on your face, the cat curled in the bend of your knee, the sounds of the pet rats chewing on seeds in the cage. Your neighbours are singing downstairs – a lilting melody, fleeting, hardly noticeable with the rush of blood in your ears.
Beauty. Beauty beauty you wait for it. The colours through your eyelids swirling and your limbs are uncomfortable cold and numb, but they’re heavy too, and you don’t want to reach for the blanket. Besides, you’d disturb the cat. Yes, silent laughter you bellow. Yes yes, this is it.
Beauty. And the sounds of the rats chewing on seeds. Warmth on your leg from the cat, and the frail melody through the construction of the building, perhaps it’s imagined.
Your heart is working softer and your eyes are heavy and your limbs are heavy and there’s gravity pulling down on you, but you know it’s down – you are just too tired to hold your chest up.
Light becomes consumption and it burns through your eyelids and consumes you. It eats you alive, but without pain, and you exhale to make room for it inside you.

Silence comes in a rush.

The soft click of a key turning in a lock.
This is what greets you as you sit bolt upright in bed, staring about you wild-eyed, searching for form in the darkness. Your eyes find a sliver of light, which expands to a strip of light, and now the room is filled with malformed shadows.
A whisper. Your name is being called from somewhere among the grey shapes, then the light expands to blind you before you are plunged once again into the darkness of night. You hear the click of the bolt being locked.
A whisper, your name again, and you realize that this is not where you laid yourself down what must have been only moments ago. The darkness suddenly begins to feel heavy on your skin, oppressing you, filled with the sounds of unfamiliar footsteps padding towards the bed. The mattress shifts under you, and the springs tell you that someone else is among these sheets with you, whether sitting or laying, you cannot tell. Now even your clothes, the sheets, the air seems foreign, so incredibly foreign you wonder if you have fallen out of time to a new place, or have been whisked away into the realms of insanity - your greatest fear and most fervent wish.
So startled and shaken, you can do naught but hold your breath, to the sound of a zipper in the dark. A murmur – it sounds masculine, but the thickness of the air cloaks everything in a mask of androgyny. And now the sounds of clothes shifting, the springs shifting the weight on the bed, and a light smell of the heat of a day of wearing one’s flesh. But the weight seems to settle – a decline in the bed running from you to the other occupant, almost seeming to push you in that direction.
You yearn to speak out, to reach out, to find out, but the silence and the darkness have formed a wall impenetrable, and you are left wild-eyed and alone, straining to sense anything more telling than the smell and heat of another human being.
Is it insanity? After these many years of walking the edge of the knife, can it be you have finally lost the edge?

[to be continued.]






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