clinging to the wreckage

I struggle with my grip on reality. It loosens and I find myself falling through spiralling prisms of sounds and sights making no sense. I fail to relate to or make sense of anything. Sitting alone in a silent room I feel distant from everything that exists… people, the chair upon which I sit, the table before me. Lonely yet somehow numb to it I light a candle and sip a drink. The glass is tangible and firm in my hand and yet I feel estranged to it. It is smooth and cold and has weight but it is an object and I am indifferent to its purpose, its existence.             My mother once said to me ‘You can travel all over the world but you will never escape yourself.’ I was silenced and forced into thought… I realised that she was correct. The most troubled relationship that I have ever experienced in my life is the one with myself, especially myself in love. In love I am lost… hopeless… a castaway. My weaknesses are lit up in neon signs each time I am in this situat

Moving slowly along these piss-stained streets towards an unwelcoming door…. moments before I felt your hug, a hug that said ‘I don’t want you but I don’t want you to be sad’. I stop at the Chinese store, a Spanish delight, to buy beer and wine so that I can self medicate. Once inside my apartment, I cut my hair – you hate it when I do but I suspect you care less and less about it now – and then shower. I pour a beer into a glass and then admire the beads of condensation as they form and fall like the tears I try to keep inside. It’s always death. I always return to the same, stable companions; this glass in my hand and the music that constantly fills the room. Placing the glass upon the table I lift another book that deals with loss, with isolation, with lost hope and the meaninglessness of everything. We seek meaning and yet we are carbon-based wastage.

The conflict rages on within me. I see the conservative, traditional, conventional lifestyles around me and I feel repulsed at the suffocating banality of it all. And, at the same time, I fall headlong into love and cling to the one I love, all the while realising that I am as guilty as anyone and everyone for causing this suffocation. I’ve lost faith… and yet still I cling. It is simply not possible to be satisfied mentally, emotionally, and physically by one person and therefore we constantly pine for all the things that we do not have. It manifests in many ways and we become a mass mess of wanting that which lies beyond us. All the while, I suspect, the answer may be directly before us in the shape of remaining an individual, compassionate, single and free. It is natural to seek love but we tend to build walls of confinement around this and become ensnared within our own traps – marriage, children, home ownership, etc. From within the white walls of our vanilla confinement