Friday, March 27, 2009

Sprawled on these cathedral steps

Note: the following post was started at 2.30 last night/this morning (semantics!) and is rambly and looney like posts of that hour tend to be. Thing is I would have posted it last night, and probably rambled a lot more, but my laptop had enough of this stupidity and cut out before I had even finished it. I have decided to post it in it's unfinished form as was automatically saved by the draft function because it's what would have gone up and hell, I want to stay true to my own idiocy. I spent a good hour afterwards still scribbling in my notebook. But yes it's quite abrupt and you can imagine me sitting there, struggling to keep my head up, banging at the keyboard in a perplexed manner as the screen blacked out. Much like Gwen in the first episode of Torchwood. Anyway, have it.

**

Feeling blurred around the edges. Have reached that state of sleeplessness where everything seems to slow, you can feel the tiny mechanics that go into something so ordinary, so arbitrary, such as blinking your eye. Closeted and wrapped in cotton wool. Breathing shallow and barely susceptible. We're the closest thing to being both in and of the world. I want to go out and feel the city breathe again, like I used to. Walk the streets after hours, when it's so quiet it's almost as if you can feel a heartbeat underneath the pavement. Get lost in the haze of steam rising from a coffee from the only place open on six blocks, and pull the jacket closer while stumbling like a drunkard down a street flooded in artifical light, both drowning and revelling in it. Hood up, gloved up, cool air ghosting across cheeks. I haven't done that in years, I've lost that person in the ebb and flow of all that's passed. Grown up and moved on. Changed so much, and subtly changed together. The imprint lingers somewhere on my concious, a ghost of things past, things that form part of the very fibres of your existence. You may lose some things but maybe that doesn't matter as long as you never forget. Sometimes I want to go out and wrap myself in the very essence of what it is to be someone else. Someone clever. Someone witty. Someone pretty. Someone easy. Someone normal. But it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter that I can't be those things, that I feel so disconnected and removed. There isn't a single light on in my street - I know, I can see it all from where I'm sitting. There is no one awake but me. At times like these I own the night, I own this street, I own this city. It's mine for the taking, mine for reappropriating. I can shape it to be whatever I need, whatever I want, whatever I feel. It's mine in a way it can never be anyone else's. It's enough.

I get so nostalgic in my sleepless nights. So existential in pre-dawn hours. There is no other time better suited for pointless whims of fancy, and can one really be blamed for questioning when your very environment forces the questions upon you by mere circumstance? It's hardly the norm and you have to ask why - why, what, how, when, and where? It doesn't help that late night television is possibly the strangest thing ever. Inane ads and infomercials, what possibly makes this the key demographic for this sort of thing? The reasoning behind this must be shocking. I can't think straight, I'm seeing in sevens. Too tired to move and so fingers keep typing fo their own violition. This won't make any sense. I won't remember even writing it in the morning. Sleep typing? Does such a condition exist? Don't see why not, many other 'sleep' conditions are available. But then I'm not asleep. That's the whole problem. Although perhaps some part of my brain has shut down (perhaps for it's own protection) and that's why I can sit here typing out this inane chatter as I talk in circles to myself. It never shuts up. I wonder if I have a future, I wonder if it matters, I wonder if I will ever stop feeling like I'm outliving myself. Reading this Milan Kunderra book in which one character suggests death is still concious, you can hear everything that's going on around you, you simply can't make the "outside" world realise this - a nightmare that you can't wake from, you can't scream yourself out of. True disconnection. Being buried though, you wont hear anything. So what? Perpetual, concious silence? What about cremation or that sort of thing, would the various parts still be concious even though it's been dispersed? I suppose silence in such a context would be better, easier to just zone out and drift. If you could here everything that's happening around you and yet know there's no way for you to reach out, that would be pretty rough. Actively being denied life with every miniscule action that takes palce in your vicinity. How odd. No one cares anyway.

**

Music: Wind rustling the trees next door
Mood: Pensive and sleep deprived
Photobucket

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