Strain of Consciousness

-He gets off the bed, stepping on the blanket, which remains on the floor, gazes around the room laconically before exiting it, toward the bathroom. Even when he lets go of things, he has this tendency of holding on. The thought crosses his mind as the light comes on in the small mildewed bathroom, the trickle sound of water splashing, it’s like the wall. And he thinks about the walls of the old house. They’ve been painted over countless times, so that when you sit in a room long enough, simply staring into them, you can make out the outlines […]

-He rolls over in his bed, his eyes moving rapidly underneath his thin, almost translucent eyelids. The rain outside crashes against the window, a stampede of ants, crushing any possibility of seeing the world outside. With a sudden snap, his eyelids roll back in his head and he exhales a long frothy breath. A cloud with a haze, taken from the moment of waking, the stealing moments of dreams. He breathes heavy as he sits there, the blanket strewn to the ground. It’s the same blanket that has been there every morning at his waking; the same blanket that he […]

-In the darkness, he fumbles with his thoughts. Always, the wonderment. Much has been misplaced in his life and it’s in the dark, as the cigarette crackles, that he begins to think. “The mice eating away at the house,” a great poet once said. And he sits there, in the darkness, the realm of shadows and unseen manifestations. When the light is on, he sees shapes in the shadows of day. He sees people and names. Now, it’s all recollection, everything reconfigured, everything redrafted by the mechanism of memory. An impossible hallucination of what his life has been, that only […]

As the darkness enshrouds the room, the cigarette smoke is swept by the fan into a spiral. Fibonacci he thinks, always intrigued by spirals. Every artist attempts to make use of symbology, if only for their own validity He’s attempted it too, pulling in the orbit of time and exploding stars. He hasn’t reached anything. Not yet. Though, in his own words, he still believes in miracles. At an age in which the tooth fairy, the Easter Bunny and Angels have all joined the realm of the Seven Dwarfs, Gepetto and Happily Ever After. There’s still an intrigue, motionless as […]

-There are certain places that harbor ghosts, they keep them, but don’t allow them free reign. This is why, as I look out the window and I’m turning right onto DeLacey, I see her. Not her, not as she ever was, but the only way I can see her now. A sense of her perhaps, or the only part of her left with me, quickly fading, so that as I sit at the very top of the parking structure, the one her and I came to years ago, I worry about the name I should give her memory or what […]

-He remembers her eyes, as if they were windows to her soul, more than that, as if they were her soul. Who’s to say that the soul lingers in the heart, in between pulsations, is it not more fitting to believe that it remains in the eyes, where it cannot be seen but can be felt. He felt her soul that night, and perhaps, that is why all he remembers now, are her eyes. It was there, amidst the flood of tears. And to see her cry was like watching his own tears fall, a reflection. She wrote letters to […]