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He rocked
side to side with a cavernous grin. Red wine lips, stained teeth with the gaps
in-between, sliding his words like refuse from a cutting board pulling them
down down piece by piece to land in a nonsensical pile. I sat glazed and numb
at the endless stream of passion and misery–like a vacillating rubber ball
bouncing between complete insanity and borderline genius. It seemed in so many ways that my days had
never been so empty. Devoid of any real meaning they spun away, one by one,
into the past behind me, never to be seen or thought of again. A strange type
of limbo had rolled in on me like a storm from the sea and cast my days in a
haze of putrescence and mendacity. He pulled me in close like a deranged boa
constrictor and I held his broken fingers and strong arms like a baby, sick
with lacking, sick with fear, sick with a pervasive neediness that coursed from
vein to vein. Rock me gently, rock me slowly broken man.
I was a
series of incomplete satires of a functional human being. I remember all those humid
sleepless nights, caught inside a thought, spinning my way from room to room.
Tea, or hot coffee, and a sunrise, a brisk jog and a faltering start towards
adulthood. Perpetually manic and hungry. It’s hard to comprehend just how something
so meaningful and driven could collide with such emptiness and drift. It was
almost unbelievable. To the point where I half expected some wild boar of
inspiration to come charging through the front door and drive me onwards to
some great destiny. Instead I just waited, chasing the clouds away with respiration.
This is how you get caught inside the demented worlds of deranged men and
wayward children’s fantasies. The emptiness sets you free, but it also makes
you directionless and malleable. Free to wander in and wander out of anywhere,
to decide without hesitation to become a ghost on the lips of any other
outsider. That is what travelling is mostly. Removing the endless tourism and
any connection to your previous self to dine on the nothingness every night; be
it a quiet peace or deafening silence.
He used to
beat me senseless with his words. They flew like big fat globular punches to
the face–right, left, right left–again and again until I would submit to the
silence within me, submit to calm his angry tirades of stupidity and
narcissism. This man was like a twist
tie I found locked around my shoe. On and on he would go, up and down each
street, scraping the pavement like an irritating whistle. I felt insane. I felt
like I was slowly being rendered, cooking inside myself. I would kick and
scream the monkey beside me trying to scrap the shoe against barbedwire. He would
only stick harder. And I would only scream louder. And bottles would fly and
punches would land. And then it was all spit and spanking and heaving myself
into a submissive ball of bones and flesh and indifference. We would hold each
other, but only to make the spinning stop. And his eyes would glaze, and his
mouth would gape in a tonsil-bearing laugh. And sometimes I would laugh too and
wonder in a part of me what exactly we were laughing at. Perhaps it was just
some of the absurdity escaping. Little giggles like bits of dust from the
unused doily on the side table at grandmas house where she sometimes put candy
before she died. But I could never forget the disappointment of that white
crocheted circle when it was empty; because it was either Worthers Originals
and a place to hide, or Wheel of Fortune on the puke green couch that smelled
like Epsom salts and old newspapers.
