Smoke Signals

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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.