Heat

Monday was a blast. A bloody explosion after the wonderful Friday I had. Family Entertainment burned my socks off, with fun in the sun, the big burning sun. It's lovely to know that you can fall from the top of a ladder, breaking all the rungs as you do so. That was my standard for lit in a nutshell.

And then I had a parcel that I want to get mailed to the Antarctica, say a vase that I had carefully cushioned and sealed in a box, along with fake flowers. A little affection for you there, baby.

Oh but that love was not meant to be. A kid came along with a pair of shears, because knocking over the parcel was not enough, and snipped up the box and scattered the remains of my heart all over the neighbourhood. Great. A whole lot of fluff and nowhere to put it.

I find it funny. I find it fucking hilarious. I am also hungry and exhausted and angry. The residue from the distillation of liquid life is salty heat and vapour of our faith clings to the glass of the round bottomed flask. The product is tears dripping fearlessly out of the low-grade condenser, disgustingly warm.

I was not in the mood to give sweet encouraging words or advice that would have fallen on still-deaf ears. Any helpline had escaped even before she had given the thought considerable credit. Why all the sobbing then?

It was rage. It was amusement. It was a bag of desperation hurling rocks at the expected. Above all, it was the quiet disbelief that life was that fragile. Perhaps it wasn't naturally as such; perhaps it was more of the self inflicted cracks that made the mirror shatter. I saw today the lethal brew of stubbornness and intoxication from pain.

I was close to freezing for forty minutes as I had the last time. The temptation to exercise self control over the body and mind was so great, just so I could be sure I conveyed nothing. Nothing that could be potentially harmful to somebody else since I never said it; nothing that could hurt myself since there was nothing to harm. I had become invisible to myself for forty minutes and the experience was bittersweet.

I had to keep on moving, even in a daze, to stop myself from that tension in my arms, tension in my face and tension that could possibly undo me. I kept moving because I had to distract myself, but of course, we never find what we look out for. The space that the familiar warmth and smell would linger at was as vacant as the beach in winter.

Not even the offer of froyo could ice my heavy heart and I asked if there was truly no one else I could speak to. There wasn't. There wasn't even the opportunity to share the nagging worries at the back of my head. Everybody's got their own head full of black smoke, why should I add to it?

Even Mavis had gone home. I tried to ventilate my mind, but to no avail.

As if that was not enough for me, I leapt into a pool of freezing water when the last thing I wanted was to spill the beans. It was horrible hearing myself. Defensive, evasive, all but nothing made of useless odd cotton. By the time I had finished, it was resignation that stained my tongue.

Things couldn't have suffered more in the time it takes to flip my hand. You were deep in analysis of the ways of humans and I thought you had finally found a buoy to float back to shore with. I thought you were on the right track. Turns out, you certainly were on the right track... to hell. It certainly turned dark as the darkest corner in hell could be, where the wicked flames did not lick. By the time I had caught the gist of you foreshadowing your own demise, I was begging for a bus to lose control and ram into me.

This numbing is extraordinary fuel for my mind, but it sure is goddamn draining . I just hope nobody else throws firewood this way.

(The only good part about today was the little funny things like the koala and weed in class, even though the lesson was shit. Oh yes, and the unritual I've been trying to accept . It always feels good to wrap your hands around a big piece of diamond. Even if I was a major stinkbomb.)