Solitude

Solitude.
You're alone, you live alone, you die alone and you spend all the time in between trying desperately to convince yourself that you're not. You pick your poisons, your delusions. How do you choose to hide the truth?

Do you scurry in the shadows? Taking the company of the other degenerate dwellers of the dark, banding together, comforting one another with sad tales of the misunderstanding and abuses of the rest of the world? And what comfort do you find in that? Does it help you? Does it make you feel somehow closer to the light, without the need of ever having to venture out into it?

Perhaps you find your comfort in the indulgence of the flesh? Fleeting pleasures, easily forgotten, easily replaced. Never get too close... That might require some effort, some commitment, some risk on your part. So you live as a coward and a leech. Take what you can, bleed them dry and then run away before you feel anything, before you have to face yourself and the truth of what you've become.

And what of your belongings, your possessions, the cold, hard love of the inanimate, providing comfort and status while you live out your days on this world. But “live” is a very subjective term, isn't it? You don't live, you simply die slowly, gathering to you, as much as possible in the futile hope that the more you own, the more worthwhile your existence would feel. Then, at the end of your days, all your possessions surrounding you, looking on with the cold indifference of the dead, it all becomes clear. You find your answers just in time to appreciate how wrong you've always been.

Chemicals. Possibly the most amusing of all your veils. Your drinks and your drugs. What's the matter? Are you so conscious of the lie in which you try to live that you need to numb your own mind to the horror of it all? Hiding in your self-induced euphoria, praying that the world doesn't find your dark, little hole, while all the time, the scavengers circle, their razor-blade smiles unseen through the clouds in which you've submerged your senses. Your head is in the sand, but just because you can't see them doesn't mean they can't see you.

Solitude.
Perhaps you do live and die alone. Perhaps, no matter how you crowd yourself with your lies, it will never make any difference. Why, though, bother with the poisons? Hy delude your mind, why convince yourself that life is anything other than what it is?

What can you leave this world with? Dignity, respect, honour and love, not only for yourself, though this is most important, but also for all the other travelers, those that you passed in your journey from cradle to grave. They might never be one with you, and you may be alone despite their presence, but they're also alone. Make their loneliness as bearable as possible, let them do the same for you.

Enjoy, love and live.

Don't ever stop.

My Irish Cottage (Incomplete)

For this introduction just read the Intro for the previous poth, the same applies here

The countryside is quiet, the grass, an emerald shade of swirling patterns as a gentle country breeze picks up the fallen Autumn leaves and sends them spiraling towards the solitary brickwork cottage perched atop the gentle rise of the grassy hill.

The cottage is almost completely still, the soft braying of cattle and the click-clack of typewriter keys drifting on the air, the only sounds that gently suspend the silence.

In sharp contrast to the quaint, old-world feel of the cottage, a fire-engine-red 1966 ford mustang rests quietly in the long driveway, a beast waiting in repose, seemingly sensing the inevitable moment when it will once again come roaring to life, knowing that moment is never far away.

A short distance away, behind the cottage, Avril sits quietly, perched atop her favourite spot, a small rocky outcropping overlooking the quiet countryside. She stares off into nothing, lost in her thoughts, caught between this world and a thousand others.
She's brought gently from her reverie by the constant tapping sounds of the typewriter keys drifting down from the upstairs window of the cottage. A smile lifts the ends of her mouth at the distraction, as she thinks about the cause. He's up there again, probably mumbling to himself, under his breath, as he tries desperately to string together the right combination of words, working to get them just right to bring life to his thoughts but never satisfied with the results of his efforts.
She used to love watching him write. She would watch his mind working, through his eyes and the lines of concentration forming on his forehead as worlds were born and destroyed on the waves of thought swirling within his head. She loved it. She loved the magic of what he did, even though he could never see it, or understand her love of it.

Incomplete

Okay, well this is an old piece now, one that I had planned on finishing, however, having read it again, I've realised that it isn't as good as I had originally hoped (I never can tell unless I've a piece some time to mature), part of the problem possible lay in the fact that I let too many people read it before it was ready so now it's lost something... Anyway, crappy or not, I've decided to post it her and leave it at that..



A speeding car. A lonely lover. A collision set in stone.

The young man stands in the middle of the road, the glow of the street lamp breaking his face into sharp geometrics of contrast, dark and light. A simplicity reflected inside his mind, that of black and white, right and wrong, good and evil.
Friends and the faceless.

That simple duality has governed everything he's thought or done his entire life, it was his only reality, his only conviction was in the absence of grey.
That all ended the day she came into his life.
She'd blasted his safely guarded convictions to pieces, her arrival shattering a lifetime of certainty as easily as he might tumble a carefully constructed house of cards.

The road stretches out into the infinite darkness behind him, its black joining that of the surrounding night, far beyond the reach of his eyes. Not that he's looking back. He stares straight ahead, his eyes on the future. Up ahead the road disappears in a bend behind the deep dark of the forest to his right. You never can see whats coming. He smiles at that, a bitter grin, and begins to walk slowly along the road towards the bend.


Some small distance away, a blue Honda civic is speeding down the same road, the driver, a middle-aged man, is drunk and euphoric. He clutches the wheel in white-knuckled hands, leaning over it and peering into the darkness outside the car through squinted eye's, wreathed in red, his vision blurred by alcohol. His smile is not bitter, he is racing his wife's suspicion home, hoping desperately to beat it there. He has just spent the day being entertained between the the bare thighs of a “hot young piece of fluff,” a girl hardly older than his own daughter. His clothes still reek of the sickeningly sweet perfume she wears. The scent is awful but it reminds him of the girl and he smiles, shifting in his car seat, his hard-on pushing painfully outward against the inside of his fly. He rubs his crotch and presses his foot flat on the accelerator.


These are the times the world closes in on you.
Everyone is either the enemy or unavailable. Friends seem to be so hard to find, where once there were many, everything is suddenly empty, bare and lifeless.
He couldn't say that he had no friends, that would be a lie, but somehow none of them seemed to matter anymore. With her gone, the colour had gone out of his world. He knows his friends matter, he cares about them still but the caring is remote, hard to reach. He's tried to tell himself that he wishes he had never met her, but he knows that's a lie. He can only futilely wish he had never lost her.

He feels so much older than his years warrant. He knows she'd laugh at that, poke fun at the cliché, and he'd laugh along with her. She always made him laugh, even when he was the joke, which he usually was. Even this walk is laughable, this pathetic little, self-imposed exile. She'd never have condoned it.

The muffled sound of his soft-soled footfalls barely audible over the oppressive sound of his own swirling thoughts, the young man strides, listlessly, down the road, unknowingly stalking towards his destiny.

Even if he were to know the fate speeding towards him, he wouldn't care. What good is any destiny, any future, without her there to face it with him? God! So pathetic, so pitiable. If their roles were reversed, he knows she wouldn't be this melodramatic. She was so much stronger than him. She'd miss him, yes, she'd mourn... But she would also move on.

So why can't he?

He feels stuck, trapped in the future, trying to reach for the past. Desperately clutching at a time before she entered his life, before she made everything right. How can he move forward without her, after sampling such bliss, perfection? Completion.

He'd always believed himself to be strong. He'd always stood by his beliefs, never faltering, never flinching. What a laugh! He'd managed to convince himself for all those years that somehow he was... More. Something better than those around him. No one had ever managed to impact him or change him. His course was unalterable and no force on earth could shift it.

He remembers the first time he'd noticed her. Long before they'd actually met. She had always looked like a sweet enough girl, in her own way. Perhaps a bit flighty, not terribly bright, but nice. Nothing more than that. Nothing he could possibly be interested in. No, he was always serious, focused.

She'd always make fun of him for that. And he'd loved her for it.

It had felt so good to let himself laugh. He'd had no idea what he'd been missing until he met her, she showed him something special in her, the reflection of which he'd learned to see in himself. Now there's nothing, he's empty, or rather, there's so much of himself that he cannot get in touch with, just the serious, sombre zombie he'd always been.

Dammit!!

Nearing the bend in the road, lost in his thoughts with eyes blurred from memories he tries to forget, the young man doesn't notice anything of his surroundings. If his mind were in the here-and-now he might be aware of the growing glow of headlights up ahead, may even hear the noise of an engine growing louder, closer. Caught as he is, though, in the fractured web of broken dreams, he remains adrift, ignorant of reality.