A Snapshot

The night was one without particular virtue. Sad clouds sat nestled in a gray tumult of mottled sky, hidden by the streetlights and uncaring of the human crap beneath. Shards of shattered night fabric, cropped up against erect towers of huddling, glimmering silver, and endless stories of wet brick apartments. Trees bent lazily from smog and sunless ness, whittled out by the collective loneliness of this forsaken city of shit.

Somewhere in the world, I can imagine birds singing their songs in happy daylight and kissing nectar from tree buds, fruit from the tassels of berried vines.

Drown all of that out with traffic. Its time to dwell in the city. It keeps you going, and supplies you with reasons to keep hating yourself.

Now all of that disappears under the mist of hyperactive pop music and screams of the joyous underclass. Alcohol brings out the best in the citizenry. Sirens have long ceased their wailing in these, the most emotionally desolate parts of the world. These are still the less enthused about lining up to be parts for the big machine.

Somewhere in the world, a quiet family evening at home is being interrupted. It could be the celebrant new mother in the upstairs apartment or even the grieving old mother below you. You could hang your head out of the window and feel the sluicing of group angst, pouring through hollow streets and running into hollow hearts.

I'm laying back on a soft mattress, lined in cheap satin, feeling the chilled springs that prop up the complex artifice of my spinal column. Surges of lazy strength pulse down its length, twitching my fingers with an unfired anger.

The walls around me ache with memories of an old life. I sit in the bedroom of my childhood. I was nurtured into life in this very space, took beginning steps and falls on this coarsely grained oak floor. There once hung a good collection of pictures on these walls, frozen frames of the better parts of my life, times when people cared enough to step out of their lives for a moment and be a new actor with me in front of the camera.

A lone blanket covers my legs as I recline, reeling from the vicariousness of the day. My mother made this threadbare garment for me, working patches of cloth meticulously into one another, for nights on end. She lent her blood and countless hours to this worn gaudy blanket that keeps me nominally warm.

I'm lying in this giant mess of shredded experiences, each one bloated by the new problems and the disillusionment. Each memory is just as threadbare as my sad little blanket, torn from being worked over and over again by tired fingers, with them searching for the faded meaning they once held.