Honor: 0 [ Give / Take ]
12 entries this month
Day XXX
05:10 Jan 24 2011
Times Read: 461
She's on a honeymoon. The Angry One married a man from the neighboring office complex two weeks ago and they just now coordinated their schedules to take their joint leave. Can you be cuckolded by a corpse? I'm sure the man she's straddling just now would say so. But who can be sure with that one?
Day XXVII
04:23 Jan 24 2011
Times Read: 464
I don't understand how they expect me to "come around" when they keep ambushing me with that wide-eyed optimism. They don't seem to notice how I've been scuttling around the apartment the past weeks, if I could hide under the fridge when Noisy Man flips the light on me I would. In fact, that look the woman wears is akin to that of a housewife with a boot handy some days. Why won't these people leave my space? They're so concerned with fixing me that the idea that somethings cannot be unbroken doesn't seem to occur to them for a moment.
Day XXV
23:50 Jan 21 2011
Times Read: 471
She wasn't there. I had my gifted day of hiatus from the world beyond my eyelids and then resumed the facade. It was a few days before I realized but now that I know I can't help but notice the thought loitering at my peripheries. There is no one to trip over, no one to break the trance, no one to shoot ferocious, furrow-brow-ed glances my way.
It's the disruption of my pattern that has thrown off the rhythm to my days, I never understood how fundamental the cadence is until the beat was gone. This is not good. The more my mind stretches to find new solutions the more accustomed my body becomes to the motion, I bowed out of the cacophony years ago. I'd only become one step greater of a monstrosity. What's more unnatural than a corpse pretending to breathe? A worn out, recycled consciousness pretending to be new, that's what. It cannot work, death should not be optional from the other side. Were mortality to become a revolving door the whole system of things would fall apart. No, I will simply make my way through this Limbo until my nerves finally quit twitching while disturbing as few of those still swaying to the discord as possible.
Day XXI
22:07 Jan 14 2011
Times Read: 482
They talked all night. I didn't realize that I had fallen into true sleep until the light trickled into vision. There was a soft rustle and a gentile thud before the light bowed back out and when I raised up I saw the green glow of my phone receiver by the door. After a moment I stood and gathered it. When I rested it against my ear before I had a chance to huff a greeting I was assaulted by the voice of the angry one, "You're deathly ill with food poisoning and not coming in today. You're lucky I noticed you missing before Rourke did or your dumb-ass would be canned right now. I told him you ate a bad shrimp when you went out to dinner last night... with me. At least he had the common courtesy not to forget about us. You-you better show tomorrow, I'm not putting my ass on the line for you twice, Dick Weasel." I sat in the dead air for a few moments before I registered the abrupt click that followed. A whole day with no one's patterns or concerned glances interrupting my peace, maybe this time it will stick. Sometimes a jump-start is all the wayward soul needs to reorient elsewhere and let blown out neurons alone.
Day XX
21:42 Jan 14 2011
Times Read: 485
They are out there talking about me right now, the woman and the man she planted on my sofa last week. It is the only reason I am still conscious, for there is no louder sound than that of a conversation not meant to be heard. Hushed urgency operates at an octave impossible to ignore. Their desperate, exasperated murmurs make no sense to me, the woman keeps cursing "that damned 'masterpiece'," and the man recounted his stumble into this place, "He was just laying there on a mattress covered in papers, everything was covered in layers of crumpled papers. He looked like he hadn't moved in weeks. Hell, if I hadn't seen him come in a couple hours before I'd have thought he was a coma patient, sleeping with his eyes open. All the light bulbs and mirrors were busted. I don't know if he's coming out of this, Viv." How do you undo death, sir? Tell me that.
Day XVII
20:39 Jan 13 2011
Times Read: 492
I used to be able to drop lucidity at the front door along side my coat and shoes but with the noisy man here my nights reserved for respite have changed. He threw out the slowly liquefying plants I'd forgotten were there, he invites the neighbors over for coffee-my coffee-with a "kick" and several times a day insists upon orchestrating a mini symphony of pots and plates and every utensil in the house it seems and always at its crescendo rather than "suffer [my] prison food." This is not my routine. He has touched and claimed every bit of this place other than the makeshift sarcophagus of my bedroom. That is my place. Even a leech can understand that. I never had much sense of propriety before but when every other inch of my once bachelor apartment now vibrating with the cacophony of life this is room is my untouched oasis. I can still hear myself unthink here.
The first few days my catatonia seemed to go unnoticed. The noisy man smiled and initiated conversation when I came home from the office but something about my blank half-smile kept the venture into intimacy from going much farther and he let me continue on to my room. Later the light and noise I'd shut out erupted through my bedroom door, a hearty greeting spurted forth before it was quickly cut off. I heard a nervous shuffle on the papers still blanketing my floor, left to lie since the day my eyelids defied nature and decided on a postmortem flutter that kept me beached just this side of peace. He stuttered something that sounded like an apology but wouldn't catch hold of my slack-jawed gaze. He fidgeted a moment longer, staring up at the shattered light fixture dangling several feet over my turned head. Mausoleums aren't meant for those still tethered to breath and he looked as if he was suffocating on the scene. Eventually he managed a slow nod and backed out of the door, pulling it closed as he went. I heard the plate he'd meant to present me with thud softly against the baseboard near the doorjamb. He leaves meals there still even though they always end up untouched until they congeal as hard and frigid as a corpse.
Day XV
02:11 Jan 13 2011
Times Read: 495
The angry one at the office called me a sociopath today. I don't know what I do there. I have a desk that faces the wall and always has papers on it. If someone left the stamp out I will mark a few at random but otherwise I toss the stack immediately into the city scape of white erecting on my neighbor's desk. I never see what he does with them all but from his look of grudging acceptence every morning I gather that this is something I did alive as well. Then, I sit. I allow the yellowing plaster wall, cork board filled with crumpled reciepts and random scraps (no one told me what I'm supposed to put up there but it raises questions emtpy. People like you to fill your spaces, it just doesn't really matter with what it seems) and the frantic mumbles of the hunched man next to me fade away into the abyss I hover so intimately near. One day my over zealous heart will concede this fruitless battle and let me stay within the nothing but until then I eventually come to and continue the patterns. At the office it is always to the angry one kicking my swivel chair on her way out, "Dumbass would stay here all night if he could," I heard waft past once.
Like the one who claims to be my sister, the angry one knows something is wrong too. Only she isn't saddened by it, she seems infuriated at the absense. I try to avoid her and her wild eyes when I can but my perceptive moments are far between these days and I frequently nearly run her over. She seems to always be lurking somewhere underfoot. Today, in the chaos of our near collision my arm swung wildly and landed somewhere that ripped a startled gasp from her and she leapt up to attach herself to my face. After a few moments of standing unresponsive beneath her writhes and moans I came to to her small, pink hand on a quick, violent trajectory with my awaiting cheek. I did not move to stop it, nor did I for the subsequent series that followed when the first strike failed too to draw a reaction. There were expletives and accusations I couldn't quite make out the whole of clinging about the blows. But soon the air settled and she was standing there still, shivering slightly. She slowly wiped her left eye and exhaled steadily, "I forgot, you're not in there anymore." She didn't kick my chair today.
Day X
05:15 Jan 10 2011
Times Read: 500
Apparently I have been far too studious in my personal upkeep. In observing this man in his daily routine I have picked up a few peculiarities of the living I had missed on my own. This situation may be more beneficial than at first perceived.
Day VII
04:32 Jan 10 2011
Times Read: 503
There's a man radiating horrendous noises on my couch. The woman brought him to my door this morning along with an acute gaze of expectation laced with a nervous urgency that sent a phantom of a leap through my ruined, dormant heart, shaking a little dust loose. I keep failing these tests of hers even though the rules never change. Everyone else can contentedly blame my lapses on the absent mindedness of the common bachelor, but not her. She knew me too well to be fooled for too long. Her sighs are as profound as any other man's rhetoric. Clearly this is a man I have some sort of connection to, one that warrants his cavalier commandeering of my living room and solitary peace. How am I to pretend at normalcy with that man crowding my supposed sanctuary?
Day VI
03:51 Jan 10 2011
Times Read: 504
Days passed and nothing. Nothing at all changed but the strange hunger in that woman's eyes. I cannot decipher those looks she hurtles at me, as if waiting for the day I reach out to catch one. That faint look more profound than disappointment makes me want to pretend I do some days for the briefest of moments, before the vacuum shifts and the numbness resumes.
She says she's my sister and I always agree. I forget her face some days, I don't think she notices. No one seems to care too much about the little things as long as I keep going through the patterns they expect of me and I memorized those quickly. People don't ask questions, don't demand the new thoughts I'll never have when they see what they want the first time.
Day II
03:05 Jan 10 2011
Times Read: 511
Here I am again, at the edge of a decaying day with this static impulse driving me to this chair, this pen, this book, these words. Something is amiss. The pattern is changing and I am ill equipped to adapt. That woman with the watery stare persisted a moment longer, lingered an added instant as if this time about to breach the precipice. Something is stirring. If only I had the faculties to glean just what.
Perhaps they've discovered my malady and decided to close me in my casket for good this time. This dirge has been echoing for far too long, someone was bound to catch on. My money was always on the woman with the watery stare.
Day I
00:29 Jan 10 2011
Times Read: 519
I died years ago, nobody noticed. I haven't written in years, unless otherwise prompted by some routine task that is. The dead no longer create.
This is not a creation, rather a compilation and retelling of facts. I have no design on inspiration nor revelation in the reader of this. I feel no sense of duty to truth nor entertainment nor beauty. I feel nothing at all, those synapses atrophied years ago. This is simply a chance, temporary spark of a whim to mark down these fading observations. Like connecting electrodes to the corpse of a frog to watch it jump, this cerebral jerk too will quickly quiet and fall dead once more.
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