Magic Carpet

The very beginning of a story

It’s all very mysterious. No one sees in. I was tearing up sheets of fire trying to make myself good. In my head I was. Hands of glass, you see, in there. Love was screaming like hungry children from every pore. I’m 100% passion with no outlet. The truth is I’m black right through, beneath the pink sheen. It’s like chopping into coal. I’m in hiding. Alone for too long again: angry, suspicious and bored, thinking in a tick-tock fashion, waiting for some exploding resolve; waiting for a breakthrough moment, the invitation to do something possible. Sometimes I whistle through my ears from the build up. Dogs can hear it, not humans. I’ve never reached any human contact in such a way. That’s why my relationships with animals are more meaningful than those with my friends. My friends simply cannot hear me. Plus, my attention span had gone to nothing with all the noise and I didn’t want to do anything. It was the stasis moment of pure immovable thought. The world was closing in, darkening at the fringes. Options were running out. There were no options for the stuck, stubborn mind. Yes, I could read, go for a walk, watch a film, feed ducks �" some live close by. There’s always porn. I could call friends and bother them for a while; my mum says she never hears from me. But these were non-options in this state. I wasn’t interested. There was only the one option �" to go into another mind. It was always the solution, to escape my interior. And that inevitable moment was coming and I fought it badly. I fought it sitting still. Passively, I fought it. I didn’t simply relent, I resisted, in as much as I sat it out. My foot was going. Sweat came. I sat until the inevitable conclusion. I waited, pretending perhaps that something else would take me. It never does, and didn’t. I waited for the bitterness and suspicion, the tedium and ennui, the depressed state to evolve into despair. It never fails me; the bottom of the pit, and only destination certain of itself. From the bottom of the pit, one way or another, you elevate, or lie flat: that’s death there, eyeballing you. Despair, the phase where, right or wrong, answers come; a phase where decisions make themselves, and robotic, I follow.  

 

So it was three o’clock, after four hours of my typical scenario. Mechanically, it simply happened, though of course I went to acquire ‘the means’, and I sat with it. I let the despair flood and run wild as chaos, as feral men at war. I let the despair tell every sunken, stripped, hopeless cell that it needed ‘the means’. And when the screaming, sick, spastic, agonised every cell through to the core of marrow screeched like a throttled spittle-dripping blood-wetted fanged wind, I pinned myself to the wall and sank, made myself the floor, melted, and in less than seconds the warm, saturating, warmly it swept, cradling me in the softened world, the numbing but not numbness, and loved. ‘There-there’, wordless it said. Smoothly it came. ‘I love you’, wordless, and meant it beyond the terms of people; no mere folk expression so trusted and encompassing. Swept, cradled, carried me, the carpet, and on the carpet, away I was.