3 1/2

A Story by czech

The first serious work that i ever created. it is extremely raw and in some places exceedingly abstract.

I awoke to find that the world was wet with a new coat of paint. It was terrible. The beauty was mocking me, spitting into my face and pushing me down a flight of stairs. I tried to close my eyes, but honey crept into my mouth, lullabies laden with laughter made my ears their home. Lilacs dove up my nostrils and danced. Sweetly and lightly they smothered me in what could have been bliss.
I screamed aloud. It was all that I could think to do, all that made sense. And it all escaped. I couldn't hold it in. This noise flowed forth from the very essence of my being and sang to the world. Words that I could never muster surfaced and rang through that terrible picture of a day. I stole a breath and resumed my therapy.
Far away I felt the cold hand of a puppet pull me out of my splendour. He took me to his house of plastic. His cardboard wife spoke loud of nothing. His no assembly required kids entertained with stupid empty songs and foul smelling jokes. I asked my leave and was shot by an offer of dinner and bed. Out of fear I fled. I didn’t want my own set of strings.
I could see the lab coats again now. They stood tall above me, their arms outstretched. They wanted me back. They wanted to “help” me. Assimilation. Those arms wielding those terrible terrible needles. With their pills of deceit and lollipops, and those jackets, those damn jackets. Just another cage that they use to imprison you. They make you live the life they deem acceptable. They lie to me. You are not allowed to view the world this way. Your senses lie to you. They are not real. You never left this room. We want to help you. This wont hurt at all. You must stay calm. It will all be over soon. We are going to fix you. Fix. You never left this room.
I’m home now. Back in the grass with my shoes off. My shirt blows in the wind and the sun bids us farewell. A blueberry purple takes over the sky and the moon watches over us. The night wraps us up and soothes our every wound. They look at me. Into me. We start to laugh and cannot stop. This fit of joy overtakes us. I wallow in our pool of merriment, steal one last glance into the night, and I am dragged away.
How recent this was. Yet in the grand scheme of things, all is recent. Was it really I that sat there, accompanied by other sentient beings? Or were my senses lying, forcing me to perceive that which is non existent. I have been told not to trust them. They lie. Consciousness is such a miracle that to share it with another seems inconceivable. I can trust myself. I can trust that I am. But all else I can never believe.
Assuming that all is as presented, then I am in a building. I am eating with a friend. The clock is ticking once a second, the law of gravity is in effect, I am resting comfortably in a booth, and I am not alone. She speaks to me with words that glow of embers from tranquil hearth. She listens, and most importantly she understands. Without audible exchange we exit the diner and find our way to the sea. I had welcomed this shoreline into my life just recently. I pace it and we discuss things. I travel to a place where only my friend and I know. We fly together, we laugh and play and we understand each other. And for this brief moment in time, I know that we are.
She died that day. She slipped into nothingness. She left me with only the words that she procured in a final goodbye to this world.
“I will be with you when the black unknown conquers the dam, so savor the end for its all that is left.”
Moments later I held her in my arms. A cold piece of meat. Bone and flesh and cartilage. Matter. I stared into an empty window, and for once in my life, she wasn’t grinning or or laughing or feeling. She was nothing. But I was sure that she used to be. How they looked into my soul that night under the blueberry sky and I knew for that brief moment that we were. The first time in my life that I was sure of anything, and just as a child growing out of an imaginary friend, this world had forgotten them.
She was not the first to go, and she was not the last. I held that task. Before her was my brother, not by blood but by mind. By thought. By a chain of chemical reactions in your brain that have you believe as they wish. And so, he was my brother. He still breathed, felt occasionally, but stopped living long ago. Or just recently. We were walking through a shadowed wood. Night had crept upon us, the trees as its shield. I turned around to find musical notes that lifted me through the air, onto clouds of cotton that floated me to everything wondrous and right with this world. back to that night when everything made sense and I allowed myself to truly believe. When I turned back, he wasn’t there. The curtains were drawn. I said goodbye, but to the character before me that was stapled together with pencil strokes To the part of my life that he had inhabited. Thus he died.
I had to accept my fate. Death had stained me with its maroon brush. And I was now marked. As said the Doctors, the Nurses, the tests and the chart. Terminal. A horrid word, oozing with anguish it feed upon the sorrow of the damned. It had a hold of me, a leash was burning my neck and I was yanked backward. All turned to pain. Beauty whored itself out and began to taunt me, the days became a stew of monotony and order that dissolved my insides when consumed. I never could return to that night again, because now I was trapped. The padded wall stole from me my only emotion left. Pain. Shower at 9. Food at 10:00, 3:00, and 6:00. Medication at noon. Therapy at 8:00. Sleep at 11:00.
I awoke to find a curious sight. Another illusion it seemed. They were there. She and he. She spoke not a word, but with her eyes emit something dark and grim, and he, my friend from long ago, waved to me from his window long deserted. He spoke to me with bulldozers and dynamite.
“You know, they tell the truth, they dilute it with lies but they still speak some pure words”
“The Lab Coats?”
“Yes”
I trusted him. The weight of the words shifted the balance of the room and I fell. I was incapacitated. He was real now. As real as anything I had ever known. “Why are you back?” I pondered.
“you brought us back, .”
“I see... “ I spat out timidly. “So which of their foul words carries no stench?” I continued.
“What would you do if I told you that you never really did leave the room. What if you were never really in it. What if the room didn’t exist.”
And with those strokes of pen upon canvas I died. As all before me crumbled into ruin I lay weeping on a cold empty plane of neither space nor time. Alone.