Vertigo

What an angry boy, with such a hidden villainous smile. Never sated. How sickening, how nauseating to be so. The common plague of a human condition.

It felt like floating on ice in the middle of an oasis in the middle of a desert. Hard to imagine? Here let me help, piece this together for you: It felt like being in the desert. Destitute. No sign of help for miles. No evidence of life. Just my cracked lips passing borrowed air. But there’s hope that I just might survive, because despite the insanity that plagues one stuck in the desert, and the mindless loop of appetitive thought (“I’m hungry, I’m thirsty, I’m tired, when will I get out? Will I die here?.”) I just so happen to be surrounded by a lifeline- water. Knuckle-whitening, shudder-inducing, spine-cracking glacial, ice cold water.  This one thing that could save me, could just as well just as fast- if not faster- kill me.

But.

But It also feels kinda raw and like savagery. Peeling the plush from my bone and snapping me back against the ice and sticking me there. Rotting my old beaten body. “This is how I deserve to die” I flippantly think. I always think very flippantly about my own life. I’ve always felt very detached from it. It’s a strange and ridiculous feeling. . I look at my life with such paralyzing unconcern, it pains me. But then again these are all feelings. Those where just metaphors and if I willed myself, with little effort, they could be forgotten on the days count.

I was running on the empty track, the muscles in my legs burning out and pulsing with every stretched out step. Running away from predators was never my problem it was always running towards the prey that played my executioner. Lu was so out of reach here. I swore he was a distant dream. I existed the best in my dreams anyway, but I suppose that doesn’t matter given that everyone in your dreams is technically you. I kept running, looping over the track again and again losing count and sense and sense of the self. I wanted to forget about wanting him, about seeing him about knowing him smelling him. There was so much that I was holding onto, and hoping, recklessly, that he was too. It was draining me. I was losing myself to myself on account of wanting something that was never mine. The bottom of my tired trainer gripped a little too forcefully into the asphalt with heaviness of my next step,  breaking my run into a an awkward and riotous fall to my face. My knees stung and I hissed quietly at the pain (never let anyone hear you wince, for even when you are alone your fear is a weapon against you) 

Using the force of my flat palms against the gravel I attempt to lift myself. If I let myself lay fallen for too long I’ve given up. And I am not ready to give up yet I’m still hopeful. Still reckless. But my body knew better, exhausted and worn out, I flopped back into the ground the side of my cheek scuffed, not enough to draw blood but definitely enough to re-instil the self-loathing I thought I had shaken off a while ago.  I keep wondering how am I here. How have I fucked up so bad? How can this be it? I wanted to scream that it wasn’t fair but I couldn’t because I knew that wasn’t true and I may be many things but rarely in denial about the things I knew I deserved.

I lay there for a while. Letting my ugly tears seep into my skin and mixing with my sweat and a little blood into the ground. Not having it in me to lift myself. To just get up this time. My body casting a clumpy human silhouette in the darkness of the night like a dilapidated sack in the dunes of a trash island. I thought about the words that he whispered, in a pattern. “You’re just so cruel and it’s so easy for you. It scares me.”

“It scares me.”

“It scares me.”

For I a while that’s all I could hear. No hushed humming of the flickering track lights or distant oblivious passing cars. That’s all I could hear- “It scares me.” I am scared. I am scared because I scare him and even more, I don’t know how to fix it. He saw me then. Violent and dirty.

I am scared that it will stay like this forever.

I’m so angry.  

It makes my legs shake and ripple. I remember when I was a kid how I used to get so angry, and it scared me because I didn’t want to hurt anybody so I would bite the inside of my palm so hard, hard enough to draw blood. And I would think , “That’s better.” And just as quickly “What’s wrong with you?” I just have all this rage in me. And sure, I can never bring myself to hurt anyone physically but this skin piercing rage douses me all the time and it get’s so heavy and agonizing. And think it’s what I deserve. I’m still laying on the ground, crying pathetically. Every selfish, self involved thought fleeting and shoving me harder to the edge of a volcano I’ve been avoiding for years. I just need my mind to stop for a while. I need my heart to stop beating, I need my lungs to stop filling up with borrowed air, I need my thoughts to quieten, I need my blood to stop looping about my body, thinking that I need it. I feel like I’m praying to some ignorant God but it it’s all I have and that thought is so f*****g brutal.

 I scream hard, and wildly into the ground. And I feel my rage shake up the earth.

“Dude, are you okay?”

I roll over onto my back, blinking at the unexpected brightness of the moon. Harlo stands next to me. Peering down with a can of coke in one hand a waist-length stick in the other. I’d act surprised that he’s here but I’m not. I’ve seen him sit in the grandstands in the middle of the night with that radio and a pack of marshmallows at least 4 times from my dorm.

He sips the coke languidly, his lanky body almost drifting with the breeze. He looks like a cat.

I sit up, hands filthy and face rotting into a mess of sweat and gravel and tears and specks of blood in my cheeks. My legs are stretched out in front of me, and I just look at him. Silent. I have no more energy to say anything.

He puts the coke between my open legs and sits down in front of me. We don’t speak. We just sit in the dark, unmoving  on the moving earth.

After some time like this, the tears are leached in by my brown human skin and the swell in my throat deflates.

“Most days I feel empty like disturbingly , unnervingly empty it f*****g sucks." He blinks and glances my way, clearly a little surprised that I've ruptured the silence so soon. But he doesn't say anything. 

"I think most of us feel that way, though there’s just those of us who linger and waft around in limbo all day, all year all our lives thinking one day it will get better, or there’ll be some miraculous James Bond or a eureekah moment when we realise it’s our job. It our thing to save ourselves and there there’s the other guys, gallantly stomping around having a self- proclaimed step by step program on how to live well and right and become monks and sell their  Ferraris. I. But they  have this incessant need to prove that they know. They know that life’s gonna work out and karma comes around and we have some crazy remarkable purpose but, you know what?”

I turn to him. His face is void of anything that tells me I sound crazy which I’m sure I do, but I feel all these frothing words at my mouth and I can’t really think of reasons to stop.

“It might not and sometimes karma doesn’t come around and the bad guys get away with it, because were so desensitized to the bad stuff and we have no real purpose and this isn’t me being cynical or morbid or whatever, this is the truth and it isn’t profound and neither am I but I know that you really want me to be, I know that that’s what you think of me. But I’m not and I’m not going to hop on to a trend of trying so hard to be profound and an obvious starshine in this world when I am not.”

 I don’t know what I’m saying anymore and I feel so lost in my own words that I can’t even remember why I’m here.

“I guess, I just don’t want to feel empty or angry anymore. I’m tired of being hungry, for anything. Im tired of sensing the monotony of life on spin wheel and thinking it’s gonna get better, that I’m going to be better and clawing and scraping to make it better but falling every time I reach the opening of the void. It just sucks. It f*****g sucks.”

Harlo doesn’t say anything, I don’ think he knows what to say. Honestly neither would I in his position.

“Wanna get a sandwich they’re having a sale at subway.” Which is totally the Harlo-esque thing I need to hear right now.

“Subway’s a multimillion dollar corporation capitalizing on a traditional snack. Suggest something were I feel the genuine incapability of recreating it with a 20 and a trip to Spargs in the comfort of my own home.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Mickey Ds?”

“Wanna get some mickey Ds?”

“Yeah.” I say. And we stand to walk to my car.

Author's Note

This was more of a random thought than a story, and definitely not my best work but oh well, any thoughts?