Houses shiver when I crawl down the street, I think they might be scared of me. I say that and it echoes from a thousand talking heads in the sky. Their teeth are chattering and I should never feel this way. Slimey. The temperature's disgust. Little pink fingers poking out of holes in the concrete advance the plotline and make vomit. It's flowing up and down the streets in place of cars, leaving purple residue and shimmering dust raining from the benches they put at bus stops. A man puts those benches there at night when the streets are empty and dark. If he put them there during the day it would cause a disruption. The sea doesn't think there's anything wrong with disruption but the masses disagree. There's a boy that rides his bike down that street everyday and tries to capture something. I'd tell him to give up but I first I should take my own advice.
The churches in our town are full almost every day, it's been that way ever since the explosion. No one had ever seen so much static so we all went inside and now here we are. They give us rations but it's all some kind of sexless substance that makes me feel like I'm being given poison and just eating it because there's nothing else to do and nowhere else to go. I feel the government's beginning to get tired of us. From afar it may seem like a really terrible circumstance we've found ourselves in. But out lives are nothing like theirs. There's a certain way a life is meant to go around, through certain stations and tunnels and those on the outside look at us and think we've lost out way. When you've been driving for miles and hit a dead end, what do you do? Some people would turn back around and look for a town. Maybe most people. If I drove out there to find something I wouldn't go back.
Indulging nothing didn't help me after the food, and dying slowly was only made more offensive by the octane sludge. People on the outside are always speculating because they have no money in the game, but we don't get mad at officials anymore. Not here.
Even in dreams I suffer. Flying feels sticky and love is a solipsistic radiator in the corner of a freezing room. "Mackarels" is a lovely word, one I wish I dreamed of, but no. Opening cans of worms all night is exhausting. The beds they give us don't let us dream because that's "too far away" but I say screw that. I hear someone laughing almost all the time and it's giving me a headache.
There are a lot of very strange things here, going up and down the streets.
It annoys me to think of diseases. They're very small. The meaning is lost on me. What is "itching"? That is all someone needs to know. If I had a child, I'd teach them first the burning and itching sensations, and then I'd die and leave behind a flowering tree. I'll never have a child. The flowers in my dream are castrated. Angels descended from helicopters and gave me n-sexes, USB port and stick defibrillated my metal heart.
"Melancholia is godliness," the government says through their reinforced speakers, and the noise echoes around the city officially. When a simple man on a farm in Idaho discovered the truth, they flew him to their headquarters and spun him around on a lemon squeezer looking for a single drop of memory. Days of interrogation yielded no juice. Eventually he wrote a manuscript in exchange for freedom, though he knew he could never write the truth. Now they read from his forged manuscript like fools from a textbook but the masses know they will never touch what he found. They know the man felt an unitchable itch, and the surface of his skin was the scope of language and the truth was something very far away. It will always be safe from these people.
Touch is next to Godliness, is what he should have said, but that wouldn't have been right either. Either way he would've been gone, the desert takes people away faster than time. There's no sensation here to speak of, nothing close to art. Just belligerence and madness as far as the eye can see. I tried to get my hand to see and it said it couldn't, but I think the senses are all one. But the hand says it can't lie. An entity of painless desire, the govermnent has synesthesia. I wonder why it's so grey. They're always spraying us with sawdust and vacuum cleaners to try to get us out into the streets. Movement produces energy, they say, but is that really what they want? What is this all really about?
The California desert has never heard of music though it knows no ends. It's a shame for a haunting sound to seep out of the sea and and drift all this way only to salt the hair on some dead man's head, but that's just how it goes, how it's always gone. Synesthesia is just another blindness and wailing just another silence. Gray whales mean nothing if they don't surface. Most complain about the beehive but some document the buzzing of the wind. Only a few see colors through different eyes, with less abrasive textures or intercepting waves. They're left behind by the colony to fly against the wind, making blue spirals in the dismal gloom until sleet crushes them on man-made concrete floors. All bees die, one way or another. I guess it's only a matter of time. Bees fly through our station in the Spring, under the disappointing glare of a sun that's hardly more welcoming than a flourescent lamp. Pathetic flowers and their bumblebees are the cloying lies of childhood. Now all I can think about is death. Some teenage summer solstice brought sunsets your mother never warned you of. Brewed by restless nights and festering when you ignored it, the fever never went away. Now you're here.
We're all here, put by the government, or so people like to say. Pleasant excuse. I guess there's nothing more an apparition could do but wait. Time rests while I wait but not for long, soon it'll pick up and keep moving without me. I just want a single moment alone here by the sea to look at birds and sculpted stones. I don't want to contemplate them. I just want them to go through me, see. See. Sea. Like recognizing the wind. Seeing is not believing, touch is the only way to the real. What does that mean? I don't know what the sea smells like or sounds like. Not everything feels like something else. What's it like to ride a bike? Do you know? Can you smell it? I've never seen one. Our city has no bikes, or roads, or streets. They only let us build gaping holes that we don't dare fall into. There could be nothing worse than this, we think. How can the unknown be worse? But no one ventures down, so I guess it is. It must be. That's what we have to believe.
Can I sleep just one day by the sea? I can't stand the city people, always chattering with their chattering teeth, always nonsense. Nothing could mean more to me than the waves. Sleep. Could anything be so close to perfection? Before, I didn't think so. Now I'm not so sure. Computers feel like a distant memory, but they're only a mile away. The lighthouse glows white every night but this time it's red. Am I lost? I always feel like I am. What is the feeling of being lost? Of being alone and not alone? Of seeking? Of being a bird with no wings left behind by the flock? Of being the last pill in a bottle? Of a garbage barge that's floated into some sickly green swamp, abandoned so far away from last sight of man that even the birds laying their eggs in the trash wonder how it got there? It doesn't know either.
Faraway fires send smoke signals that carry the first three notes of a long forgotten melody in black cloaks and suffocating clouds. Silence now, or stillness. Waning perceptions never gave way to light control, blinking, blinking, blinking, blinking. It's over now. It was never here. An empty gaze for a thousand miles of broken glass. Stained glass windows on every side drown out the voices in a piercing sound that wails far away, opel, open, processed through a machine but manlike. Mechanical laughter, angular and gray. The sky above Tokyo is rotating and everything is about to explode. In their last moments, people never panic. The feeling of ending is all it's leading up to. Centrifugal love and all that. Solitude. Falling off of suspension bridges is a lawless game. Can you say what it was all for, now that you're here at the end? But you just stare.
Is this really it? Confronting death is just a sham. Is this really what it's come to? Words everywhere, the worst of all worlds. Symbols overwhelm me. The gun at the end of the line is the only voice worth listening to. Five minutes before it's all over. A quarantine so long makes you treat life as a disease. Why am I suffocating to stay alive only to reject life? The wills of the world evaporated on some scalding summer morning and left salt crystals to shatter off our dying skin and mix with the sand. I would tell the next generation to beware of the flesh but I don't know if they'll make any more. God planned our obsolescence and now they're waiting for the last of us to die.