Missing Forever-Afters

Consider the framing of the door as the framing of the story.

Trying to reach and pull at the handle — struggling.

Swollen wooden panelling prevents it from opening easily.

Wedging the edge of a crowbar between frame and door is the only way through.

<>

I appear, or do I simply impair? I wrestle at night and sleep by day, trying to make sense of the gradual shifting beneath my feet.

Unsteadiness and unreadiness fuel my time as gravity holds me captive against my plane.

I exist, or merely fail to find the exits — stretching out flailing, failing limbs to press against the precipice of something other than nothing.

<>

Loss is an asset we barely even understand.

Assess and vivisect with inflated intellect and a wealth of unreliable knowledge.

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Studious, as I am known, I watch by candlelight — the stars, how they soar. Effortlessly clichéd and sublimely obtuse.

Sitting here, as I always do, envisioning a world — a creation of my own basal thoughts and desires, detestations and periods of inebriation.

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Laceration after laceration, segmented and drenched across the tapestry — there is a triumph in the folly.

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As the blood — all red and white cells, plasma and platelets — pumps, so does she.

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Of course, this is all pontification — a diatribe by an unknown.

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“Unknown?” a fellow of distinguished framing within the local community once said to me.

“Renown says otherwise.”

But surely renown is redundant if the trap of the simulation of the known is where we find ourselves.

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Spinning like daffodils — where stale sterility is not quite stability but a gradual draining.

Liquidation. Liquidisation.

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The liminality of the forgotten, the room I find myself in pales in comparison to his, it is not his, it is mine, or was mine, before it was stripped of meaning and any sense of warmth and dignity. Alone, alone, alone we fail. Together, we fail to hold it together. Dark paths overlap and intertwine. Calling the comas — what is numbness, the other's control?

What's a coma — prisoner on the loose.

Description: the spit of me. Except for the heart-shaped box of a hole where all hope runs free.

A nation divided — not as the crow flies, but as the blood flows and connects.

Spilling out onto dermal canvases.

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Veracity be damned. Implication or indication? Subjugation or subtle stagnation?

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A nation divided, internal segregation — something like a cerebral apartheid.

While missing, my body is taken captive, guided toward a goal I truly wish I knew.

For if I knew, I could reason, deliberate, postulate a defence against such action.

But it was not for me to know, nor for me to act.

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Shock me awake?

Tear me apart?

With toes on the edge, it's a lovely view — inside.

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My body was no longer my sanctuary. It had become a prison — holding me, encasing me.

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As I appear, impair, and impure — my reflection, the antithesis of reason — all darkened stares and five o’clock shadows.

I appear the passenger; he appears the driver.

My voice drowns in delirium and feedback from broken amplification.

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Splintered forever, we exist and desist in living at the same time — crossroads on the same plane.

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When the passenger takes the wheel, becomes the driver, the other is demoted to the role of passenger.

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Front-row seats to the oblivion, the drama, the ecstasy, the rapture.

Watching my body engage, but out with my control.

He, the passenger. He, the driver.

Watching from the discomfort behind barriers.

Closing my eyes makes no difference, as the warring within continues with ferocity.

In lucidity, the chair — central to the room — holds particular prominence.

Though drawn impulsively toward it, I am not sure why.

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Stationing myself — ourselves — upon it feels both privileged and weary, drawn from the deepest well in my psyche.

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The drawing became the longing, as sitting in the chair stirred in me sadness and missing forever-afters.

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Destabilising — while the cracks intensify and everything slips.

Sitting in the chair stirred in me sadness and missing forever-afters, as fading to nothing invigorates the other.

No longer possible, the battlements encircle me, keeping me sitting in the chair — the chair of my own undoing.

<>

Recalling, or recounting, the beginning is draining — or drilling.

Framing, the device of meaning and context, is missing. As I sit waiting for the end of oblivion.

*

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Author's Notes: This experimental prose-like, stream-like story was written and in part inspired by the songs I Appear Missing by Queens of the Stone Age and Heathen by Deafheaven. It has been entered into both The Forgotten Room and the Parallel Lives challenges.

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