The Engine Revs

I'm tired.

Kin, the great city soldier of chaos, is tired.

Not enough for the effort of lighting a cigar and pouring bourbon to be exhausting, but enough for the process of thinking to have become taxing. My thoughts, my soul, they rev higher and higher, bouncing first off the red line and then promising to smash through it while I become a machine consuming gallons upon gallons of fuel to keep up with the demand.

I won't.

Sooner rather than later, I'll choke on air and die.

Tch. Won't we all?

No, maybe not all of us. Maybe not even most of us because the truth of the matter is that I was sculpted for a different future. My bones were molded with the intention of seeing a world that bred creativity, farmed passion, and encouraged every soul still alive to touch the glowing light of the stars. I can still remember reaching for those points of clear light. The skies weren't so dark and empty then and the world was a boring place.

In this way, I've become a vestigial organ, just on the brink of being left behind and forgotten. I am one step away, and only one step, from witnessing the first slice of the knife.

I remember the boring.

It wasn't as empty as the days I live now. No, it was a wonder in itself. Quiet.

For a long time, I didn't think of it at all when it first vanished. I'm not even sure I noticed that the still nights had been overthrown by the music in my ears, the cars roaring by, and the endless loop of new voices coming from my phone. I didn't notice it at all when LED blue felt familiar and paper felt foreign. And I completely missed the moment when the dark clap of the sun finally setting on my reality cracked across my mind. Things were different now. The noise had sunk in.

I was no longer comfortably idling.

I used to fall asleep at one in the morning, desperate for something to entertain me and now I fall asleep at three, unable to stop experiencing.

Scrolling like a hamster on a wheel. One lap turned to one thousand. A test drive that ended when the car ran out of gas. Only this is infinite. It is eternity masking as a single moment in time. It is a flash-bang of atoms crashing into one another, ruining the silken fabric of the cosmos. Our world is untouched.

Mindlessly devouring, consuming just to whittle away the reality in front of me. It is an obsession, a craving of the soul. The engine of my thoughts has broken through the red line. It spins and spins and spins as I consume endless fuel, flicking through video after video with nothing but glassy eyes to show for it. This hunger inside of me must end! This crippling need to satiate myself will not go away and all I want is the silence.

I want the engine to stop revving.

No good signs on the horizon though.

It's cold. The middle of winter always is but in this city there's no warmth anywhere. The heaters are liars. It's all cold.

The city looks the same in the morning as it does at night. Ashen. The light pollution ruins any dark landscape and I have to crawl like a worm deep under my tattered sheets, hoping to drown out the light. It shoves fingers into my eye sockets. It yanks on my dreams and turns them into nightmares. The late-night light of the city is a monster.

Am I prey?

I need a smoke. I need more. Less. Something in the middle maybe.

I need none of it but the feel of smooth glass under the pad of my finger. Just one more night of skating across the black ocean in search of something bright. I'm so close to eating my fill. My thoughts are bloated, my hands cold. I am so empty I've begun to feel whole but the creaking of my bones never lets me forget the weight I am carrying.

It is the weight of everything.

I cannot stop thinking! Thought after endless thought. One picture then one hundred thousand. Each pixel, each frame, each note rattles like another ball in my brain and I am drowning in information, craving the silence that died a silent death.

Damn this noise. Damn it all!

There is no way out of this cursed hell of pretty pictures and glass idols.

The only silence I will find is static-filled. The rest has been slaughtered and I've been too swallowed by the noise to commit its resting place to memory. I am a shell nearly emptied but my engine, it revs. Higher, higher, impossibly higher.

And so I must consume.

I must devour.