I never told anyone about that time I laid on cold linoleum and listened to haggard snoring and rasping and wished with all my heart I was miles away. But really, where I wanted to be was miles away and had already found a place to go. For a few seconds, anyway.

I never told anyone that I wanted to see what it would be like to send my car through the edge of a bridge and test the metal, to test God and see if it would hold me and if I deserved to live.

I never told anyone that I told everyone too much. And now I don't really feel like I have much to say and not much to write and not much inclination to make the experiences that will allow me to write the things I write. Because the things I write make my hair white. And the things I write make my hands shake. And when I cough, I cough hard. Sometimes I cough so hard that the world floats away and I try and float away with it, hoping that this time I can float far enough away that I'll end up floating to where the blackness is, where I can understand that it isn't really entropy I seek but just a nap. A really, really long nap.

I never told anyone why I never sleep. Why I am forced to sift through carpet fibers and debate existential idealism and creations of process with myself.

I never told anyone that the shakes didn't go away. They just went inside me and hands sometimes keep the shakes at bay. And sometimes you can breathe and say, hey, I'm home. But you are never home. You will never really belong anywhere. You will always carry some kind of hatred inside you. Always carry a chip on your shoulder, even when you knew that you made that chip and you grafted it to your shoulder and you show it to the world.

I never told anyone that you can't spit in the world's face and hand them an umbrella and hope they get the joke.

I never told anyone that the neon lights and clack clack clack and closed eyes and dream sounds all made me feel like I was Magellan coming home. But we all know he didn't come home, don't we? That he ate leather to live and still got scurvy. For want of citrus, you know? The great explorers all died. But they weren't that great, anyways, unless you are into people subjugating the world.

Everything has been discovered. And beneath the ice, the hidden secrets freeze themselves and die so that no one can know their true names. Their candles burn many hues under the floes, the water not dimming their incandescent spark. I want to swim through the graveyard of ash and dust and brine.

Photo - S
Words - S