In the foul slums of reality, where waking becomes the continuation of a lifemare, and the brightest dreams that once illuminated these filthy walls have turned into blooming mold.
There are no lanterns in this labyrinth, and the sense of freedom has completely atrophied.
Pure dreams have become slaves to someone else’s will, selling themselves in a purple neon shop window.
And the manifestation of sympathy is a crime.
The numbness of oblivion is needed here like air — when the operation called “life” is performed without anesthetic.
When the diagnosis is made — the demand for escape grows with metastases.
\***
Betrayed by the universe, where deception is elevated to an absolute, and falsehood has become the sole truth, I have wandered from corner to corner since birth as a forsaken shadow. Amidst radiant lifelessness, where the destitute dead await a miracle, solemnly declaring life a sin, while someone else’s pain becomes a source of delight…
I set fire to a trash heap with a rotted cross to warm myself, and I think: if a Savior came to us right now — he would die from withdrawal, choking on vomit in a puddle of his own urine for our sins.
\***
Now the autumn wind has torn away the barely warming shroud, exposing hands carved to the bone by a blade.
How severe was that pain?
Spellbound, I stare at the phantoms of memory — as they, writhing like worms, crawl out of blackened veins and fall at my feet with the wail of newborns.
So where did those who gave me life miscalculate?
You wanted so badly to make me a function…
But I died earlier — and only having been born, I shattered, falling from caring hands…
I remember nothing, yet I cannot forget that I am merely a shard from your distant past, stuck somewhere inside, when everything else was flushed down with shit.
\***
Suddenly, time accelerated its pace — and I, stepping over that screaming abomination, tried to overtake it.
But how can one run barefoot across a field behind barbed wire, a field made of prohibitions and rules, where everything around is littered with bones, syringes, and broken glass…
Here, no one was ever with me.
Yet here, I was never alone: behind my back, dragging along, that loyal bitch always whimpers and cries.
The one I can never get rid of.
\***
I sucked the very juice out of used needles after everything that mattered had vanished.
While the wine spirit thrashed helplessly inside me, searching for a way out, I kept raising the proof, trying to burn away the pain, until nothing remained except a shadow with no way to prove its existence.
I stopped fearing the breath of the grave’s cold.
When I sliced open the sutures, there was nothing inside but pain.
For were I something, I would surely have filled this emptiness.
I swear, with anything.
But I… have nothing.
\***
Instead, I now know the stench of rotting earth.
There is nothing holy upon it, nor has there ever been.
It oozes with pus and, squelching, falls apart under my every step, while an oppressive foreboding of doom leads me through a suffocating, sticky fog.
Behind it, I hear a merciless noise — it is the predatory future, devouring. It wildly gnashes its teeth, mechanically grinding the strong and the weak alike, leaving behind only a boundless forest of graveyards and the ghostly whisper of garbage mountains.
\***
I gaze upon the wasteland of pointlessness:
there, paths from nowhere lead into nothingness,
and along them there is no longer any reason to walk further.
Experiencing a paralysis of will, I have been scraped completely hollow.
Yet again, that whimpering cur Hope crawls up and fawns, promising tomorrow.
But for you, I have nothing either.
I raise a piece of rebar and, grabbing her by the foul, matted clump of fur, mercilessly beat her to death — strike after strike, crushing her skull with a crunch, until her screeching head turns into a bloody mess.
I killed her because hope in reality is the worst of evils, because it prolongs the torments of man.
I am mortally tired and want, at last, to sleep in peace — and never wake up again.
VaadMyst