Heat Hazy Days

There was once a life within which I existed. Encased in a fantastical ecosystem designed to cocoon me from the pain of reality. Then it was over. A breeze-block in the face. I didn’t see it coming. The impact of the ending sent shockwaves of negative energy into batteries hidden deep within my body such that every time I thought I might have some respite from the pain of my sudden, shattering loss, those batteries fired up and fried my nervous system, leaving me reverberating with a sickness that I could not comprehend, let alone deal with. 

Losing someone to death is bad enough. When they have the temerity to stand right in front of you in a continued existence that is intent in your absolute exclusion, casually delivering the end of all things and exposing you to the claws and teeth of a ravenous world? That’s a monumental shift from bows and arrows to the nuclear age. A cheat that time has treacherously waved through. The nuclear age is the supposed age of reason. The pinnacle of civilisation, and yet in the barbaric pillaging of a life like this, there is no reason. There is no sense. There is only pain, and a sticky and seductive rage.

Having disembowelled me, and handed me my own intestines, she walked away with a casual politeness that inflicted scars that blinded. The way to my heart really was through my stomach after all. I numbly witnessed her cold betrayal and after the door closed on our union with a soft and too quiet finality that left me feeling even more cheated, I felt the first waves of pain via fresh wounds heaped with piles of salt. An egg timer of grief without end.

She came. She saw. She decorated and bought soft furnishings. She feathered her nest and made a life with me. Then she walked away as though her job was done, and there was nothing left to do. She walked away just as life was getting interesting. Oblivious to my presence in her completed project. It seemed that I did not matter. And perhaps I never mattered. I was just there as she got on with her life. And then I was collateral damage as she went on without me. She left me with no clue as to what had happened, even before the madness of chaos cascaded down upon me and drowned out all reason.

I wanted to ask what I had done so wrong, but the paradox of that was that I had no one to ask the question of other than myself, and I had no answers. I had no sense and I had no notion of where sense resided.

Set adrift on an ocean of pain, the violence of the storm threatened to tear me apart. But sensing my capitulation, it backed off and merely flayed the flesh from me and removed any further protection I may have had from the baying elements. Raw and broken, I rode the waves and awaited my fate, but the boat held stubbornly firm and I had neither the strength or inclination to climb over its side and slip into the murky depths that surrounded me and screamed my name over and over.

In the midst of this silent inner storm, we remained friends. I wanted to tear the world apart. I wanted to end everything around me, so that the world understood what I was experiencing, but my desire to do so subsided at the point just before I could make contact with that ignorant world. My inner turmoil talked a good game, but that game was lost before it ever began. I was on a losing streak that I had inherited from my forebears and would make my lasting legacy. I was a constant loser. I’d suffered loss and now I was defined by that loss. 

The wounded state I nurtured, left me in a dark bubble of razor blades. I could not breathe without shards of pain flailing my skin from the inside out. My body did its best to go through the motions, but my nervous system buzzed with the repetitive message of my demise.

At night I curled up in a bed made too large by my loss, and there was a heady moment of peace before the devil sauntered in and tortured my beleaguered mind. I regularly reached out to the other side of that bed. The bed that had once been our bed. My fingers went in search of her and in not finding her, they scrabbled around for the memory of her, but there was none. This bed was mine now and mine alone.

Alone.

For a while, the scent of her lingered in that bed. I breathed her in. Observing the shadow of her presence. Allowing my gaze to rest upon those items that constituted a shrine to her existence. Soon enough, all of these things were lost in the maelstrom of her passing. She even took the last vestiges of that scent. She took everything, even though she did not need it. Did not value it. Did not want it. The act of taking was what she wanted. Nothing more. Everything less and lesser.

She would visit me, and in her visiting, she was always less there. She took and she took when I had believed that she had already taken all that there was to take. But with every visitation there was a little less of her and with that diminishment, there was also a little less of me.

In the depths of my suffering I fell into an even deeper level of a suffering I refused to believe was possible. I then ceased going through the motions, as my body lost its capacity for the memory of such things. I faltered and I marvelled at the protracted nature of an end that was nigh and yet was never going to arrive. Limbo was my punishment and the punishment was made more wicked as the list of my crimes was never made available to me. My judgement was never spoken aloud. I did not even deserve that courtesy such was my abject failure. Never would I learn from my mistakes. The expectation was that this was where I would reside for evermore.

Yet I did not give up. Giving up was a choice denied to me. Instead, I went on and was congratulated for my resilience, and the stoic nature I displayed. Beyond the shell of misconception I wished I could recall how it was to weep. 

There was no respite. There was no tea break from a doom that was visited upon me on a schedule I could have tracked, if only the email had not gone straight to junk.

I had got this so horribly wrong. Reached an obvious conclusion only in the obviousness of the conclusion.

Somehow I existed through this hell, and in an act of perverse joy, I smiled at a cruel world that had to smile back in a reciprocal snarl. I kept going in an act of petty revenge and a stubborn desire to hear the punchline of my fate.

Each night, I climbed into that unshared bed in an attempt to reclaim its original purpose. In dark solitude, I sought sleep and all I found was her. She haunted me more now than she ever had when the both of us were real. The acid ghost of her caressed my battered body and spoke to me of an isolation that would eventually crush me, as the oxygen ran out and I drifted away from myself into the outer reaches of a frozen cosmos.

As my body shivered and my consciousness constricted, I contemplated a simple reality. My world drew closer, narrowing, and although I continued to have no control over myself or where I was headed, I found a way of concocting stories that gave me illusory solace.

I dressed my bleak and ugly denial in fabulous clothes and called it a dream. I browsed the possibilities, remembering the fairy tales that hid their horrors from me and paraded around as the means to a happy ending that would never make the time to pay me a visit. Too busy in the lives of others to lower itself to come to me and transform my fortunes.

Never did I have the notion of venturing forth. I trod water and awaited my fate. My fevered mind span around and around in ever decreasing circles. Threatening to come to an abrupt end in the very heart of me, causing an implosion that would be far from a blessed relief. There were no blessings here. Only a desecration. The debt of sin from a dozen fathers. A reckoning that had come home to roost, sinking it’s talons into my exposed muscles and toying with me as though I were a threadbare ragdoll.

A Summer emerged from the midst of my annihilating Winter. I was burnt by a happy sun whose happiness was alien to me, but I did not experience its warmth. The rebirth of Spring had been cast asunder by hands unseen. Strangely, I could not ignore the Summer heat intended for growth. The tendrils of my being snaked out towards the light in a parody of hope, and in the slumber of my suffering I was carried away to a place of unfamiliarity.

With eyes unused to seeing the light, I caught a wondrous susurration of sunbeams playing on the other side of a form, and that light-play made translucent a dress that highlighted legs that I desired with a toothless vengeance. I loved the very thought of them, and an unwarranted and unbidden hunger arose within me. A wanton need to consume those legs and proceed upwards in an exploration of my unsated desire. 

That seductive sight lived with me. It found a way inside me, and it grew. A want that was born in the innocence of the Summer light, slithered into the darkness, my darkness, and became something far more compelling. An addiction that consumed me even as I had nothing left to give to it.

At night, the heat of the light that had caught my eye kept me awake, and she came to me in fevered waking dreams. I made love to her in a million different ways, and yet I knew her no more than the first time I had ever seen her.

She was limitless in her effect on me. Invading my mind and my senses. Whenever I saw her, she was only a morsel of what she truly was. A hint. A teasing sensation on the tastebuds of my libido. I carried more of her within me than there was before me. The curve of her breast would expand within my being, becoming an entire world, and every existence upon that world for an eternity. I breathed in, tasting her as the breath passed over my dry tongue. In tasting her, I wanted the entire banquet from the tip of her toes, to the expanse of hair beyond the nape of her neck.

She consumed me as I made my clumsy attempts to consume her.

In the frozen emptiness of my loss, I fancied that I felt her warmth, and I craved that warmth and hoped for its healing constancy. Engineering opportunities to be around my newfound sun. I glowed in her unrelenting heat. Fearing to get too close, but all too aware of the pain of loss that I carried around with me. A rotting and swelling tumour that had once been me. Me in another life, now decaying, but unwilling to let go and pass on to who knew where. 

My orbit was clumsy in my regard for her. I could not take my eyes from her and so my course was never true. The energy of the Summer gently and imperceptibly drove me forth, and I gradually grew into the season. She fascinated me in the intensity of the heat. My heat. Her heat. A heat I wanted to make ours. The movement of her lips was hypnotic. There was no need for me to register her words. She spoke to me soundlessly. I swam in her eyes and when she bit her bottom lip, my mooring rope unravelled and I was lost in the depths of a love that swallowed me whole and cleansed me of my malignant self.

Each night, I brought her to my bed and bathed in the heat of the Summer. My body beaded in sweat even as I slipped under the single sheet, and by the time I paused from my lumbering ministrations, I was a single tear of sweat, lamenting the state of my existence.

She was my addiction for the entire Summer. I could not help myself until I had no idea what my self was anymore. I had lost, and then I was lost in a beautiful distraction. Every time I saw her, I breathed her essence in and travelled through my mind on her high. She was my everything. She was my escape from everything until I became nothing.

With the waning of the sun, the dimming of the light, and the cooling of the ardour of the year, I gradually came to my senses. At last, I understood that I was alone. Acceptance was still to elude me. That would come in the deepest depths of the Winter, and well before the renewal of a hope filled Spring.

In a weak act of defiance, I conjured her for a final time. Making love to the illusion of her. Exorcising her in the want of my lamentable lust. Wanting what I could never have. An illusion more real than the woman I had loved. A woman who had left me before she ever walked out of my life. As I traced every imaginary curve of her being and worshipped that which once was, I wondered how real she had ever been, and what that said about the substance of me. 

We cut our teeth on fairy tales. They warn us of the cruelty of life and the world that stalks that life. This was my happy ending. A Summer fling with what could have been. A dreaming existence with what should have been. An affair with denial that was never going to last. Exorcising one demon, in order to make room for another. Whether that be loss, loneliness or an avatar of someone equally broken and incapable of any real connection. 

Each passing season reminds us of the transitory nature of being. Nothing lasts. All things pass. There will be contrasting experiences. The cold wastes of a Winter end. The Summer fires of passion. 

Few things last, but the memory of our Summer fling will endure. A high point that will never be reached ever again. A beginning of an end that sets my expectations impossibly high and gutter low. The Summer sun sets, taking its final bow, and the leaves begin to fall as the trees at last find it within themselves to let go.