the ashtray full of days, butts bathing in ash. soot from thousands of lungfires, cherries eating rat poison, gulp by gulp. this night, every night for months, this table, this ashtray, these people consuming for themselves with each other. using each other, hungry eyes caged by depression, apathy. depend on the unfailing ego. depend on curling smoke hurled across the room, the music to fill the void where conversation died weeks ago.
I looked at alex across the room from me, lengthwise opposing. she met my eyes, stared at them hard, took a drag. she raised one dark eyebrow and reached for the ashtray. For a moment, I searched for the perfect words, to summon her. Gave up quickly, ruthless fantasy.
Henry around the corner cradling his camera. tripods strewn over the floorspace, lights. Life has become a long photoshoot, posed existential boredom, reinforces the haze. He kneeled, focused on Earl looking destracted, exposed. the unblinking lens shuttered and fell silent.
She felt the weight of my gaze still on her. I didn't hide my eyes behind a smalltalk smile, my stare got heavier. She looked at the posters, the ashtray, at my hands rolling a joint, back to the ashtray. She flicked invisible ash off a clean cigarette. Suddenly she returned to my eyes, unafraid.
"Death comes with immediacy. Death comes with your uncontrolled present, which hurdles headlong unstoppably toward the future, toward death. We are slaves to the idea of time that leads you to death." Her voice, oh god, her voice made her ascendancy transparent, gave her away, the voice of an old soul in youth.
I liked to pretend I could keep up with her. I liked the feeling of being able to play her games. "Time is manufactured by society and injected into you at the same time that the myth of cohesive consciousness is injected into your sense of self. The lies at the center of our lives."
"you're so full of shit, jed. you inhabit absolute time. you live from one moment to the next, lusting after each one, slaughtering and dismissing the present." Earl attacked, as she will do.
Henry focused his lens on me and I tried will myself out of existence.
"humble immortality, this moment here and forever. beer and cigarettes. This story has to beginning, no end, it is yours, yours alone, I can't share it with you. Stop trying" she said gently.
I would do anything for you, I said intraskullular. I wish I could say it out loud. I would be anyone for you. Your skin, your voice could justify me, give me leave to exist.
It will never happen. We are alone.
I let mingus fill the room, fell silent. I lit the joint, found solace in acrid smoke. Smoke my companion, my mistress. In this moment, she will never leave me.
In your picked liver, in my blackened lungs, we live. Paralyzed by desire, living in insecurity only enhanced with daily drugs.
The ashtray accumulates her cigarette. Henry and I passed the joint back and forth, I could feel it making my night hazy, could feel my exoskeleton beginning to calcify. I know this feeling well—I will stay silent and cynical all night, full of self loathing, paralyzed by loneliness.
"Don't we have somewhere to go? I've been sitting in this chair all week."
"yeah, governor street. let's go," said Earl.
a hike.

   [ POSTED BY Jed @ 12:39 PM ] [ ]