August and Everything After

It’s nights (well, mornings if we want to be correct about occasion…) like these that the only way to make them go down without a fight is with a few bottles of mellow wine and a box of harsh cigarettes – the kind that burn the back of your throat with every indignant breath (or borderline apathetic, pick your flavour)… one after the other, forcibly inhaled breath after forcibly inhaled breath, burning down like wildfire to trembling fingered grasp. The wine just acts as a catalyst to stop your lungs collapsing from a subdued flow of stagnant oxygen that you seem to take shallow and begrudgingly. And for what? For a sense of melancholy, a sense of, hey, I’m still stuck here? Stuck probably isn’t the right word — more likely just stalled — trying to mull over every single option blasting through your tortured mind like artillery shells through poorly-erected fortification. Each and every thought lands as though it were a punch thrown by a heavyweight prizefighter right into the crux of your outstretched jaw.

And then the lightning crashes again… it’s a shotgun burst from the sky into a building nearby. The rain is still pouring like it’s a goddamn hurricane or the so-called apocalypse or some bastard progeny of the two. The air is still stagnated and humid enough to wet your skin to the point of furniture being more like waterslides than seating. Every single song that comes on the playlist just makes you want to scream and jump out your second floor window and run into the eye of the storm – conveniently forgetting your lack of attire to satiate the unseasonably sweltering weather’s ken of will. Despite, it’s the usual mix of the inescapably tragic and the divinely apathetic… the sounds you hide in to comfort yourself and assure yourself you’re not alone in this torment. You take solace in it no longer, it’s lost that special something – masturbation has become a chore (physical and mental), hell, even the simple act of sustenance is low on the list of priorities. Faces are pretty much a uniform and featureless meld of every one you’ve ever seen — all except for that one that’s sticking in your fucking mind like tar, haunting every moment both conscious and not — and every friendship seems to have lost any sense of meaning.

What does it all mean? It means that life, sometimes no matter how hard you try to battle the storm, will inevitably get the best of you and leave you drenched to the bone. Plan all you want, it makes no difference… when that one perfect storm comes along, hide in the eye as you might, the path of destruction it leaves is inexplicably violent. C’est la vie, any rope to swing from will do.