He walked for a couple minutes on a sidewalk downtown then swiftly drifted apart from civilization as most of us know it and into a dark alley that marked the end of time for his fake Rolex. He should have stayed on the sidewalk. He should have stayed in the light, all civilized and in sight of witnesses, even if they have been avoiding his encounter, even if they've been ignoring his presence, pretending that he's just the stranger he really is. They were right, he was wrong, as always. He should have changed his fake made-in-China Rolex batteries. He shouldn't have bought a watch in the first place. Watches and clocks tell us exactly how old we are. They tell us how our life is ending one second after the other. They'll mark our final hour while we "watch", staring at a brand name that makes us feel better about our miserable lives.

When you walk into a dark alley, you don't expect to find a quarter on the ground, you don't expect to see visions from heaven, the girl of your dreams, or your once in a lifetime opportunity. When your own very freewill drives your feet into a dark alley, that's when you realize that you've walked in seeking a door that says 'exit'. It's when everything becomes silent, the air holds still, anticipating something spectacular, a life altering event, a fourth page newspaper article, an arbitrary reason. Shadows start making sense, evolve into something monstrous. You feel small yet feel special; so special that you feel that even the garbage can and the trees are staring at you, waiting for your move. Your ears gain super powers and now every dust particle that moves catches your ears, shortens your breath, chases your heart into an unexplainable pulse. You wait in anticipation for a big black dog to chase you down that dark alley and kill you. Mental faculty paranoia in its prime and at its peak.

Then he said 'let there be light' and lit a cigarette in hope that the smoke would hide him from harm and stink up his adrenaline stench, in hope that maybe the burning tobacco would lead his way through the darkness of his path. He inhaled the essence of cancer and exhaled every inch of oxygen he had stored in his blood combined with two parts carbon from every burnt out particle of a soul he had left inside his human form. 'Let cancer take hold', he thought, 'oxygen has never served me well'.

Benedict pushed forth his legs, wanting to reach his undesignated destination, his made-believe destiny, his mind falsehood. He stumbled across some homeless bodies of semi-dead unidentified individuals. He walked past them and dared not to look back. That's when, suddenly, a scream from a distance far behind him caught his ears, his attention. He looked back and that's when he tripped over, hit a greasy wall that he couldn't grab hold of and fell. The grease which seemed like someone else's cum rubbed off on his hands and clothes. Life couldn't get any lower. But when things reach the bottom of the world, there's only one way to go. A magazine with faded colors and worn out pages grabbed his attention; a homeless man's ex-blanket that protected him from the cold shivers of the winter nights. The man's gone now, yet the magazine remains. He picked up the old magazine that was dated back to 1978, back when hippies were appreciated as a culture, when culture itself was appreciated and acknowledged, and there it was, a picture on page 32, a two dimensional visual image that is as old as he is. He found his reason to be, his vision from heaven.

Яαgιи' Яανєи

Posted by Яαgιи Яαvєи on Saturday, August 26, 2006 at 3:54 PM | Permalink