Shattered

He sees it whenever he closes his eyes. The fragments of his life. A thousand receptacles containing lost meaning. A jigsaw he doubts he’ll ever piece together. Once you’ve seen what lays between the gaps, you can never go back to the ignorance that once ruled your days.

One conquering moment suspended in a sea of millions. That’s all it takes. The scales fall from eyes blinded for safe keeping and vengeful hoards storm the castle of the mind. These are the lurking, vile creatures that once seen can never be unseen. They pierce human understanding and burst the defences of the hiding mind. Magical knowledge with a parasitical nature. Invasive ghosts haunting all understanding. They remain long after the party is over and cleave to their miserable host whispering spells of undoing. Death comes in many forms. This a naked, unremarked end with no apologies or laments.

We are all dying, he thinks to himself. But his plight differs from the throngs he encounters when he dares enter the world. His life is draining from him and there is no prospect of replenishment. The temptation to attempt a refill of the emptying cup of him is constant. A lustful seduction to take others and enjoy the act of snide yet brutal conquest. To share his dark gift in an act of false intimacy and walk them to the precipice of a choice that should never have to be considered.

Made with an eternal longing for connection. A vital connection only possible in his true form. Rendered impotent by the cruel and the envious. He was penetrated with hate as he held his arms aloft in an act of peaceful submission. Forever helpless in his helplessness. Opportunistic use of his vulnerability. There is only enough left of him to witness the betrayal that he was complicit in. He embraced the miners’ of his soul and wished for their love even as they stripped him of all his worth. His nature an echo of nature itself. His tormentors exemplars of human nature, ironically voided of all humanity. An emptiness that allows the efficiency of envy and glutinous greed. Just another victim of the creed of use or be used. The ultimate deterrent, the secret theft of as much as can be taken before the ultimate crime can be detected. The devil is in the details that are never shared.

Exiled from the Eden of an inconspicuous life. Robbed of an innocence he casually bullied throughout all his days. Telling himself he knew better until he was rudely awakened and learnt far worse. Striving for more in a contrivance of noble motivations. Consoling himself with platitudes as he refused to run with the rats and cannibalise fellow dogs. His, the pursuit of knowledge through experience. Drawn to people with delightfully exotic operating systems. Asynchronous behaviours forcing him to rethink his dance steps. Willing himself to find the underlying rhythm and go with a harmony of flows that might just take him to a place where he could belong. If he tried hard enough to fit in.

Chasing discord and drama in the quest for the dragon he must slay. Pursuing the death required to invoke his rebirth. Befriending the serpent in the hope it would in turn be his friend. Willing it so. Wanting it with all the heart that is left to him. Dressing the approval seeking child in his father’s clothes and hoping he could pass muster. An actor with no lines and no notion of how to act. Walking into the woods and feeding the crows with the breadcrumbs of his self-worth. Pleading for their validation as they viewed him sceptically with eyes that were portals to his own, personal abyss.

He stares out at the darkness and cruelty in the world around him. Knows that it’s what’s inside of him that counts. Never retreating internally. Bravely standing firm as he takes everything that is thrown at him. Missing the point by a country mile. A sad by-product of his environment. Passively consuming all the poison and trash before him. Failing to be the curator of his life. Exercising so little discernment and control over that which he fills himself with. A mindless Pac Man building himself and his life with mouth wide open and eyes firmly shut to the folly of his ways. A busy fool with a disjointed belief in wishes and pipedreams.

An unconscious artist painting the world with the last vestiges of his hope. Everyday his first day at school. A nightmare of grim repetition. Holding the painting aloft. Shielding himself from the chasm of lack that could never be bridged. Always on the wrong side. Never picked for the team. Isolated from birth. Unable to speak the language of connection. A language learnt in the early years of life, or not at all. He is the epitome of not at all.

Boldly moving through the corridors of life and shouldering at doors barred to him until his flesh was ruined and corrupted meat. Following the light that shone in the distance. An indifferent light that never shone for him.

Never a victim in the denial of his proud ego. Always a victim in the eyes of the wolves that stalk those such as he. Forever marked. Destined to pay for the sins of nameless fathers and doomed to do so by the silence of their wives. 

Life is not worth the fare. Life is a fair. A burning circus tent in its midst. The clowns sitting in the cheap seats. Weeping as the acrobats lose their grip and the lions savage them where they fall. Not his circus. Not his clowns. He knows this much as he passes through once more. Wishing he could stop and take a seat. If only for a while.

There was a time back there where everything cohered and he glimpsed paradise. Too good to be true, he held it together all the same. Clutched and grabbed and clambered with all the might he could muster. Embracing thin air and making of it a thing of mock substance. 

In his bones he knew. Deep in the ancient stones that hoard all knowledge, there were echoes of the truth. He shouted that truth down. And then he screamed his protests to an absence that continued its mockery of him even in the thunderous roar of his desperation. And still he screamed until his throat bled tears and painted his chin in painful treachery.

Let me have this one thing.

Just this one time.

If only for a while.

We all want what we cannot have. We envy the imagined prize of others. This is the truth of us. Yet it is not the truth of this world. We defy the odds as we defy the world. But in the end we always lose. Reality is death in a wedding dress. The hand that rocks the cradle is building the momentum to create calamity. We are snowflakes melting in the air before we can cohere in the illusory safety of the collective snow.

No one was ever coming to save him. He was born in the frustration of isolation. Remained in a womb that denied him access to the awaiting world. A false start that disqualified him from the promise that played out all around him. An unspoken word that lost all meaning as it grieved for the voice that failed to show at the chapel on the allotted day of their union.

He understood all of this before he broke the mirror, but could only admit his possession of such knowledge as he took the broken image upon himself and became one with the darkness that held the glittering glass in place. Pulling himself together but always falling apart. 

Pushed and pushed until he snapped. He did all the pushing. That’s all there is to it. But this is not like him. He doesn’t like him. This is not him at all. There were no instructions to follow and in his failure to build himself he fell prey to eager, grabbing hands. Mistook their manipulation for the gentle caresses of a passion that creates. By the time he awoke to the theft and corruption, he’d slept walked through the better part of his life, gurning an appreciation that failed to warm his tired bones.

And so here he is, languishing at an impasse of cheese grater limbo. Refusing to accept the truth of him as he lays in a chafing bed of his own making. Dreaming himself away in his restless repose. His life’s work has come to this and it is no life at all. Only a stuttering torture chamber of half-arsed projects laying in various states of incompletion. He is and always will be incomplete. Deprived of the part of him that matters. The shattered mirror shows him how he really is. And that truth is beyond his brittle comprehension. The infinite is not meant for the likes of him. He is not the undead. It is not the mirror that the vampire fears, it is the dread reality that lurks beneath. The same dark and twisted reality that animates them with its incessant and seductive hunger. A whispering and cajoling darkness that sings its siren song to the lost. Drawing the unwitting into its cold embrace so it can feed on the windfallen fruits of hope rotting into sweet despair. An infertile last gasp anti-climax that leaves the body shuddering and afraid.

The mirror is shattered into a thousand pieces. And all of those pieces remain in the frame. He fancied he saw her in the fragments of his lost life. The flicker and blur was but a ghost of a memory that will now forever elude him. There are those who infect their hosts with a terrible dementia. Stealing away the golden memories and leaving empty howls of pain past.

Yet still he searches.

For her.

For him.

For them.

Faceless characters in a story he brought into this world. Fanciful paint suspended on the fickle wind for a tantalising moment. None of it was real. None of them were really there. He stands on the precipice and the chasm calls to him with a music felt, not heard. Perhaps they are on the other side. But it no longer matters. That is a place that will never exist in his lived experience. That is a space denied him. He lies within the myriad images before him. Spider’s eyes observing his demise. Drawing nearer with a web of lies to spread upon his tired body and a deceitful lullaby lament to herald the end of this tortured life of his. 

And as the spider gazes down upon him in his cot of silk. As he lays there in a numb cocoon of approaching bliss, he sees the beginning that heralded his end. Don’t drop the baby, he whispers the words from a smiling mouth as he sees his original fall from grace. An angel held in envious hands made spiteful. They cast him down in his new-born fragility and broke him from the outset. He nods a final acceptance. The image in the shattered mirror is his true shape in this world. Beyond this fractured existence is the return. The awaiting light banishes the darkness between the pieces of him and his heart does the rest.