There is a feeling in my bones I can’t pin down. A strike on an elbow I don’t have from a hammer unseen. A worrying rattle in the marrow. A place I was expected I did not even set out for. An empty seat sits cobwebbed in the corner, worn into my shape in a house I’ve never been to. I have been divided and the pieces trucked here and there and misdelivered. I opened my baggage after a long journey and it was filled with nothing but a strange and pungent mulch.
Words are in my head and I don’t know who put them there. They pour out and I gather them into my arms and hold them for a moment like some stricken beast breathing its last. They always perish and I wander further in the wilderness alone with their blood still on my hands.
I was dead before my grandfather was born. I was robbed but nothing is missing. The window is broken and there are things on the mantel I did not put there.The fire in the grate throws no heat no matter how I feed it. The pictures on the wall leer at me and they’ve turned to strangers overnight.
I want to go home but there’s no such place and never was.
10 Responses
“If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.”
― C.S. Lewis
Not sure which is more unsettling, the prose or the video.
Makes me wish I could do something to help the hapless.
Sounds like The Nameless Dread. If that's where you are, may you come out the other side, if shaken, also stirred, and find once again that what is, Is.
Bits of your life flung on the internet floor? That makes us, your readers, scavengers. Not a pleasant image.
Poking my toe to turn over a phrase like:
"They pour out and I gather them into my arms and hold them for a moment like some stricken beast breathing its last."
And I can't help but rub my own hands on my pantlegs to rid them of the blood, too.
You know what? I am no scavenger. But I do collect things. Precious things. Things shiny and dull, colorful and gray, known and unknowable. I gather these precious bits and save them. And pull them out. And wonder over them.
Most days are like that. And it doesn't matter if the world tilts me off my axis, or you off yours. You are connected all the same. To those who collect and treasure odd assortments like those you offer.
The video totally creeps me out! The man doesn't open his mouth enough for all of his breath to come out and I wonder what he is saving it for.
I felt like I was reading Poe. I enjoy that in a rather undefinable way. Thank you.
I was born in the dark and I'm still looking for the light.
Just thought I'd add that. Except a guy cannot add a word to your prose, but it gets me thinking.
Sounds like you were up all night, playing mismatched cards with the Willies. Coulda been somthin' you et.
Coulda been Cthulhu and Narlathotep peering in the windows atcha.
That man has no teeth.
Probably just the Dreamer who dreams the dream, the unThought psychic twin who shadows us always.
Either that or you're not drinking enough.