The Unquiet Void

He looks out of the window. There’s nothing to it, and yet it’s everything, this view, this mess. This hole, this nothing. Seems like it’s crashing, just crashing through into his eyeballs, into his brain. There’s nothing more to it than this miserable scene. Yet it goes on.

He sees a man out there, down there, down below, on the street. He stops. That is, the man stops. But he stops, too. The stopping is being watched by stopping. That man down there, he takes a look around. Now what does he see? This piece of shit. What’s that piece of shit down there taking a look at? What’s crashing into his eyeballs at that very precise moment in time and life? Could it be something so monumental as his own death? Could something so monumental ever be looked at? Or would something so monumental as death just look at us while we look at something else? In the corner of our eye…

In the room. Where there’s only windows and the cold. As he looked out of that window, he got to thinking that he wasn’t looking out at all. He was just in a box, and the inside of that box was painted with some realistic stucco, some over real mural, a work with its heart ripped out so that all it ever spoke of was desolation without despair and solitude without tears. A bare presentation of facts of a reality, out there, never to be known. This was all, and there was only desperation in glorifying that.

But then this is forgotten. The shadows outdoors seem only to enhance all the heaven of inside. He looks all about him and gathers in all the shadows he sees dancing about him like waves and he lets these self same shadows grow and crawl up his body like weeds up a rockface. Sheer twisted pleasure grips him and makes him clench his corpse which persists beyond everything. Behind him is nothing but hell and in front of him all but hell. There’s pure difference between these hells. One is gone and torpid leaving only embers among ash. The other is burning bright ahead of him and he approaches like the forest it is, which he wishes to walk into rather than watch from afar for the time for watching is gone and has been dusted off this mortal surface – long, long, long ago.

Anxiety is done away with, anxiety slips away into the sea.

But he has to go elsewhere. He has to go away into the storm. The storm is nothing, to be sure. The storm is just many illusions coinciding all at once in an attempt to convince us that anything at all is going on. That’s a lie, for it’s all dead. It’s all dead except for what he does, and he knows this, which is why he acts at all. If you don’t act and you know you arent acting, it’s only because you’re operating under this delusion that there is a storm about you and you are doing well just to cling on to this timber here – you praise yourself for staying above the swells when others’ heads dip down and die. The dead are just being honest and you are lying. But still you continue – well well well.

There is sadness, for sure, out there, in the storm – but on the margins. If you’re just on the outside looking into the eye, you don’t see right and you get sad because you think it must be hell in there. There isnt any hell where there’s no life. Sadness only comes about when you’re dead or clinging onto not-death. Sadness, sadness is just really a mistake. Sadness is like tripping up or being stuck somewhere you didn’t intend to be. Some place like fuck knows, like waiting in a car for some lost soul you depend on out in the wilderness.

But you see him. He keeps going, because he doesn’t know how to get out of that storm, for some weakness.

He catches you – points at you, he grabs you, he grabs your soul, he holds you by your everything. He calls out to you. Your brain, it breaks.

Excuse me sir, do you speak English? Do you have any change you could spare? Do you have any change you might give me?

Wild in the eyes but somehow kidding himself that he’s still a part of things. That’s the only way to do it, maybe, because when you’re nowhere and nothing, you can stop taking it seriously and ask something like that with a straight face.

Yeah, here, take it, here’s something for you.

Yeah see, I need it for a phone call and it’s a very odd situation really, to tell truth, I need it to buy a beer for a girl since I’m on a date with her, but we need a taxi too so I need to call them for that. I know you don’t want to hear my life story but I just thought.

Yeah sure.

Have a good night etc.

God bless you.

Words by Ryan Boyd.

Photos by Marlena Shores