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iwantoseeafrigatebird · 5 months ago

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The Edinburgh Diaries 1

Adelbert wants to sit still and not fall through the floor. Adelbert wants to cease the motion, he is passing through the tunnel of time (downwards, downwards, the direction of time is vertical, not horizontal as so many believes) with dysfunctional eyes that wander aimlessly from one edge of the periphery to another, like pixels that bounce off edges of the monitor when the computer is on standby. Loose jaws (he can't lock it, the key is missing, the hinges are off, it is a well trained receptacle that swallows but holds nothing), mouth slightly ajar to form the stupefied, drooling expression of a moron who is constantly discovering their own existence and therefore perpetually surprised.

Adelbert passed through the innocent tunnel on his bike aware of only the motion. It is a tunnel of colours of layers after layers of dirty graffiti illuminated by the colourless luminescent light over head that gave off the warmth of a dead fish, gutted, massaged, marinated in soy sauce and spring onions, 10ml of desire, anxiety, nostalghia, fear, insecurities for abandonment, longing for approval and dread for mortality that's quite unique to new year's eves, and ginger. Adelbert wanted to tear their face off and chew it like a piece of molding jerky. They wanted to lick the damp rough gritty walls and taste the colours in motion. The texture of the road as they travel over it, in uncontrollable motion, face down, bottom up, the tarmac scrapes away first his lips and then the enamel over his teeth and then the teeth themselves. Adelbert wants to taste motion, of which he has been a helpless, unwilling but utterly delusional and therefore begrudgingly willing victim by patting himself on the back like a sacrificial animal in an existential crisis, too lazy to find another meaning in life. He is in motion, this is the sane, right, normal thing to do, or so he has been told and told himself and those around him.

Adelbert has two friends in the city, they might also want to tear their respective faces off. Perhaps that's why they are friends, sharing the same firm foundation of being in downward motion and wanting to tear their faces off, the same toothache in their brain and in their heart and their throat when they want to speak and their bones and tendons when they want to move but cannot muster the spirit to.

"I am a mute bride for you and I am blind when I look at you." Adelbert said, last night, to Nice Legs, "That's real." he said, pointing at the bluetooth speaker that was playing Pink Floyd's Comfortably Numb on a low volume, "The colours in the innocent tunnel, that's real. I want to eat them. They seem to be the only real and therefore nutritious thing within a four mile radius." then he turned his blind face towards the beautiful blue/green eyes of Nice Legs, "And you are kind of real."

"I am real." Nice Legs said, ignorant of the veil of reality being draped over him, the chair he was sitting on, the table with its lamps mugs teapots and cables (mere bulges under the veil), the stacked bicycles, the tv that refused to be turned on, like white cotton sheets being draped over abandoned furniture in an abandoned house. The ambiguous shapes infused the furniture of potential, monstrous and suggestive, thus concealed. The soft warm photons of the bluetooth speaker penetrated the veil and glowed in diffused yellow. It is real. Nice Legs was ignorant of the unreality of their environs, the desertion, the abandonment, the neglect, the crumbling roaring emptiness as muffling as a rough fibred synthetic door mat being pressed into their face. Struggling for a sniff of dust. But he could see. He has never had any other kind of sight, there is no sense of loss when there is nothing to be lost. "It might be an insult to suggest that I am normal. But I've been trying to be normal."

"No, I wouldn't say that you are normal. You are just well grounded in reality. While I am not completely there. I mean, here." Adelbert said, gesturing around him with a sweep of his hand.

"Well, anyways." Adelbert smiled, placating.

"I am afraid." Nice Legs said, his beautiful eyes reflected specks of light like they were about to turn into liquid, like fresh water ice on the brink of melting.

"Whatever for?" Adelbert had an inkling of an idea.

"You will disappear completely, turning inward. People do that, you know."

Adelbert smiled again, "Ah, anyways."

As Nice Legs is one of the few real things in the house, when Adelbert is not breathing in the photons with his face pressed to the bluetooth speaker playing some repetitive droning layered vibrations, he wants to eat Nice Legs. He has recently developed a lust, an appetite out of severe and prolonged deprivation, he chases after the real, he could walk on his knees on setted streets begging for the real thing, sniffing for it in the cold wet northerly wind that carries in horizontal rain from the firth. Razor sharp teeth cutting through skin and tearing flesh apart and the veil of reality into shreds. And beneath the veil is the edible substance that he longed to devour. Sometimes, in Nice Legs' presence, he flexed the muscles that control his jaws discreetly, indulging in the desire to close them around Nice Legs' nice thick fleshy stubbled neck and snap his heavy bountiful half-naked pretty head right off. Which he doesn't do. Because that's not what friends are for. And Adelbert is quite aware that Nice Legs might appreciate the privacy and dignity the veil of reality affords him and would not stand for having the fabric torn off, he might not fancy the vulnerability and pain and shame that could be the result of such an indecent exposure. He might be a crab and would fall apart like a sack of organs when having his armor dismantled. And Adelbert is all about consent.

Adelbert was no longer in motion, she was pinned down into the sheets like an insect. She was being crushed and she could not breathe. Bug juice seeped out of the joints of her shell as the downward pressure increased. Her head was scooped up, a very real, very physical hand under the back of her head, so that she was no longer falling downwards into the future.

She was playing the mute, bruised bride for Nice Legs, everytime a virgin.

"I thought you don't like it." Nice Legs remarked several times.

"I don't." She said, amended, "I didn't. I still don't find the need to do it with anyone else."

"What is different with me then?" Nice Legs smiled, masculine pride radiated off him like poison.

"I don't know." Adelbert said. She knelt on the foot of the bed and pressed the bountiful half-naked head of Nice Legs to her sternum, between her small flat breasts that made her feel like a child.

She does know.

They remember and sometimes still see in worn-down colours (like trying to piece together a narrative from the panels of an old and faded rug), the reality of shame and horror arose from her disgusted childish flesh like a tropical sun arising from 800 acres of half-composted vegetable matter, like the pungently sweet smell of rot when a spoiled bag of pork was sliced open and its congealing creamy white juice dripped out of the cut, it ascended upwards towards the ceiling, gathering into a miasma of suspicion. She is still looking for it - the childish distrust formed over an old wound - kneeling on the bed. Nice Legs perspired and breathed harshly into her chest, her arms felt his sweat sticking to her skin only because she felt her heat being whisked away as the sweat evaporated into the silence and darkness that permeated the house at 3am. She looked out of the door, ajar, almost completely dark, at the top of the stairs that led down into the living room and the kitchen. She waited for the horror and shame that would ascend those stairs, sour poisonous sweat being secreted by its pores leaving a trail of wetness in its wake. There was a tranquility in the waiting, she was still, she was patient, as life walked towards her with the predative self assuredness only seen in men wearing expensive leather shoes, with the inevitability of a car crash, just out of sight, behind the corner, off the bend, beneath the last visible step of the stairs.

She swallowed her spit in anticipation and heard her own long dormant voice, it stirred in her throat like a larvae, waiting for her to search in herself for something to talk about. Or cry about, if words were not forthcoming. The walls of her innards were dry, like abandoned concrete swimming pools in the Moroccan desert that only have water in the tourist season. She could not cry. When she does, she always feels as detached and unfeeling as a cast iron water fountain. Tears were pumped by an invisible force through her body and out of her eyes, cleansing her system of emotions like an enema.

"It's so quiet now." Nice Legs mumbled.

It is, not a single car passing under their window. The night bus had stopped but the first one in the morning has yet to set off.

"We should go to sleep." Adelbert said. She was still cradling Nice Legs' head over her sternum, like an overweight hard-shelled ball-shaped fetus that has fallen asleep after a night of fits and torment. When Nice Legs pulled out of her, she looked downwards towards her opened legs, and felt that she had just given birth. A part of her had been separated and grown into the man towering over her in the dark, twice her size and age, asking to be touched. She obliged and stroked the back of his sweat drenched neck like a child, a virgin, a mother, a cannibal, a fond anonymous dog-loving hand. They perspired and drifted towards heat death. Adelbert wondered if they only embraced so that two dead battered bodies could reduce their surface area and delay the inevitability of losing the last of their warmth. They perspired like candles.

"Like sensible adults." Nice Legs said.

"Exactly." Adelbert said, chuckling.

Adelbert wants to stay still. They want to be reduced to the size of particles, of a single dust mote of white chalk, and hide in the grooves under somebody's shoes. If they float up and down or sideways, there would be no consequence. The fall would be so gentle, the impact so tender, for they are so inconsequential. They want to tear their face off and burn it like the letter from TV licensing. They want to employ a poet who is adept in the use of cut-up and black out, who could fish their head filled flooded exploding with words to make some sense of the soup stew puree blocked kitchen sink of their mind. Adelbert wants to stay still and not sink into the sofa fall through the floor and get pulled downwards into the dark endless tunnel of time.

They fall together. If they maintain the same velocity, does it mean that they are staying still relative to each other?

We are all dying at the same speed, comrade.

#a writer's mental outhouse #the edinburgh diaries

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