#13

The Noise (2005)

I will be the first to admit that when my anger finally arrived, in its totality, it raised my vanities with it. I lost myself to superfluity to cope with it. I buried myself in the superficial, rather than burn in the fire of rage. I pivoted and whirled, threw myself into the reckless oblivion of the night, and awoke many times devoid of any coherent memory of it. But as I sobered the memories would return, and I would throw myself back into it all again. On and on it went, many faces and naked bodies, many empty glasses and dusty panels, yet precious few moments of truth.

Indeed, my vanity became a crutch, but it could not hold against the inevitability of emotion. It could not hold in the spaces where I found myself alone. I ceased to look into mirrors, as I could barely stand to see what I saw. For what does vanity bring but itself? It is not an offering, neither is it a gift. A false commodity is what it is; fragile, wicked and untrue. But as is its nature, it went deeper and deeper, infecting the host down to its roots.

That original interruption – that estrangement – set in motion a series of twists and turns that led me to lose my way. In hindsight, it was but a small push, a slight that contained hidden meanings that I would have done best not to dwell on, but it sat within me like a surgeon’s scalpel that had been sown up within me, forgotten deep within the folds of tissue that had now healed over it, and around it.

But its incisive edge seemed to respond to my movements, splitting me from within, dividing me inch by inch. I entered into the process of becoming two just to cope with the agony of it. It so assailed me that I created another half to hide from it.

I could feel it doing its work, but I couldn’t fathom why it mattered so much. It was as though it was merely a product of something else that I could no longer reach, no longer touch, something left behind in the passage between being and becoming. I became determined to find it, determined to track down the origins of this pain, the roots of it, the ultimate causes of it.

And so I began my descent into the fractal geometry of memory, and my mind bore the burden of multiplicity like it had never done before. The deeper I searched, the more it appeared that there would always be more, that there was a chain of infinite causes, and I could never reach the end of it. They blurred, sometimes appearing as one, sometimes as infinite.

Eventually, I lost sight of the origins. I unhinged from the present and spiralled into chaos. Memory, sense and emotion combined. I lost myself to the noise, and joined the all-pervasive tremble of the origins of the universe, of everything.

I broke, became untethered, and floated into the unreal; where truths and falsehoods became one, where distinction ceased. I was no more, neither was the mind. Only the body remained, haunted by an uncertain spirit.

Yes … I broke. And in breaking, the vanities that had once sustained me, became the very demons that I had sought to avoid by inflating myself. They circled in on me and took possession of my mind, as though a wizard had wrought a spell upon me. I bumbled through each day, my only thought of sleep, of escape from this breaking, this brokenness that laid me bare before the world.

The spirits of the necropolis embraced me. I felt them encircling my chest, restricting my breath, drawing me inward. Fear accompanied the stifling weight of it. It was ever so slight, yet it still wrought a tension within me, so that it felt more like a contraction; a confinement that grew tighter as the yoke was wrestled.

A strangling ensued, but it was not of the quick type; it lingered for a long time and did not conclude. Even when it had released, it still held on. It released and reset, encircling me more with each reprieve, contracting thereafter again. I needed a way out but the compression, and the agony of that scalpel within, combined to fix me into a state of dull oblivion. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t move. What way out of this insanity?

So what began my descent - that spiral - into the fractal geometry of memory, ceased to matter anymore. What mattered was the dance I enacted to avoid the descent into chaos. The dance that gave meaning to it all; even if objectively there was none to speak of.

***Note: To view the previous chapter of Fragments please click here.