The screeching is always loud, especially when you get close to the end of the tunnel, where the sun is so bright outside that it sears your blood-bitten retinae like warm buffet ahi. Everyone’s here, laughing at the cruelty of the survival instinct. We’re vacillating in a different world. We’re walking the line between wishing to know depravity’s depth and the fears of knowing it before we’re shipped off to oblivions-villeby some disease or the body’s resistance to living.
We dream about dying, even asphyxiating, because the drudgery of illusion is like a fortress of torture built from the promise of some future happiness.
Outside, when my eyes finally adjust, I can see that it’s not the sun — it’s fires. Fires everywhere. Bodies twisted into bone-kings like calcified termite mounds. Hands reach up in a cliche of god-lust. Someone’s crystal piano echoes in the sky, a shopping-mall dirge fossilized in a cocaine-addled eardrum.
Mephistopheles kisses us all, one by one, at a kissing booth built from our own weakening veins. Red and blue fleshy vines hold up a sign that reads, “Let it go.” Isn’t that right? The best advice. The only advice. Let go of the promise — we’re all corpses. Let go of the promise — our heads will be crushed into paste by the fist of nature’s cruelty. Cranial bone-shards will dig their way into the folds of our feeble cerebral gelatin. And what we will be left with without that blubbery paste of knowledge? What’s the brain but the soul we most value?
I’m inside out. I’m outside in. I’m imagining the cancer that’ll build up right at the bottom of my left-side rib cage. I’m watching it grow and push against everything, rebelling against the body. I never wanted children, and in that irony I’m finally pregnant with a great burden, but one that can’t become a murderer or an obnoxious autistic freak.
Who knows how silent I’ll go? Who knows if I’ll rebel against the nature that made this lumpy infant?
What I do know, and I know with confidence, is that I’ll laugh while I close my eyes and sink, sink, sink down under the bed and into the linoleum floor, and into the dirt and past flint and obsidian and into the core of the earth where I’ll fucking burn forever and eventually get used to it.