A Search For Home (546 hits)
Category: NoneRating: 1.75 on 4 reviews (Rate this item) (V)
Submitted by <murphydog5.at.hotmail.com> (View user info) at 2004-11-16 20:27:59 EST
The other night, a rainy cool dark and orange-lit night, I was walking down The ally looking for home. The gravel popped under my big black boots and I could hear the sodium lamps sizzle and cast out their orange light, me seeing this light only as reflections in the puddles down by my feet. The air that night was sweet and cool and fresh like sweet honey spring or like the after taste of a hot soapy shower. Thoughts of just about everything shot through my head; I wasn't able to concentrate on one single one for any appreciable amount of time except for just one. Where's home? Where do I feel safe? And then I found the door. On the outside it didn't look like home—it was black with old filthy grease and smoke from big big machines that whirred and purred their stinky smoke. It wasn't the door or a conventional like home safety feeling I was after that orange fresh night—it was what lay behind the filth and grease. It was what was inside and the options I had once inside that was what I wanted.
So I put my finger tips on the door with one hand and with the other I pinched the greasy brass knob and turned. The door went "eeeeak" on it's dry hinges and I put my foot up to step inside. The other foot followed, stepping on the carpet and just then I took a big deep breath because now I was home. The door reflexed and came back; I could hear the "eeeeak" in rewind as it too found home. Before I could exhale the door went "BOOM" and I found myself not at home any longer but in a chair, strapped down and gagged and butt fucking naked.
What? How did I get here? Have I been drinking or drugging tonight? No. Pills, legal-like? No. How the fuck did I get here? My first thoughts were panic and fear. I went from what I had considered reality and subjective truth to a whole new world without any provocation that I could pick up just then.
The room it was white as pure colorful white; it had four doors; it was a cube with right angles at ninety all eight and parallel lines and a diagonal equal to any of the one perfect equal twelve cube sides. My hands were tied behind my back with what felt like thin wire and my legs and chest were tapped to a brown chair in the center of the pure white cube. A cloth of some sort was wrapped around my head, bisecting my lips so that my screams of fear sounded more like "mmmff, mmmff." And oh did I scream. One step ago I was home or was it really home I guess I thought tied up and gagged, naked, screaming, full of fear.
This struggle continued for some time until I felt like very very trapped and all alone. Reason had no place for it was strictly forgotten in seconds: no human being I've ever talked to went from an innocent search for home and found it in a place not like home and then ended up tied up with a gag in a room somewhere. I had no point of reference and there was no reason to apply reason... to think my way out of this horror trap I somehow put myself in. Did I mentally put myself here? I don't know. And no matter—I was here. I gave my mind up then and then these pictures filled my lids, the moment I gave up my ability to reason something reasonless and closed my eyes.
The light from the pictures was originally orange like the sodium orange sizzling from the ally moments ago, the orange of the back of thin lids trying for sleepy black while forced to stare at bright white. Then orange turned to real pictures—a well, of all things (like a get-water-in-the-olden-days well). I looked down this mysterious well, giving up all control from my chains of reason. At the bottom was no bottom, just pure black, and when I concentrated reasonless on the black all of the sudden I saw another picture. Get this! It was ME staring down a hole—the silhouette of me and my spiky hair cast against dark blue sky and white powdery clouds that were moving pretty fast.
What was going on? My eyes were closed in a cubic white room and just before I was looking for and found home and now there's like two mes looking at each other and talking about letting go of subjective, personal truth in favor of nothing really more practical or TRUE. That's what I thought and the dual-image disappeared like "snap." Back to the horror and panic and confusion, terror of being in some place reasonless. So I said stop it. Why? Don't ask brain, just do. Give up. Moments later, it gave up.
There was me, your author, looking at me again. I was looking up at me, the silhouette. What I saw was the other me, heaving up chunks of food down in to the well. He didn't look so well, wobbling this way and that as he puked. What was he thinking? He was scared as hell, I could just feel it. Then he did something I wasn't expecting. He threw himself down in to the well knowing what fate that decision held. He wanted to end the sickness and suffering and he didn't know how else to do it, feeling as though all his choices had expired. I knew this, though I didn't feel it personally at the time, me being already at the bottom and having no place else to look but pure up up up.
His screams echoed throughout the dank well, "ahhhhhh" and yet somehow I don't feel like he regretted his decision. I'm sure it all felt reasonable at the time, him being still stuck and bonded behind his own thoughts of being able to control everything all by his lonely self. I thought about catching him, feeling like he is just a part of me that feels uncatchable. I would surprise him. But instead, I let him die.
It was quick pain, I'm sure. Loud, too... it was a sick crunching sounds followed by a lot of quick blood. Frankly, the sound and sight was disgusting to watch, but the end of suffering that followed was sure because he was right dead. Pure dead. He thought of nothing any more and forever more and to him, that was probably best. But now what? There's just the one me, stuck at the bottom of a well.
I did what instinct told me to do. I touched the mass of broken everything, even though I didn't really want to, but I touched it because this mass was like me, or a part of me that died. I guess it was symbolic, to be like kind to myself and let something go or something. I wasn't sure, but I let instinct guide me just then. And the instant I touched it, me, I found myself back home, standing on the carpet, looking back at a door that just went "BOOM."
I was refreshed for a moment, trying to figure out what all of this meant and why it happened to me. What I did, though, was to only recognize that this was not home really, this place that I was, but only a place to poison myself and feel synthetically on the insides like it's home.
And poison myself I did, and at last I was home and safe.
Murphy
User Reviews
Submitted by Istaros (user info) at 2004-12-16 00:05:09 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
holy shit
Submitted by snagglepuss (user info) at 2004-11-16 23:10:24 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
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Submitted by JMG114 (user info) at 2004-11-16 20:50:52 EST (#)
Ranking: 1
Went on a little long here and there, but as usual, a damn good read. You've always been a favorite of mine.
Submitted by catatonic (user info) at 2004-11-16 20:44:47 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
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