Polarity #6

Seconds crept into minutes. Minutes wept into hours. Hours spiraled into days. Days bled unsealed into weeks. Weeks spun surreptitiously into months. His old life seemed to him distant, irretrievable. His heart ached, too tightly tuned to yield to grief. Music remained a source of inspiration, a clear iris amidst colliding tempests.

*

In the absence of supervision the residents fought continuously with one another. Each with their own means of embellishing violence. The atmosphere was fevered and uncertain, every step taken was in violation of some inscrutable farce. What had seemed at first a fierce individuality appeared now as posturings and affectations. He withdrew into her and she in turn embraced him, even that which stood, a monument to his anachronistic virtue.

*

His sobriety was a point of contention to some of the residents for they took it to be condescension. Others exalted him for his resistance to social pressure but neither view seemed to involve him directly. Caricature, opposition, deceit. He knew not to which paradigm they affixed his likeness only that his words and deeds never measured against it. A villain. A hero. He knew himself not in such black and white extremes. He saw in each man a vulnerability, guarded, resented, and preyed upon. He saw happiness assumed in jest. Insatiable was the illusion of freedom for it depended solely upon excess.

*

She held him, his love for her a panacea. He was willing to remain indefinitely. Until one day she betrayed him in a way that his heart was unable and unwilling to fathom. “What are you a monogamist?” She had asked, the final word drawing from her a smile of contempt and ridicule. Here was a question he’d never pondered for it had seemed to him quite obvious. He was and he had assumed she was as well. Had she not said “I love you” only hours before? She had never mentioned an open relationship and had assumed happily the titles that he had naively bestowed. What of his best mate? The other man knew well his feelings for he could not help but speak of them. Had the pair just assumed that he wouldn’t mind? That he would defer or perhaps even applaud them their secrecy (discretion)? If they had thought it natural why had they lied in the first place?

*

“I knew if I told you…you’d make a big deal out of it…” He would have because he would have known himself well enough not to enter such an arrangement. His heart would have been crushed but as it stood now he was completely devastated.

*

“Life is just a game right? You ought to loosen up a little…” He had loosened up but he would not become someone else entirely. Doubted that any of them had become someone else entirely for their reliance on parodies and pills.

*

“We can still have fun together so long as you don’t pull that morality bullshit on me…I get claustrophobic in relationships you know….” He wasn’t sure if she was telling the truth or if she had simply assumed the lifestyle in order to fit in. But standing there watching her fang-bearing smile flatline, he knew that he didn’t belong. More importantly he knew that he did not wish to conform to their despotic notions of authenticity.

=

We’re not there yet but we’re getting there it was a pretty long and involved dream haha I tend to have one dream that seems to go on the entire night or I only ever remember one. Today I turn 33 I love birthdays, the aging thing not so much haha

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