Fingers release the bottle begrudgingly. There is no such thing as free will. Circuitous processions beget circadian cluelessness. Irony is not lost on me in finding liquid solace so readily in the morning — there’s just something in the air, something fleeting that figures as existential dread hanging in the sepulchral sky of the city.
The post-event horizon permutation of the Ideas — of an Idea — always eclipses my scope and reason when foetalized in this Lethean lake. Persistent psychic dilapidation recurs. I am, I am not, ego sum, non sum. The sum of my ego — a non-sum. Nonsense. And so the mortar of my febrile psyche acts in subjection to patchwork efforts, part-prescription, part-addiction.
The bursting blister of the sun’s resurgence finds my feet planted on pressure-treated geometry and sucking turbid tar, staring at the rising starlight in which I have been so recently enlightened. (Exoplanetary prophesy.) Evergreen mirrors in glass quasi-toroids pointing in a yawning maw, and it is with the subsequent flicker of a tawny tinder glow that I spy splayed feathers, an eagle-spread. Sloe gin droplets mark the eviscerality of the comet’s causation. Moss musters on the naked mud. The tenuous ice holds hands with itself across the dappled tundra.
Drawing closer, inspecting the failed flight from a supernova. The raw red crater of conspicuously absent osteological evidence. Grumous digits litter the frigidity, the finality, and this narrative nothingness betrays so much more about the speaker than the Reality in front of them.
Standing godlike above the ruin, I can see the triumphant lunar proclamation. It has the lunar chill of Truth echoed so unvaryingly in the Vacuum; sound belongs to the air and the air alone, and we only ever borrow it to come close to something like a True and Real connection.
Beside this sanguine abstraction is a poplar transplanted from remote Tobermory. It reaches strong and proud into the numinous winter air, and is contrary to all deniable aspects of its existence.
Another abstraction.
Extinguishing molten pathogens. Uncertainty as to which mirrors me, which psychoanalytic reading is the True one: my collapsing Reality, or my contrary Reality.
One suspects they aren’t really all that mutually exclusive.
Whisky bolsters the wavering man’s will.
