Stupid Mistakes

A shrill screech was the last thing I'd heard.

I'd passed out after.

I woke up against all odds to find that I was surrounded by people.

'Dont move' they screamed together like an untrained choir.

They shouted it again and again, and maintained a safe distance from me.

My passive mind picked up on their anxiety and I obeyed by n0t moving a millimeter.

My father stepped forward and explained the situation.

' He was here son, but dont worry they got him. He's dead now, he came back for you, but he's been punished. But, I am afraid that he may have done some permanent damage.'

He hesitated a little and said

'Its very essential that you dont move because your face has been cut right through the middle. The good doctor will explain the rest.'

They were well prepared for this explanation, made me wonder how long I'd been out.

The good doctor, a man in his 40's with prematurely greying hair and a thin frame, stepped forward.

He said,

' You see young man, what we have here is unintended perfection. The perfect cut. Do not misunderstand me, but I can not not admire the art.

The big bad man, used a laser to cut through your face. It is a plane cut, angled at 30 o t upwards from the front, starting above your lips. The laser has cut right through your maxillary, palatial, sphenoid and occipital bones succesfully emerging from the back of your head, however as is common experience in life when plastic sheets stick to wet surfaces, all the blood vessels are in alignment and those which are'nt have been cauterized by the laser. A miracle indeed. Your face is being held in place by your mere lack of movement. Even the tiniest action could cause your face to split into two.

I suggest young man that you neither move, talk, eat nor drink, until a solution is thought of.

The brightest minds have been called forth to brainstorm so worry not, a solution will be reached.'

I did as asked of me and for three days I lay still. People came, people went. I became a scientific subject for some, a doomed relative for others and a horrific tale for the rest.

The fourth day, thirsty and hungry to the bone I was, when the good doctor came back.

He said, ' Young man, we have found a way to make you live. It is simple and painless and a permanent cure. You shall receive treatment from tomorrow. The world is good again.'

Joy surged through me like a roller coaster and I stood up and jumped as high as I could.

When I fell, I wasnt the same, I felt my plane of vision rotate and I landed in a pool of my own blood.

My body lay a few inches in front.

The Unnatural

Unnatural bouts of fear.

Perceived movement on the other side of my bedroom window.

Randomly fluttering curtains.

Feeling observed.

Dead dog, in my living room.

Dead birds on the roof.

A vial of white pills.

Neither placebo nor cure.

A man in a white coat.

Ladies in green.

All eyes fixed on me.

White environment.

A room merely declared as solitary.

Loneliness yet I dont feel.

Bed, Mirror and the loo.

Morning, noon and night.

Dead by morning.

Unnatural hands, the harbinger of my doom.

Unnatural death.

Fractured hyoid.

Self strangulation they say.

Physicians devoid of physical perception,

declare dead yet another mysterious person.

But, hardly anybody asks for my side of the story.

I performed the unnatural.

But I wasnt me.

NOTE :

Depersonalization disorder (DPD) is a dissociative disorder in which the sufferer is affected by persistent or recurrent feelings of depersonalization and/or derealization. Diagnostic criteria include persistent or recurrent experiences of feeling detached from one's mental processes or body. The symptoms include a sense of automaton, going through the motions of life but not experiencing it, feeling as though one is in a movie, loss of conviction with one's identity, feeling as though one is in a dream, feeling a disconnection from one's body, out-of-body experience (a detachment from one's body), and difficulty relating oneself to reality and the environment.

Other Worlds I

The two clans were almost unaware of each other's existence.

They even saw the world in different light.

The Neari were like noctuelles, adapted to the moonlight.

The Samar were like birds, the life of day.

Yet they inhabited but the same land, ate the same fruit, hunted the same creatures

and were hunted by the same beasts.

Like most early people both clans worshipped everything around them, the earth, the wind, the rivers, the animals and the sky, sharing a very sophisticated relationship with nature, yet possessing merely simplistic drives.

They say the most beautiful part of a river is the estuary; that of an ocean, the beach; that of music, where melody meets silence and that of a painting where colour meets space.

Every year, during the eclipse when day becomes night, the Neari who had attained their adoloscence would come out from their hiding, so would the Samar.

Temporarily blinded by the gold and silver rays, they would engage in the most blissful activity known to them, moans and cries of pleasure would silence the birds and all other creatures of Earth.

They would then return to their hiding, never to talk about the happenings during the eclipse, silently believing that they had experienced god.

Then came the ice age.

Note : 'Possibility' is a very intrinsic term in human life, drawing from recent understandings and developments in theoretical and experiential physics it seems that any scenario is actually possible. The situation described in this story may very well be the reality in some other universe, defined by a different set of rules. Our science, their magic.

Watch Me Grow

Someday, I will be the man who you will look up to.

Someday, out of the blue, It'll hit you,

Hey I knew that guy you'll say,

He was'nt like this before, you'll think to yourself,

Someday, I will own you,

and possibly the world around you too,

Out of the blue, It'll hit you,

and you'd say, I knew this man would own me someday,

Someday I'll be king of the world,

Someday, a whole new day,

in maybe a whole new world,

around maybe a whole new bunch of people.

Someday I'll be able to look you in the eye and say,

Watch me grow, Watch me rise,

To unprecedented heights,

While you plunge to even greater depths.

Today,

A tiny flame flickers in a lamp as black as night,

blackened by rage and passion,

the fire lost in the emptiness,

Perhaps,

In the silence I still hear those 'somedays', and I still see your face,

Reminding me of the endless race I pursued.

Counterproductive Conscience

Okay, so he had a gun to my head.
' You would'nt wanna shoot me.'
' Why not?'
' Bad Karma.'
'I think you're forgetting that you're the bad guy here.'
'Am I now?'
'Yea you killed many people.'
'You are going to kill one.'
'Yes I am, but one that killed many people.'
'So does that make me a bad man.'
'Yes it does.'
'According to whom.'
'According to me and everything I believe in.'
'But what if everything you believe in is wrong?'
'It cannot be.'
'Why not?'
'Because Its what's generally accepted, the guy who kills many people is the bad guy and killing him aint that much of a crime.'
'So would you kill a police officer or a soldier then?'
'They had to do it to protect the rest of us, besides I am a pacifist.'
'If you are a pacifist and you do not believe in war then should'nt you kill those who commit it, because they are killing against your beliefs.'
He started and then stopped.
Then he spoke
'I should just kill you already.'
'Yes you should have, but now you have all the time in the world to kill me, you've got the gun, my last wish is to have a decent conversation. Surely a good man like you can grant my dying wish.'
'No, you are trying to confuse me and dampen my intention.'
'So your intent to kill is pretty strong?'
'My intent to kill you is.'
'But why would a pacifist want to kill so much?'
'Because scum like you should not be alive.'
'Why not?'
'Because you destroy lives.'
'You are about to destroy mine too, will you shoot yourself later?'
'No...'
'You like to kill, but you dont because the world and the society dont allow it, so you take shelter under the idea of pacifism where you shield yourself from an oppurtunity to kill, because you are afraid that you might enjoy it. Fear propels your psyche to escape from situations that may create it.
Do you not think so? Think about it from an intellectual perspective.'
A slight tremor shook his arm as he cocked his gun.
' No' he said.
' If your urge to kill me has only increased after what I have said, it probably means that you see the truth in what I said, your psyche wants you to shut me up so that I will stop revealing aspects of your identity that scare you, because you diffuse your identity over all of humanity and you see this animalistic side to us, that you cannot tolerate. So I think its fair to say that killing me is the best way for your subconscious to vent out its lust to take away another's life. Perhaps it may also make you feel a little more powerful. So if by dying I can help you then go ahead kill me.'

I could see beads of sweat emerge from his forehead, as his pupils dilated to maximum as he grasped my words, his hands were shaking. The conscience was getting filled up like a bag, i figured that he would eventually crumble under the burden.

'Shoot me, I am done talking.'
'No.'
'But you came here to shoot me.'
'No I wont, I am going to call the cops and wait for them to show up.'
'But isnt it wrong enough to want to kill a person?'
'Yes.'
'So you came here, wanting to shoot me down and leave, because I was the only one that you had an excuse to kill, I was the bad guy. But now once I showed you your true nature you want to not kill me but you want others to do it, once again just to protect yourself, seeing that you are a man who does everything with himself in mind, even kill, why am I the only bad guy in this room?'

He dropped the gun and sat down, I walked upto to him, picked up the gun in my leather gloves and walked out of the room.
The man had suffered enough.

THE CHASE

‘The infamous assassin cum art thief Hulohot was killed today in the city of Delft by officers of the European Law Enforcement Agency (ELEA). The ELEA had been tracking Hulohot for almost 3 months while he is said to have been in the Netherlands to steal the famous Castafoire emerald. A special squad of the ELEA tracked his location on Sunday evening to an old cottage in Delft. Officers soon stormed the building and a short exchange of firing ensued following which Hulohot was declared dead from a headshot. One ELEA officer was also killed in the crossfire, Lt. Rosa.’

This piece in the newspaper grabbed my attention almost immediately, as I read through it several times each time grasping different parts of the passage and putting together the whole. I had just woken up and my hypnogogic state made it all seem like a dream.
As I made myself coffee I thought about how this very well could have been a dream. I was indeed associated in my small way with these two people, more directly with Charize.
As a psychologist I Charize had been visiting me on and off for the past ten years. I have seen her grow through the ranks. Working for the ELEA I had seen bizarre stuff, but none as captivating as what Charize presented.
The first time she came to me was in 1990, I can remember that day very vividly, she was part of the operation that was trying to capture this man, I forget his name…..hmmm….yes it was Hulohot. She said that there was something that had drawn her to this case, something that she couldn’t explain and that all she could think about was finding this man. She even showed me a photograph of Hulohot. Initially I began thinking along the lines of Freud, but unfortunately modern psychology does not allow one to be that free with their thoughts and ideas.
The next time I saw her, was a year later, I vaguely remember that occasion because she started by saying that she thought she was going crazy, she told me that she hadn’t been with another man for the last year and that she didn’t know why but ever since she started chasing hulohot she just couldn’t be interested in other men, this was very bizarre because she seemed to have somehow tied her identity to the chase of this man, a chase that her hippocampus seemed to thoroughly enjoy. It was strange that she feel this way about a man that she had never met, but when I confronted her with this fact she said :
‘ Of course I’ve met him, I’ve even danced with him’
She had waltzed with him at a party being hosted by Gianlungi Bouton, the art connoisseur, but of course she hadn’t known that it was him then and her whole fascination with the man had begun after the party and after the world had finally seen its first photo of Hulohot.
Now I was sure that Charize was in some trouble of the cognitive kind, she had taken the carpet that was her identity that covered different kinds of terrain and had wrapped it around this single man.
But why?

THE GLASS WALL

It was impossible to tell its thickness for sure but I could tell that it was fairly thick.
White and transparent and cold to the touch.
I could see shapes on the other side and I could hear sounds, sounds of people, laughter and sometimes music.
I could hear moaning at nights and roars during day.
I could see hands and legs and heads.
And then I looked sideways only to see the slab stretch forever.
I felt like some kind of analyst, strategically placed to analyse the glass and the figurines behind it.
But I hated it.
I spent most days looking for a door of somekind.
Funny thing is, I don’t remember how I got here.

THE WRITING SESSION

' You cant just sit down and write stuff', James said.


'Why the hell not?'


'Cuz thats not how people write', he said as I walked him out the door.


'Well thats just how I write then. I am going to just sit down and think of stuff to write about and you guys can go and do whatever the hell you want.'


'You bet we are, we are going to get all the clunge while you sit here like a fuckin bender.'


'Get lost' I said as I shut the door on his face.


I grabbed a glass of orange juice and walked upstairs.


A lot of ideas crossed my mind as I thought of ways to organise and write them into a story.


So I sat at my computer and I opened a new document as I prepared myself to write a story.





Deja vu.


I remembered this situation only too well.


I remembered wanting to be sophisticated, wanting to be like those other guys, like Nick Drake or somebody.


Wanting to be that guy who could spin tales and carry people to different worlds, to draw their minds to the matter, whether it was consentual or not.


Wanting to be the closest that we can be to magicians and wizards and oracles and prophets, a writer.


But I guess sophistication is an aquired thing.


I remember spending the last 5 hours in front of the blank screen, trying to produce ideas perfect enough to deserve writing.


So today I guessed I wouldnt try so hard, as so many thoughts crossed my mind I drifted off to sleep.

Inkblot

Pools of thoughts,

fed to our souls from the same sea.

From these pools words shall flow.

They shall flow through the purest paths,

from silvery river to black,

five shades of it,

shall reinforce one another,

worlds will be created,

and through a silent sinister metaphor,

the universe and life itself shall play on paper.

And as i let my pool refill,

an inkblot forms where my thoughts touch paper.

L.R