I don’t know if you’ve ever waited for someone to die but after a while you stop caring.

Don’t get me wrong.

At first it’s awful. The stress. The terrible inevitability of loss. The tears of your mother and the cold monolithic silence of your father.

And you’ll worry.

Whole nights of sleep disappear in lieu of wondering. Will there be a call from the Hospital at 3am? Have you loved her enough? How will you cope?

You’ll age too. Not overnight, but sometime after. Perhaps two years after it all starts – the anniversary of your twenty-first birthday almost, because this is a yearly event – and you’re there again. Stalking the corridors of the hospital, a sickly yellow tinge to everyone’s faces under the strip lighting.

Faces I have come to hate – family, the Guinean nurses, the young tired doctors and the patients clawing desperately towards the last dregs of their lives.

Hard to tell us apart – we all look so wan and worn out.

And each of us, like I said, older than we had been before all this. Each encounter removing something from us in different way like the slow draining from the half full glass.

It’s heart failure, by the way. After your first two years with the condition you’re supposed to be on borrowed time. But it’s been three now and my own dear grandmother is still here. Filled with fluid and the will to fight on regardless of the cost to society and her own loved ones.

Rather I that she be filled with the good grace to turn her face to the wall and do the right thing.

Stop fighting and give us all a break.

Of course, according to anyone who overhears this sentiment, I am, without doubt merely struggling to come to terms with the nature of this catastrophe.
Poor me. My reaction is … understandable. I must be devastated inside.

Who knows? Maybe there’s always been this detachment inside me. The switch clicks on but the connection misses. So no smile and no tears and no nothing but sick jokes and harsh realities.

Maybe it just takes a real crisis to test you character and peel the self-defensive layers of your personality back to expose your true shining shelf. Maybe I was always a heartless good for nothing ingrate with no sense of justice or hint of selfless motivation or maybe I can be saved at the last moment.

And in the background to this scene it continues - Her and I and her demands for cream cakes despite the diabetes, for more salt in her soup and more beef stock cubes in her mince. Crisps on demand and fish and chips every Friday despite the four heart attacks and endless trips to chemist or the super market and phone calls to her doctors and the cardiac nurses and put upon social workers and home helpers whose jobs are never done well enough. They don’t dust the mantelpiece.

And so every conversation returns to her. Dear old Grandmamma. The centre of our collapsing universe.

Trapped nine stories up in her own purgation. She could have gone to grammar school you know – if she hadn’t caught rheumatic fever. She could have gone to America if the immigration office hadn’t demanded she remove all of her bad or rotten teeth. She could have had a life you know – if she hadn’t had to nurse her own sick and dying mother through the last of her ninety-nine years. So filled with bitterness. So filled with regret.

How history repeats itself.

So let’s just say that it’s a surprise when I have some kind of a reaction to her. Or at least a surprise to me who had been sceptical till now of my own kindly hidden emotions. Maybe it will be a surprise to you too, if you’re not of those slow eye understanding types so eager to mother away the hard edges and doubt from my life. Perhaps your eyes, this whole time, have been fixed with a knowing sort of understanding to these words.

Of course you know – and as you assume, so much better than me.

I don’t mean it.

I can’t mean it.

I’m just a poor girl, confused and trying to hide from the pain. It must be terrible for me. Secretly I must be glad she’s still alive. I just can’t express it through all the worry and mental anguish.

But my reactions? They give me away. You are certain.

And so to that last time I saw her and my reaction. July sometime. Or August. Whenever. The yearly penance – my parents deserve a holiday and so for one whole week I trudge up there. 9 stories to be told I have gained weight and need to wear neater trousers and cook her dinner.

And every day, the food is cooked already and all I seem to be there for is to wash dishes and listen to her and her endless talk of friends in nursing homes and how she feels so trapped up there, shut in and breathing recycled air all that way up in the sky.

And I realise how lonely she must be. And how no-one wants to listen. And how I have to get home and leave her there until my mother’s phone call. Alone and maudlin and knowing no-one wants to listen. Dying bit by bit – suspended like the rest of us in time.

And I end up, sitting on this circular bus that weaves its way all round the city, crying and feeling so heavy. I stay there circling everything for a long time. Long enough to think and collect myself.

Oh how well you have guessed at me, dear reader. How demolished I have been my sympathies. How much I have learned. Because you were right, there was something to learn from this.

I had learned to stop caring. Like I said.

And how sorry I am to disappoint you. That old woman, festering up there like some great boil – I didn’t cry for her. I cried for me. I cried for every moment I had wasted waiting for another human being to die. For every pass of the city made in a wavering loop like the circling of my life around hers. I cried for every wasted minute and hopeless plea to God in her name.

I cried and when I had finished there was no more caring in me.

So, my personality shines through. The morality tale comes to a twisted end and I leave you a numb, uncaring Everyman. Its nature winning here, not nurture although you have all tried.

And how cruel of me to lead you on. With the hints and suggestions that you could be right. That I could be wrong.

But, like I said, after a while you simply stop caring.

It had been years now. Years of savage weekends and fraught encounters with each other and something was coming.

It hung back, black clad and ominous, out of sight but never out of mind. On slow nights you could hear its shallow breathing and the odd muted clanking it made as it waited, shifting its weight from foot to foot. And somewhere among the stinging notes of acrid smoke and bourbon you could smell it on the fast nights between the sweat and anticipation.

Each of us felt it, in our own way, and each of us dealt with the promise of its arrival with varying tactics and degrees of success.

I drank. I drank rivers and lakes and oceans of bourbon and vodka and wine. I drank alone and in company and always purposefully. To forget. To run. To dull the clanking and the breathing and the sharp, stale taste at the back of my throat.

And when the drinking failed I smoked. Pollen and grass and cheap brown blocks of sand and plastic. I smoked till my throat ached and my voice dropped a full octave.

I drank and I smoked and all around me the city grew stranger. Terrible things began to happen. The buildings seemed to grow taller and closer together as the people who occupied them began to fold in on themselves.

Something was Watching.

Something was Growing.

Throbbing up from the streets in inconsistent sickening pulses. Thrumming along our spines and rattling our teeth till our souls shook and our hearts beat the same unfathomable rhythm.

Somewhere below us and inside us something had been growing. Some vast empty something that pulled the town to its knees.

Something terrible was happening.

After all. It had only been a matter of time.

Things had begun to stop, and drip sluggishly towards the streets, collecting in pools around the feet of the buildings. And there they lay. Heavy and black – ready to suck you in.

Finding a pen to write with became impossible as the ink curdled in the atmosphere and set in long colored needles. Words failed and dropped dead into nothingness. No-one held eye contact and voices grew ever more muted in their merry making. Downcast, we weekend millionaires. Groups fractured and coalesced into smaller and smaller alliances. Restless, we tired warriors. Battle scarred and spent out we trudged home and went to ground.

Everything became stilted.

Everything became silent, waiting beneath the electric calm in the space between shoes dropping before the storm could break over us. We hid, animal like, and cowering in corners.

And still the feeling that we were hung here in the vastness of our space, waiting for the unknown inevitable. A city in gestation and each of us building chrysalises out of the haze and delusion. Closeted away with old winter coats and shoes I turned 24. But what does that mean? Holed up at the weekends and tranquilized and hidden teaching myself to crochet. But what does that mean?

All of these things.

The clanking, breathing other. The pulsating concrete and cobble. The slow dripping of the stopped world and the sound of the clicking hook stretching out the yarn. Old war cries mumbled through lips thick with drink. Forgotten toasts to the fallen.

Blocks upon blocks. Progression; building higher. Building towards this something.

Recycled stories of better times to fill the space where something should happen.

What was it? What was out there? Stalking the outskirts of our home. Pressing in closer with each looping pass. Waiting, obviously. And all the while the building continues but not for us. For it.

And at any moment – at any long drawn out pulled taught moment – it would come rushing and skipping over the streets towards us to inhabit its place.

So we waited too.

Under the ever descending sky. The walls grown in further. The nooks and crannies listening more furiously for the last echoes around the town. No laughter. No footsteps along corridors or up stairs. A dull ache in the chest somewhere.

Each nerve in our bodies grating and squeezing past and over each other in squealing, juddering twitches. Stand close enough to any of us and you could hear it – the grinding of teeth and the chorus of anticipatory bio-rhythms. But no-one stood close and only the hollows and It listened.

And so we waited.

And It calculated.

And all we could do was think. Think long and feverishly into the stifled air. Words and images.

The back of a neck. The long afternoon. The bar at Club Heartbreak out on Desolation Row was open that night and

“I never meant to”…

And somewhere inside us the truth congeals oily skinned and thick. Dirty green and cold. What It is. What it has been this whole time. What we had birthed together.

Our dreams and the future personified - our own ignored potential and wasted time, accusatory and large the way we think of fate as overwhelming.

What had to happen – the thumping at the door and the scratching at the windows would come. The splintering and the cracking and our hands pressed over our mouths to stop the screaming. Eyes shut tight; refusing to see what we knew would be there. And in that long agonizing second that grows ever longer in the dark we wait.

We wait to know what it wants.

Think as we night, we can only come close to knowing at cold, clammy moments at the end of stark grey dreams.

4 am with eyes sprung open to brief shadows and furtive movement. Breath catching in the throat and every inch of us is slammed awake. It’s purpose?

Who knows that?

This place, swapped brick by brick by It’s building from our home to something else watches. Hostile. Suffocating. Warm to the touch.

This place we built together. It and us. And from each unfamiliar hidden place we feel it.

Its aim – set dead on with beady concentrated eyes – is us.

I started this over and over again and it was the same each time.

"Dear Max, so here it is. It’s a letter. Which is a pretty poor start I guess, but I’m in college…"
and each time it trailed away into inanity because the truth is every day I wake up and drag myself from one place to another just getting by. No complaints; no moments of great distinction. Just me, and the grey black fuzz crammed into every space.

Sometimes during the hours at home listening to the washing machine shake itself to death nothing takes form at all and all you know is that sitting here, something smells like wet dog after the sea. And I'm thinking, nothing smells like that here.

But it does.
But why that smell of all things, here and now? Why wet dog and salt water? Perhaps some memory of dog left over in the clothes I pulled still damp from the dryer activated by the wet insides of its aging belly. Perhaps a mistake. What do you think?

Not that you've ever told me anything. You're all spaces and stops and in those spaces there could be anything. And every day you go about your life completely separate from me and unrelated. A startling white spot in the dust - far off and small. Here I am. Here you are. Constantly shifting reference points.

Nothing happens. Time paces: counting off minutes and seconds in terse steps. Down same streets, over same dips, past same sights, across same streets. A progression of still shots of dust motes floating golden in the evening. Suspended between horizons. Trapped in the unreality bubble.

And you outside. Time passes you. You pass time. Time ticked off in scale and regiment. Time accepted. Time gained. Time lost. Time acknowledged.

And me inside, where nothing can touch me. Airless, this sealed rubber space around me stretches out with my movements to touch people and surfaces, ripples forming around it in the air. When was the last time I touched anything? Here everything is muted. Everything is soft. There are no hard edges or unbroken lines.

I've never been sure where I was going, but today I found myself at the bus station. Stark and concrete. Sickly smell of diesel and scattered stained dog ends. Everyone comes here at some point. We congregate - each person hunched and wary, avoiding eye contact. Skittish. We could be anyone but we're all falling. Tumbling down from our pedestals and landing here together to share pensive communal space. Each journey testing the borders of our intimacy issues.

In these spaces I shut my eyes and picture nothingness in front of me. Vast, dark, rushing nothingness. All around me I feel movement and inertia pushes me forward; traveling through this space with no destination but more space. Traveling forever with the noise of emptiness crackling in my ears as all the bad things slide off. The sick grandparents, the lost loves, the problems of friends you can never solve; the passing vacuum peels it from my skin where it's been stuck and pulls it away. Fluttering languidly it stretches off into the distance, disappearing into a tiny point.

Trailing away into inanity.

This cycle - like my letter - of false starts and falling away. Like the future, pulled out and thin between us; ideas anchored together under the clouded sky. We’ve never walked the same streets but everyone has to travel.

Right?

Whether back to the start or in straight lines towards the future we have to travel. This one thing I know about you, and everyone else. Here we all are reduced to single sentences and bare bones in the sun. The quietest easiest assumptions that I cling to, to impose some sense of shared reality between us. Connections. Communication.

We all have to travel, right? We all have to breathe, right? We all want to be happy, right? We’re all human, right?

We’re all pushing forward right? Pushing forward and away from our starting points, where-ever they are towards something no matter what that is. Pulling towards our reference points through the dust. Then:

“Dear Max, so here it is…”

These are the values we hold as true: fight, fuck and forget. Take what you can before it’s taken off of the table. Deny, repress, displace, project, rationalise and compensate. Turn all things inward with the force of your manly determination. Man up and quit whining, Susan. Move so fast you lose yourself. Never regret or feel guilt; feel shame universally and in secret. Contempt fear and jealousy are valid feelings: your emotions are not. Love leaves and love hurts. Love your mother and your sisters but love yourself the most. It’s easier to run than to be forgiven. Never forget. Laundry day is Sunday and weekends are what you should live for. Keep busy. Keep active. Keep up and keep fit. Keep your substance abuse limited and sporadic yet rigorous. This pill makes you smaller and this drink makes you bigger. Smoke this and snort that and don’t worry. All of these things are just something to do and not a problem. Everything in moderation: especially moderation.

The only law is your own and you must remember to never be caught in breach of it by anyone else. Protect the weak; avoid the strong; kindness will kill you. Set the pace – leave first and leave frequently. Take one for the team even if the team is a bad one. Create only what you want to destroy because everything you touch will break. So don’t touch and don’t stare and keep your dirty hands off! – This is why you can’t have nice things, my boy.

Always own one shirt and one tie. The rest can be improvised. Always know the time and wear comfortable shoes. Grow up; get a job; earn a wage and find yourself an old fashioned girl. Embrace the responsibility that made you so miserable. Walk a mile in a man’s shoes. But what’s a man anyway and how am I supposed to know? Eat beef jerky and enjoy hot sauce. Screw with impunity. Live fast. Never plan. Leave by example and lead no-one else into temptation or down the garden path you chose to follow. Where-ever you are running to you will already be there when you arrive. In that case always keep your next destination in mind – even when it is nowhere. Nothing matters and good people suffer and that is a fact. God is dead and the balance cannot be re-dressed. Hold out for nothing and expect less than this.

Smile. It’s important. You see this smile: it turns the motherly women weak at the knees - you look lost. This smile is for your friends in the early hours of the evening - you look strong. This smile is for the bad girl over there by the bar with the fluttering heart - you look dangerous. And this smile is a secret - you look like yourself but remember to keep secrets religiously: especially your own. You can always walk away from criticism. Walk tall and walk confidently with your shoulders held back. In any group, find the mouth and deal with him first: the others will follow. In your own group be the brains behind the mouth and never admit responsibility for his words. Play games and play them well; establish rules and then break them. The playing field is never even. Self-respect is an obstacle to immediate gratification.

Keep one foot on the ground and always wait for the other shoe to drop. People will not like what you are even if you don’t know who that is. It’s easy to mistake a whore for an angel. Just look at your mother - my mother was a saint. No-one can be saved and everything will be lost. You are being lied to and that is a certainty.

I am at my parents.

I was away from the computer from 8pm till 12:30am.

I do not know what the fuck that was about.

What. The hell.

I know I'm right.

I know what's going on.

And I know I did.

Fuck you buddy. Whether you're happy or you're sad I will never know and I don't seem to care either way anymore.

What was fueling me through this I wondered. Where did the strenght to float from day to day come from? And how well stocked was the boiler room?

The wind was blowing tonight in short gasps and long sighs. I listened to it over the msic and I wondered then who or what made it call out in the voice. But you weren't here so the answer was you.

And so it was that I arrived at the familiar answer. Half mad and fragile from the burnout and the bourbon of last night. I'm not shaking but my soul tremors inside, agitating my senses in an unfamiliar way like fingers running down the wrong side of my skin. I'm not asleep but the stilted reality shut in here along with me hold me suspended a speck away from wakefullness.

This is the electric calm in the space between shoes dropping before the storm breaks over me and the wind knows. It's inconsisten anticipatory rythm is just for me. Here it is, pictures in my mind, swirling close around my locked door and draughting in through the key holes and cracked window seals, feeding its own insistence into my weightless atmosphere.

I cannot keep secrets.

The wind knows this. It knows the force and pressure to be heard and felt and it rages at me, louder now. Picking up speed and loud enough now to mask the noice of the sluggish 3am traffic. Somehow, perhaps throgh the invasion of my space, I think it knows what I am doing.

Every time, in fact, I imagine it intensifies when my faltering vocabulary failes me and I slump over, pen removed from the paper to conect my thoughts and pull together the rogue hemispheres of my brain.

The wind, I believe doesn't understand secrets and talking in riddles. It bloes from one small corner of our whole world to another in an open spinning circuit blatantly fanning fires here and showering the young and the hopeful with cherry blossom as it pleases. Who tells the wind to blow and who can hold it back? Its art, hatred, love and intentions are raw and unclaimable.

The wind doesn't understand the fight to temper it's irrational heart and the struggle like pulling teeth not even throgh the gum, to back its rush of words and feelings. It calls us on, the wild and fast. It knows its people and it goads us on into rash life lived in forced ingnorace of consequence, cramming second after second of experience into hours that last for millions of eternities.

Till I am with you. Till I am with you. Till I am with you.

I'm not shaking but I feel the sicking adrenaline creeping and flowing up from the endless well lodged behind my shoulder blades. I'm not asleep but I@m so removed from the world here that next to the wakeful people all over it I could never call myself awake.

So differently human but all to human for the wind. Filled with fear and uncertainty. Hands unsteady, mouth pensive and eyes holding some giant rsh of emotion behind their sad glint.

Always so sad. Always so burningly joyous. Scorched heart and charred synapses smouldering red and pulsing beneath the black. Anger stored between white bone and blue vein, seeping out from the pores at the back of my neck, flowing down the channel of my spine like slow creeping lava to pool in the dip where it meets the bones of my hips and curves up again.

And across this ravaged valley landscape of my body the wind pushes and ripples, showering me in dusky purple blossom.

It seeks to soothe me and as they brush over my shoulders and back and all the places I had wanted to feel your skin I feel the grass begin to grow. The tingling, prickling blades probing their way up from the space inside me where luch things breed in deep green reserves.

Cooling this eruption. Cleansing. And though the fire and the lavs and the burning itching insistence in my trembling soul remains, the volumes fades beneath the whispered stream of words and songs carried by the blowing in my ears.

Here I am, every time reborn. The fatigued and broken parts of me carried away by chill dry fingers and new ones pushed and clicked into place by the nurturing buffeting wind.

It had been years now. Years of savage weekends and frought encounters with each other and something was coming.

It hung back, black clad and ominous, out of sight but never out of mind. On slow nights you could hear it's shallow breathing and the odd muted clanking it made as it waited, shifting its weight from foot to foot. And somewhere among the stinging notes of acrid smoke and bourbon you could smell it on the fast nights between the sweat and anticipation.

Each of us felt it, in out way, and each of us dealt with the promise of its arrival with varying tactics and degress of success.

I drank. I drank rivers and lakes and oceans of borbon and vokda and wine. I drank alone and in company and always purposefully. To forget. To run. To dull the clanking and the breathing and the sharp, stale taste at the back of my throat.

And when the drinking failed I smoked. Pollen and grass and cheap brown blocks of sand and plastic. I smoked till my throat ached and my voice dropped a full octave.

I drank and I smoked and all around me the city grew stranger. Terrible things began to happen. The buildings seemed to grow taller and closer together as the people who occupied them began to fold in on themselves.

Something was Watching.

Something was Growing.

Throbbing up from the streets in inconsistent sickening pulses. Thrumming along our spine and rattling our teeth till our souls shook and our hearts beat the same unfathomable rythm.

Somewhere below us and inside us something had been growing. Some vast empty something that pulled the town to its knees.

Something terrible was happening.


Afterall. It had only been a matter of time.

No matter how seperate we are from each other. No matter how much of an expanse of inches or miles cuts us off. No matter what scene or place we occupy we share the same home town experiences.

Every stone of every building held together by the same mortar of stories and memories.

Here is the place where we were young and idealistic, and here, as the rain sinks to earth is the place where that away and we became something else together.

Here is my house, a few streets away from yours - the only thing I need to get there held close to the surface of my hear.

A few words, a picture or a drawing. A drop of blood soaking into clean sheets.

Disconnected over years and seconds and tiny increments of time that take on their own meaning as they stretch out from and away from us, skipping over the streets we walk alone in memory.

Tell me your stories. Send me your memories. Reach out over the waters and fields and forests and sleeping towns and roads and mountains and share what you remember about the place we all lived once.

The sadness or the joy of the numb Sunday afternoon nothingness of your hometown experiences.

Again.

Oh God.

I can't help but feel that God hates me.

And that by the end of this horrible, fateful day I'll have had sex with something and will have at some point cried tears of blood.

My dissapearance may have been noted. It was unfortunately but apparently unavoidable.

I am still technically disspeared for the next couple of day.

But normal service will resume shortly and all debts and fuck ups will be dealth with with great sincerity and ass kissing as usual.

In the mean time enjoy all the crap I wrote when I was drunk or high in my olde worlde note book of THOUGHTS.

It's nor particularly detailed and there are no real clues as to what's been going on but some of it sounds prettier than 'had boyfriend, lost boyfriend, drunk since june, gone mental'.

Tonight this city is screaming, the long moaning gasps of the wind forcing themselves through the empty spaces between high rises from end of the street to another. It pulses forward, regular and insistent, rushing into our backs, something alive trapped inside it, howling into our ears and smashing against the windows that distort the clarity of its message.

And at this moment I think of how it would be to be caught up and swept away by it. Pulled into the rush and the flow and carried on into the distance by the surge. Slowly I would dissolve into it, chilly currents moving through me like fingers through the air, carrying away tiny parts of me that mix into the calling of the voice.

And over time, when the last remaining clump of what I was has disintegrated and fallen away the voice changes. It takes on a new tone that sounds over and over among the other shouts and whispers, repeating the same message as before, only altered now by the inclusion of another story. Slipping past the building and over the roads it has traveled forever. Past the window and round the cracks and into the room where you lie sleeping. Through your hair and your fingers and into you so that you would finally feel me. Singing into your ears and calling your name from the border of conciousness so that you would finally hear me and what I had always tried to tell you.

What the wind is trying to tell us now.

In this moment the city is screaming and loving you seems like something I would want to do if all this was possible.

Ladies and Gentlemen the bar at club heartbreak on Desolation Row is open tonight for one more roll of the dice. Bring me your cursed and your bruised and your battered. Youre despairing, your empty, your abandoned.

Bring me youre lonely bleeding masses and we'll drink to their health to forget our own.

Dear Diary,
today I did something or other. Which was a lot like every other day. What I'm saying is that it occured to me that I may be stuck in a rut somewhere. Drastic change may be necessary. Or any other sort of change really.

Today my handwriting is large and fast and perhaps easy to read. Is this my cheerful hand writing or my energetic nearly manic hand writing?

Are those two pretty much the same things?

Who knows anyway.

Terrible things happen here. How you feel like you're a dog shut inside a car with the window rolled down an inch. How it's only safe to love someone once the relationship is over. How you're always waiting for the other shoe to drop and when it does you're relieved and you make your excuses and escape. How something you scrawled on the back of a beer mat at 10am is supposed to mean something 6 hours later. How you can be a wonderful person and still be alone.

You come home morning after morning and you remember why you stayed out so long. Here is a pile of all my earthly things and here is the overwhelming feeling that as achievements go they don't mean so much. Here's the bed with the bloody stained sheets I don't care enough to change. Here is my life slipping slowly by while I stare blankly at my cigarette burned carpet.

You wake up crying again. It hasn't happened for years, but you can't shake the feeling that this is how you always wake up. Head down. Back to sleep. The hours between passing out grow longer. Here you are, intermitently dozing off on someone else's sofa because there you don't dream. But 10am of 12pm rolls around and you know it's time to shuffle home, back to your pile of things and the blood stains and dreams.

I always said you were too busy fucking yourself up to fuck me up but now I think about, I'm almost sure I was talking about myself.

Terrible things happen here and then pass into the ether and in enough time you'll forget them. Like how I've forgotten most of your face and how soon enough I'll forget you.

Happy (late) birthday Shoons.