Indelicate Balance

Genre: Autofic Stream of Consciousness POV

Radiohead plays on the jam box speaker, a hole where the CD player used to live in my manual Acura Integra. 90s stock model. Sometimes. You just drive for hours. Night becomes day, your aging hands live on the steering wheel. Smoke filled breaths, your nose a dragon's nostril. You watch your body fly through the car over an overpass without rails. The pain is intoxicating as it touches your arms and legs. You were a child who was never held to be known. Only to be seen, as the shapeshifter replica of your dying mother.

World's live inside of your brain, a recorded message that never runs out of minutes. No one knows your name yet, psychological boards dream of infecting your blood with dollar signs. Money networks given to friends, so that they'll never find you. A place without clocks you make your own imaginary time without blame. Sinking into the sheets, you hear the melodies play. Your charm lets you pass through the doors. They can't understand the pain of being alive. You cross through the threshold. A sunlight that blinds your eyes as you soak up its juices. You'll be a ghost that they'll never catch.

Substances fill down your body, as you visit the part of carpet where you died more times than the fingers your human hands allow. You touch the melted and fucked up trauma of its spaces. Someone lives there now with the ghosts of my past. Number six or number seven. Check on your loved ones during the holidays, someone’s been abandoned. Just check on them. Bile burns through bone. Feels as though there’s holes in the stomach. You can’t be a sponge forever.

Incense burns in the corner, as the piles of books and their world's collect themselves on the ceiling. You taste the burnt edges in your mouth when you sleep. Isolated like the winter gives you a blanket, its pretty orange white bone fingers says it's the moon, it says it as it tries to engulf your body. Insomnia rages like a manic fit as you watch the sun rise deep in your thoughts. You spend most of your days awake. People want you to be a junkie to make reason to the madness that lives within you. You're allergic to all the pharmacology, your body rejects all the interjections. You feel alien as you visit emergency rooms. There is no band aid to this life. There is no cure. Streetlights pass over your face for hours as they melt together, your life is an entire hallucination inside your head. Melting freely, making art that no one ever sees.

All the names were real in your life once, now they live stained in the ink pages, that drip and make a mess. Your friend group is a collection of creatives that paint the skies with their own traumas. Murals line up their exhibitions, it costs nothing to cross through it. People eat up the feelings to escape. They cannot cherish what is already lost.

People whisper they love the versions of you through pretty privilege, someone called it your beautiful curse. You want to kill them for the thought of loneliness, but that song only gets louder through lines and verses around your name, your age, your birth. A sign that stays on, loud, neon red. They cannot touch parts of you because they cannot see beneath the flesh. They taste the fantasies of your curves, and thoughts are emptied to the trash to linger there. If you had a mirror you could step through it and find another suicide, you kill parts of yourself to stay alive. Detach. Reattach. Destroy another part of yourself that doesn’t work. Under microscopic lenses in society’s view. A world who wants the outer layers without ever touching the surface of the inner layers. They collect parts of you, take the pieces with them and make that their journey. An unrealized lack of awareness they pretend to care until it damages their reputation. A crisis that lives on call by the pay phone. They spend their coins for the escapism. A record is broken in the distance, a scratch too deep, the music will still play. In a field so vast where no one can hear it, nor dream it.

Surrealistic night owls that become animal noises. Notes that play with bullets and shape to the knives on your hips. My nocturnal skin wishing it could help. You cannot see yourself in the mirror anymore. Your clothes fill the boxes, like bodies of memories where you cannot recognize yourself. What is a name without a future.

In another world, I dream of lounging on the beach side. I let the waves pull, pull me away to the ocean, creatures unseen, wrap around my legs. We taste the cold, and the salt water. It's cold here. Espresso grounds live in the holes of your molars. You rot slowly, hoping for someone to open the dusted, aged, book within. Someone says you'll die of hypothermia as the waters part around your flesh. It happens during the night. Unexplainable events. Memories fade. You can't get the grain of sand out of your teeth beds. It lives there without infection. A mold. Another version. The many parallel universes. Fires try to burn you off the map.

Weaving in and out of traffic of people finding spaces where no one belongs. World's so heavy it could crush up the bones. A peace you've come to realize is part of its own rebirth in the making. Your favorite smell is plumeria and it doesn't even grow here. You collect smells that are attached to memories, they live in the clouds in your head. You've seen death in the eyes, enough numbers add up it becomes a pyramid scheme. You're addicted to seeing the other side as it explodes around your body. You fear things that don't kill you.

You find yourself in ditches with stitches that cover your head. Holes that leak along the sides. It bleeds out all the dreams, the world's that tell you to live. Your tall long legs stride through the circles of others lives like a ghost without a home. A ghost filled with holes that leak to the perpetual noise. A piano with weighted keys sings your song on the death bed that weaves out of your skin with its smoke. You taste citrus as it burns your stomach lining and imagine all the artifacts your lineage left you with, small morsels. Love is an obligation that is bound by my name.

Blood drips and dries around your limbs, eyes dilated as you crawl through the tunnels underground. Searching for the original dream, it floats farther away, as you embark on life, the hours get longer, and the days become shorter. In retrograde, the steering wheels change as I age, wrinkles that have bound me to my human cage. You haven't swam in ages, you taste the water around your body still. Every season, your memories listen to your heart strings. It never changes from the mosaics in your eyes. World's that live forever. World's that never stop playing for you. No shut off switch.

Your feet stands at the truck stop.

Time never stops moving.

Indelicate balance.

The reel slide plays another memory.