Icon #18 Mad

#18 Mad –

Line after line scrolls past his eyes, phosphors glittering — meaningless, and full of everything — endless and horribly finite in the cosmic expanse of existence. He is alone — she gone to the store/park/friend’s house, all the same — endless and absent. What is real is imprinted on the pages before him; what matters is dredged from past days, lost times and half-lived moments that cannot be reclaimed. All against the backdrop of alone — in synch with the knowledge that she is not present, and he is too far gone not to think thoughts that will bring back the ghosts.

Others walk the columns/lines/words that blur into his past. He can’t rip himself free of their embrace, can’t stop them from claiming him and dragging him inward — onward. Pain blossoms, echoes of other times, other lines that were his, and hers — a different her — also gone. Turn the page.

Wrong steps — roads leading to despair known but impossible to dodge, because it is not he on the page but his memory, not under control, but controlling, and there is no escape except through. Through places/things/times where he never wanted to go again, where he has always been — through with this, through that — all the same emptiness; all the same pain without relief, never defeated, only buried and now dredged to the surface by pen and ink and psyche . . . laid bare against the backdrop of time, past/present blurred– the same.

He closes the book. The pages slide one against another, embrace like lovers. He closes his eyes and feels the words grope for his soul. How could the words be his life? How could she write him out like a fairy tale and then…vanish. She wrote ‘the end,’ but he remains an open book. He can already feel the fingers brushing over his skin – the breath as others read aloud and violate his world.

Turn the page.
Find the rage.
She’s out there somewhere…all he needs is an eraser.