1Into Insanity
-In memory of all those who have
lost everything but insanity.
The air is cold about me here. It is so different than my homeland where everything is warm and lustrous, where the sun is bright and the plants all alive with growth. Here it is all changed. The pictures in my mind of the beautiful places I took so much for granted are replaced by these grotesque images. Everything looks to be dead, but although the flowing of the creek is loud and sluggish, one can still hear the breathing of the trees, the crying of the wilted flowers that only turn brown and droop. No leaves crunch beneath my feet when I walk, for they stay in all their withered death ever attached to the tree that killed them. It is the same with these flowers scattered throughout this wilderness of waste. A stale wind blows my hair about my face, poking my eyes and lodging this matted hair between my lips.
The wind is incessant here. Cold and icy it blows with the same sluggish nature as the creek flows. And there is only one creek. It stretches as far as the eyes can see in both directions and changes its direction of flow on a whim as if pushing the rank waters from one stagnant lake to another. Yet the wind has no affect on this putrid creek. It neither creates ripples upon the surface nor seems to touch it at all. It is as if this cold wind, this movement of stale air, pushes against me in spite, lashes out at me alone, wrapping around me like a serpent.
Sleep is of no use in this land and rest impossible. The night comes on as if someone has covered the only hole in this blanket of darkness that lets in the faintest of light. That is the time where to hide is to be safe, for it is when the demons of the dark come out to feast, and only the cleverest of hiding places can fool them. One must not make a single sound or even breathe too heavy or fast. They are always listening, waiting for anything that could tell them where you lay. Even if they leave your vicinity —and you will know because the rank smell of death will leave— sleep is still of no import. To close your eyes in the night provides no renewal of one's body or mind— like the failure to renew life in this depressing world. When the hand uncovers the hole and what dull light can slink in spreads itself over the land it is even more dangerous to close your eyes, for the immense panic will drive you mad. Every blink of your eye brings you closer to insanity, for the others wait for you. You see them crawling toward you like crazed animals, smiling with their psychotic eyes and unnaturally wide mouth filled with menacing white teeth, and staring at you as they deliberately stand out of your direct line of vision so you can only see them from the corner of your eye.
It was unnerving, this constant intrusion into the part of me that is supposed to be the most private. It unsettled me that something could invade the darkness of my mind whenever I closed my eyes to feed upon the remnants of my resolve. These horrors don't bother me much anymore, and it was this level of fear I had for them that I at first measured my sanity with. I know now that my reason has almost completely leaked from my skull. The only way I can still remain remotely apart from losing my mind is by my memories. Scant images stay with me as I continue this existence —if one can even call it that at all. They have faded over time, but, no, I cannot use that word. Time does not exist here; it is merely a word with no meaning, a phrase which is missing all key parts that make it a phrase. I suppose these images then, the only link I have to constantly remind me that there is no hope left, have faded as I draw closer to insanity. They are pictures of my former life falling into the abyss of all things forgotten.
And as I reflect on these circumstances that traverse beyond the depressing I find myself watching before my very eyes the slow ebbing away of the final string tying me to the past. I find myself dazed, closing my eyes of my own accord, feeling their claw-like hands pulling toward eternity, away from logic, to a place apart from a rational thinking. I find myself watching them take me away just as the brilliance of my savior appears in the wasteland. But I merely laugh at the irony of it, laugh for there is nothing else to do, and I laugh as the giddy arms of insanity fold about me.