Subliminal's blog: "Subliminal Lies"

Through the Darkness. Christopher Jones 00. "Close the door, put out the light You know they won't be home tonight." Led Zeppelin, No Quarter (Live) Through the world of future's past, the darkness comes interrupted by the flame of a lighter. Joshua is sitting in his bed with an ashtray between his feet, listening to the silence penetrated by the dry tobacco burning down. The acrid smoke tears at his lungs, but it helps to numb the pain. Joshua runs his fingers through his hair and looks out the window, the moonlight glints in the deep snow and he wonders if it will ever stop. It's been raining and snowing for days, reflecting his mood. Reflecting the cold in the hollow of his chest and the tears he cannot cry. He wonders if Gaia is mocking him, but he closes his eyes for a long second and blocks that thought out of his head, grumbling low in the back of his throat. The cigarette is stubbed into the ashtray and another is lit in quick succession. The pain helps, he tells himself, but knows that if he smokes enough, quick enough, it will knock him out. Toxic shock or something of the sort, and he puffs away, almost gagging at the heat burning down his throat. He knows they taste foul, but he also knows - well, he knows nothing else, but he likes to pretend so, and sucking back on that cigarette, the red glow illuminating his face, he tries to forget. Bright blue digits on the clock roll over to three AM and he groans. He should've been asleep hours ago, but it's futile. Sleep brings dreams and that's the last thing Joshua wants at the moments. They may be innocuous enough, but something tells him otherwise. The parasite in the back of his brain, worrying it's way through to the frontal lobe, whispering all the way - he tells him that his dreams will not bring him comfort. Joshua lays back and stares up at the ceiling, watching the shadows play across the plaster, the light reflected from the snow stretching the shadows from the window to the far wall. It could be worse, he tells himself, but he doesn't know how in the scope of reality. He could be parapalegic, he could be dying of some unknown infection. Any number of things could be wrong, but he knows that they are not, and he knows that given the current state of his life, it could not be worse and that it probably won't be getting any better in a good long while. Festering in the dark, he lights another cigarette and concedes. He lays down and prays that he can sleep. * Tossing and turning until sunrise does not bring sleep, not even the insomniac haze. His mind is alert and worrying through the thoughts, through the notions, through the possibilities of what could be happening. It could all be nonsense, or it could all be real. He does not know. He does not care, because for this time, it is all real. She is really on her back with her legs spread and some diseased boy is between them unappreciatingly. She is really having a drunken jolly time without him, and she doesn't even care what he is doing. Joshua sees one thousand things that she could be doing without him, and it tears through his psyche, it decimates his well-being. It is nothing but nonsense, but it's all he has. Delusional and staggering, he pushes himself out of the bed and paces the room in front of the window, in front of her ghosts lingering on the bed, at the desk, behind the door, in the corner. The ghosts taunt him, reminding him of what there once was that is no longer, and he furrows his brow in thought, in desparation. They won't leave him be, and he closes his eyes to try and block them out, but they only appear more substantial, more vivid, standing about his room, taunting him like a vicious bitch. Nothing could be worse than this, he tells himself, and he begins rationalising; it's not that she's gone, he could deal with that, he had a hundred times before with all the ones like her he'd known, but it was the fact that he had nothing to occupy his time, to keep his mind busy, especially at six in the morning. If there was something else, anything else, it would be that much easier, but lethargy has consumed him and the only thing he wants to do, he can't. Joshua wants to lay his head on that pillow and under the blankets they shared and just sleep. To turn his brain off for just an hour, maybe two. That would help. It would be - refreshing, but he knows that if he tried it, he'd lay there until noon, unable to sleep. Tossing and turning and continuing to fester in his own imagination - much like he was doing now, but without the movement. With a heavy sigh, he lights another cigarette and sits at the desk, in front of the computer. He'd find something. Something to read, some other insomniac soul to talk to - something to keep his mind occupied, something to take him away from the death burning through his veins. He's been here before, too many times before, he knows that he can make it through, that it'll get better with time between the point of impact and the now. He knows that he will survive, that he'll do whatever it takes to do so, even if it means staying awake for countless hours doing nothing at all until the break comes. Joshua had built him a nice little cage, a wall of commitment, and he let no one else inside. It was him and her, where no one could get at them. Sure they'd been trying to chip away at it from the outside, sure over the past two years some had snuck there way through, but as soon as their intentions had been defined, they were punted out across the universe. He was still in the cage, but she had snuck off to wherever. Somewhere better, somewhere safer - whatever. He was locked in his own cage, alone and separated from the world with nothing to hold onto. Nothing to see him through the night. Nothing to hold him close and tell him that it would be alright. It was the way it was, and it was his own damn fault, but he'd be able to get out. He'd smash his head into the wall enough times to bust a hole through which he could climb. He'd do whatever it took, and once he was out - then, maybe, things would begin to look better, but for the time being - he had nothing. The computer opened up and brought him the expanse of the universe at his finger tips, and he knew that if he looked long and hard enough, he'd find something. Someone like him, someone broken and bleeding, or something to help numb the pain of all that nothingness inside. It would be there, he knew it, he just didn't know where to look, under which rock to crawl under to find the answer to the conundrum. * Web browser up and messengers locked and loaded, they were all empty and showing him nothing, but his fingers lit across the keyboard and a plethora of knowledge fell upon the browser in minute ones and zeros. It may have been nothing he wanted to know, but it would be awhile before he could figure out anything he wanted to know. The air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow, for instance, or the theories of Freud and Jung. The History of the World according to the Kuran. The Egyptian Ra's rise to power. Conspiracies concerning the death and life of Adolf Hitler. It was all there, at his fingertips, but he didn't know what to look for. Maybe the complete works of Friedrich Neitzsche or a biography on Ludwig van. Wikipedia. Yahoo. Google. Myspace. Time Magazine Online. Porn. He thought for a moment on porn - it would work for a few minutes, but once the rush of orgasm had left his body, quite literally in fact, he would be left even more hollow and dead inside, so he shook that thought off and decided just to check his e-mail. The starting point for any loser awake at six in the morning. Nothing was there but porn and other spam, and returning to the homepage, he began perusing the news. Fifteen minutes and he was already bored senseless. It didn't hold his interest. Nothing seemed to. Growing listless and bored, he grumbled and lit another cigarette, reaching under the desk for a Mountain Dew. The scars across him arm caught in the snow light, so white and long forgotten, he remembered the story behind every one. Another desolate and barren relationship gone awry, but he couldn't do that now. This was the wrong place and time. Five years ago, it would push him out of the hell he had made, but now, now he'd grown numb to it and it fixed nothing. It solved nothing, and he pulled the green can out and opened it, feeling the carbonation rip down his already raw throat. He would regret this all in two days time. The lack of sleep, the excess of the stimulants nicotine and caffeine. It would kick him in the ass in a few days, or more to the point - the jaw, but he would survive that. * Joshua had been right from the onset. There was nothing online worth a damn, and nothing held his interest for longer than a moment. It was crossing noon, his eyes were beginning to burn, and he felt the filth of the day and too much thinking accumulate on his body. And like a revelation, it came to him. A true epiphany of the simplest nature, but sometimes those were the best epiphanies - the little things that always get overlooked or forgotten, the things that are so much habit that when they're stumbled upon it feels like a true revelation. He pushed back from the desk and grabbed his cigarettes, the Dew, and left the room. Stumbling through the mountains of books littered throughout his apartment, he reached the bathroom and turned on the light, the cd player and filled the small room with enough music to break glass. He let it wash over him as the water warmed. A shower would wash it all away, at least for a little while. It would clear his brain and salvage him from this funk. He hoped, and as the steam began to rise he stepped in and felt it burning his flesh. Nothing was gained without a little pain, and he closed his eyes, feeling the blood thawing and rising to the surface of his skin, turning his back beet red. It could always be worse, he told himself as he turned and let the steaming water burn his face and through his hair, prickling his scalp.