We wandered through Pariser Platz amidst the tumbling snow, hands grasped tight in defiance against the bitter pinch of the wind. Flakes as bright as daisies in sunlight scattered across the square, shrouding the asphalt from view with a thin layer of crystals that creaked underfoot. The usual street vendors were nowhere to be seen, a dull trail of fairy lights illuminating our way instead, their dim flickering lights no more indicative of direction than a will o’the wisp as they cast a milky hue over the street.
Hiding amidst a perpetual state of sorrow;
Every movement automatic,
Systematic.
I’d been planning it for years. In the cinema of my mind, a myriad montage of endless roads had replayed over and over again, its grainy hues intersected every so often with the image of my rucksack filled with sketchbooks, with the sight of hundreds of film canisters spread over the floor of the car, with the curling vision of various old cassettes looping round and round in the radio. I’d flit from each beat-up van to the next tattered bus, my eyes watching the environment around me switch from the crumbling rocks of the mountains to the parched undergrowth forcing its way through the sandy desert; from old western shacks, whose residents would glare at the alien vehicle passing through, to the bright lights of the big cities and the inhabitants that refused to sleep. In my thoughts, the tone was always tinged with the slightest hint of sepia, as though the deep red of sunset was constantly casting its enflamed rays across the landscape.
I guess you could say my affections are misplaced;
A chemical reaction of feelings silently displaced.
I’m reading between the lines, but I’m not sure what is supposed to be in those vacant white gaps. Letters stretch like skyscrapers into my mind instead, and they settle their roots into the crevices of my brain. Read between the lines? But I can only read what is there, just as I can only see life and not death. There are small graphite smudges beneath each word, where you ran your hand over the paper in your rush to finish writing, and each erased mistake is still etched into the thick paper. I’m searching for what lurks in the imperfections of your note, for what hides beneath each word and its plaintive meaning. Should I translate the note, should I take each word back to its roots and start again, decipher it as though it is a code you are hoping I can never break?
Or are your tiny words, your timid phrases, really all that you have to say?
(Source: maryrobinson)
I’m surrounded by perfection all the time. It’s in the books I read, on the trains I take, in the movies I watch. It’s plastered through the magazines I flick through on my break at work; it suffocates me as I walk down the road. I can’t escape this perfection, and I can feel myself drowning in the imperfections dotted across my skin. The contradiction of my life against what I am supposed to be, what I am expected to be; it fills my lungs and scrapes its sharp nails down the back of my throat. It sets my bile duct raging, pushes nails over my skin, pours liquor down my throat. I want to escape from this perfection, but I don’t want to escape from this world. I just want to escape myself.
