I Remember...

I remember songs, and not knowing where I was going. It was late fall and everything had a dark pallor about it, like it was wrapped in a shawl.

I remember fields of grey and green, and sun that shrunk behind dust curtains. There were abandoned buildings and woods. Our parents told us that they were haunted to keep us out of the coal gens.

I vaguely recall walking in punky forests, squishy leaves sinking beneath my feet. I took pictures with my cellphone to pretend I was happy. I captioned them with lines from Lord of the Rings as if I were tracking an Orc raiding party.

There was a stone slab, I called it an altar, and pretended that unholy rites took place. A huge rusted chain-component jutted out from a hillside. I called it Megatron's claw.

I remember in vivid viscosity how I ate nothing for weeks, and read Centennial in my grandmother's back bedroom to pass the time. I recall nothing of the book though.

The memory is fuzzy, and refuses to come, of the middle bedroom, and when he came back talking about love and coffee. There are things I punish myself for. I forget what they are. Self-punishment is so natural now that I can't even think of a time when I was happy.

I still remember the music though, guttural and feral. But the songs were always about other people, never about me.

I'm sad though, that I don't remember the fireflies, only the fights that I can't think of to save my life right now. I do, however, remember the first time I saw them when I was a little girl, and my mind fills in the blanks with what it was probably like. Magic has gone out of my memory, and I do the best I can to preserve the mental images left behind.

There were a few times when I was so strong that the entire human race would rise to its feet and be inspired, if only they saw me. But most of the time I was weak and struggling to hold a weight and a standard made for greater men, men who no longer had the spirit to pull heavy loads or build great monuments. I had to do it, and I did it. I remember that at least.

But there is no schema in the minds of modern America for people like me who defy, "go rogue" as he used to say. Only a few people have done it, and they keep very quiet about it. They're much stronger than I am to not need a role model.

But I thought that if I just...if we just...if he just...if they just...if everything just...it could work. But everything just...didn't.

I don't remember when it was decided that life was going to be a shaded forest covered in dark fog. I was too young or not born yet. But I do think I remember the day I decided I wanted to die. I was eleven years old and slept in a new room in the new house with nothing but salmon carpeting and a box TV. The chest pains didn't stop, and I masturbated with a pencil to keep my mind off things. They haven't ever stopped.

Some people hoard things, material possessions, even living things. The memories attached to objects are like family, and they build a home for themselves in the tangible world. I don't know if they stop seeing the memory when they stop looking at the object, but I imagine that's why they keep them, as talismans to trap their past in. I don't need the things, I carry them with me always, in spirit. And other people can throw the objects away and the memory it held within its ethereal container may eventually fade and be forgotten. I can never throw my memories away, there is nothing to dispose of in the physical realm.

So I remember, everything. And even if I can't recall it or see it, I know it's back there in my mind somewhere, gathering dust like the music boxes in my grandmother's attic that he loved. And even though that place will go and the bridge will fall and the car we went camping with but never made love in will be sold and the flowers will never bloom again in the strip of land that was bulldozed where we thought we saw the unicorn, and I'll deny that the songs spoke to me and the magic changed me and the churches and abandoned woods called to me and still do...

I will always remember you.

Seratonin

Light stimulus; pounding sensation behind my eyes, and the electronic glare from the monitor sure isn't helping. Two weeks I've been asleep, ventured out once to explore my new surroundings, and found nothing worth documenting. Body hurts now, it hurts to move my arm, and I know that I've fallen head first into a new form of depression, one that is unimpossing, doesn't bother in the least, and is merciful to a battered sense of purpose. I drifted out of unconsciousness for a moment today, and saw beautiful sunlight caressing my window panes, but I wasn't moved much, even with a to-do list a mile long, I felt no urge to get out of bed, or leave the safety and warmth of my new place. Hungry? Not really? Thirsty? Maybe, but I don't care. A pounding behind my eyes lets me know that I've well overslept, a new phenomenon for a lifelong chronic insomniac. But right now everything that I felt like I was running out time achieving feels like it can wait, everything feels like it can wait while I grab a few more hours of escape from real life. 

"Ch0023r"

He switched on the Augmented Reality goggles, and became Ch0023r. A flash of chrome was all the warning he got before hi-jacking in. Scatterframes of nanobytes swirled around in cykene kinesis like foxtails, neon slipsteams racing through flow-wire circuitry, fraying the nanoform of iNet. A grayscale membrane saturated the tunnel-vision of the Augmented Reality stream, and then it was like a curtain being drawn back on a silverglass LCD holoscreen; a steamstack fringewire colossus rose out of the Linux universe like a motherboard metropolis, made of microchips and metacode, root programing streaming in beta like a thousand shooting lights across cyberspace.

This was iNet, the virus-plagued serial-world where malicious software came to die; annals of an archived version of the old internet that still existed in an IRC database now served as the garbage dump paintball arena for glitched profiles of the parallel shooter MMO to constantly replay their gruesome death-matches. Like digital zombies of dead gamers, the profiles existed locked in pseudo-combat eternally glitched in clan-battles that had been played out in the publicly released version of the game months ago. The games were fake, but the psion beams shot from pixel-deleting magna-weaponry was real enough to fry a consol controller, hotwired to hell by overhacking and code-splicing, real enough to kill a wayward avatar, and delete the backtrail for an unfortunate hacker hi-jacked into AR to logout. This was the deathzone, accessed through fullmetal ICE programs classified above Top Secret, originally formatted by military-grade intellegence codecs, and displayed only by GraphX mods purchased on the Tokyo black data market in cold hard cash. This was illegal, this was stupid, this was suicide.

This is where Ch0023r would find the AXIS.

Blood-Velvet Dream Sequence

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A song; it echoes on a bridge of sanguine glass, over teal-streaked moonlight banisters, flowing over stairways to the heavens. It comes to me from across a far off place, one promised to me in the early days of my life, lost swiftly to a sable-coated sunset, casting shadows on days and nights obliterated by time. Now I stand before a mirror of jaded brass, jilted in the haze-yellow amberlyn glow, bending in the image-distortion of aura-gold fractals, reflected in sun-flecked conflaguration of bronze-refracted still-composite, wearing red. This dress is a blood-velvet dream sequence played out in crimson calescence, amaranth satin feels so soft and melodic against my skin, outer inner-representation of the soft music in me, folded like pressed flowers to hang like a wreath around the places he's supposed to kiss. A philharmonic rock-opera plays in the illusive background, reminding me who I am while I enjoy this, and keeping who I want to be dear.

Premonition Panic-Attack

Cold adrenaline, coursing through veins like a rattlesnake bite, sharp venom spreading over body limbs, taking over. No control, vision starting to go blurry, thoughts exploding out like spider cracks in the altered perception of reality, losing grip on sanity. Toxins causing muscle spasms, hijacking the nervous system, chest pains and shortness of breath shorting out abstract thinking, reducing higher reasoning to rote motor-functions that aren't functioning properly. Survival backup systems kicking in, fear takes over like icy fingers scratching out narrow pupils that no longer track light, panic-stricken would-be blue-screen short-circuiting inner wiring of the central nervous system which completely locked up like fifteen minutes ago. You've got thirty seconds to live, hurry, poisoned blood zigzagging through bulging veins shooting straight to a hyperpalpating heart beating faster than a mouse snatched by a rattlesnake. Tunnel vision, sight gone now, zero body sensation, mass panic ensue.

Sorry kid, you're gonna die.

Lunar Flower

Eternal revenance, freeflowing through heavenly stratospheres, piercing the clear-carbon sky, illuminating a path to enlightenment which is the gleam of your aether-blue eyes, halogen aquamarines, bright as an eventide oracle, alive as the surface of the sun chasing a path to the horizon. You flow like a luminary presence, an aerionic aura, a celestial omnipresent power, a sacrament of the wind. Iridescent wavelengths dance through your sable hair, curled around my fingers like calescent silk, tongue-tied in knots around my heart-strings, you've found the soft music in me. Your wings wrap around me like a ballad, shadows of worlds dancing on alabaster feathers, lulling me into the serene waters of your aqualescent gaze, velvet harmonic whispers caressing my ear.

“Don’t be afraid.”

You came to me like the energy of a million stars, freefalling fast toward dream-sequence, starscaping past the coronation of the sun, and made me your Simbelmine flower, efflorescing under lunar lightbeams. And so I bloom only for the deity of the moon, ethereal and mysterious, your rouse is of Fantasmagoria sweeping a forlorn sunrise, where I will withdraw beneath lunar flowers to await the aphelion night, when I can see you again.

Supernova Cyberpunk

A vast slipstream. It races by me like sylph worlds, creating dimensional rifts in the physical realm. I reach my hand out to touch one of these riftworlds, and catapult through time. I'm here at a bar, taking a shot for the road with a boy I just met. The liquor slides down my throat like an elixir, instantaneous happiness. Suddenly I'm gallivanting through the space-time continuum, purposefully and recklessly going nowhere in particular. Supernovae hyperimplode all around me like an extraterrestrial dogfight aimed right at me, and that's when the hairs on the back of my neck started to stand up. What if they hit me, what if I get lost what if I can't find my way back, what will I do? What will become of me? Paranoia seeped through my veins like the liquid shot at the bar finally being absorbed by my body, system shutdown inevitable, operation terminated, code red, abort, abort!

Stop.

And then a lunar cloud floats by me, carried on solar winds, and I think "dude, chill." And suddenly the Supernovae are fireworks, exploding in the sky like a holographic lightshow exclusively for me. The only way the can hit me is if I run head on into them. I decide that would be silly, and drift on watching the show. Categoric rift-haze streaking by like windshield rain, I see light at the end of the liminal solar system. Username, password, system scan complete, virus report: zero.

/logout