SHORT: Where Is My Love [2005]

Where Is My Love

My love lies silent on the bottom of the ocean. Her eyes are closed as she gracefully exhales, her tangled hair drifting aimlessly in the undercurrent. The air she breathes is fragile, cracking like porcelain with each elegant pulse. And as she lay there, so did I redeem her; I searched for my love and fumbled the catch at every opportunity, powerless to halt the restrictive undertow which slowly enveloped my lungs.

Where is my love? She is forever out of reach - a decaying embryo, transient and dysfunctional as she sinks without struggle into the quicksand below. She’s in the sky; she is overhead and faltering as I start to run on frantic legs which take flight beneath me in a desperate bid to meet her halfway. Falling through the air in suspended animation, battered by the pressure, oblivious to the violence as I fail to materialise upon hitting the ground. At that height, no-one could survive. I am liquid as she forces me to the point of total disintegration, the fractured pieces solidifying in mercurial attraction, a colony of unquestioning drones obeying their queen.

Where is my love? I drank it away, staring upwards in slack-jawed stupor as I watched the revolving patterns spiral on the ceiling above me, arching my back beyond its elastic capacity and letting the distortion bristle through me as wave upon wave pulsated and spasmed and I willed the flood of a thousand lonely nights to the surface. Naked in front of an audience of thousands, slam-dancing to oblivion. I played in sets for you: ones, twos, threes. I tried to reach out and squeeze your heart from the other side of the room. A meaningless echo, endless poems to no-one reverberating across an empty dancefloor. It’s easy. It’s honest. I drivelled like an unbalanced puppy, a mushy haematoma lacking fundamental hormones, repeatedly smacking my chemically-softened brain into glass doors as I ran up against the ghost of your reflection and never seemed to learn. Batted around like a swingball in June, inviting in the noise and embracing its abuse with open arms: the rebel, the king, and everyone inbetween.

Where is my love, my rollercoaster sickness, the one that I adore? Her beauty echoes through eternity, shimmering in xylophonic harmony, an expanding ripple refracted through a diamond. She is a prism of light, a collection of words burnt into the page, a monotonous lullaby descending note-by-note in chromatic succession. She is the first to arrive and the last to leave, always there, twitching like pollen in the summer breeze, soaring majestically in an allergic explosion as she overpowers every fibre of my being. She is a cavalcade of empty distraction, a glitterball mosaic of waterfall rhythms pounding in tribal ceremony.

Where is my love? I gave it away. I held it out in my hand to you and you let it flutter past you like a butterfly, florid and alive in the abandon of infancy. I spent it like currency on misguided displays of affection, an endless round of meaningless sexual encounters, hatefucking people of absolutely no worth or interest to me. I felt the loathing flow freely with the uneasy vertigo of every lubricated stab, my weathered face contorting involuntarily as I struggled to make sense of every basic inhibition I once held dear. I used them up and threw them away, disgusted, degraded, humiliated and profane. I killed them off one after another, cutting into them with a psychopath’s blade until no more blood could spurt. I pissed it away time and again against graffiti-stained walls, the ugly stench of evaporated toxins infiltrating my nostrils with every dismal splash. Soaking and appalled, staggering through the streets, teeth chattering numbly against each other in a state of bulletproof inebriation.

I have travelled this far and can afford to sacrifice myself no longer. And so I pledge to forsake all temptation as I lie down and wait for you now. I will wait for you in the countless teeming bars, watching the fluorescent lights spin as the alcohol bubbles drowsily beneath my slothful eyelids. I will wait for you on abandoned railway lines, under frozen lakes and in wrecking lots, listening to the metallic howl of machinery screaming in carnal bliss. I will stumble along desert highways, delirious with thirst and burning beneath the midday sun in the hope of finding your mirage fluctuating somewhere in a distant oasis.

The manoeuvre is complete. I lay her down and let her wash over me as I’m taken away to a place of infinite sedation. She places the needle against the base of my spine and I feel the pain gradually ebb away as the opium methodically takes hold. And so there she lies, swimming through the endorphin stream until she moors and finds herself buried somewhere deep in my imagination; I’m alone with her now and swallowing water, suffocating gradually without a care in the world. My love is absolute and infinite; we are one as I wait, forever and a lifetime.

C.C. 24/05/05