Fragments of Delirium

* Dedicated to the youngest of the Endless, who was once called Delight

A city is never one city but a haphazard collection of many cities, each with their own  This part, for instance- red brick buildings, imposing architecture, a page from a different decade. And a road full of yellow taxis- bulky and bright and defiantly old-fashioned. And for the tiniest slice of time, the city is a stranger. The clouds gather.
~
Say thank you. Be polite. Smile. Or type a colon and close a bracket on the secret. Make cheerful plans. It is easy to hide if you know the words, or the signs, to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet[i]… The windows are shut. What of the weather?
~
And cold iron chains my dreaming soul and bars the door to faerie…
~
Sometimes reading is like an inevitable goodbye, for you know the story must end somewhere. Or stop, at any rate. And you want to cling on to it, knowing that your life have changed irrevocably forever by these hosts of imaginary people and that you can never, ever go back to the way things were. But the pages are turned by a power no longer yours and suddenly you’re reading back-covers and biographies and then there is nothing to read at all and nowhere else is as wonderful and moving and you can only find another world, or create your own. If you can. And so it rains, or maybe not.
~
What is the weight of emptiness? Just enough to crush your heart and freeze your tears and choke your breath.
~
Some mornings you remember your dreams, but they vanish into a world of fog if you look too close. Some mornings you feel them slipping like sand through your fingers. But most mornings, you don’t remember at all. And out of nowhere comes the echo of a memory- a day or a week or a month later- a hint of a blurring colour or a dissolving shape or a fading song and of things you can’t name because you don’t remember. Not really. You only remember that you’ve forgotten and you wonder if it truly was a dream, or your mind thinking that it was. And you wonder why, if your mind wants to give you a message, it wipes it all away. And you wonder if there are two minds at war- one trying to remember, the other obliterating everything and you wonder what else this other mind can do. And you think maybe one day you’ll go mad. Then you’ll know. And the rain, my dear is entirely in your head.
~
That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.[ii]



[i] The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T.S.Eliot
[ii]Ibid

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