Week III: Down the rabbit hole

Your wakefulness each morning is equal in consequence to your rest and to your unrest. You survive the hard frost and the cold world and borrow breath another day. It is dark. A digital tether to society eviscerates your dreams in a false moment when you were lost but unafraid. Beep beep beep. Precious hours of sleep turned too quickly. Hours spun until you reeled. Your balance failed you and you fell.

You clench your teeth and you cling to sleep like a raft. It is a ghost. It eludes you. The spectre of your unconsciousness fades receding with the shadows. The sun taunts you fingering the swollen bags under your eyes. It intrudes your gaze and mocks your resistance. It laughs and creeps overhead to illuminate the cold grey. Your vision clouds over with blurry resentment and you blink heavily and squint. Your eyelids are burdened and tired and rely heavily on stimulants. Dose after dose after dose keeps them up. It is artificial.

The second hand cuts you. Tick tick tick. A thousand cuts bleeding away your resolve. The clock is always winding down. Its precision cold and calculated and it is lifeless and counts your slipping numbers. You begrudge each second that passes and you need every one. They are a rare constant. The rhythmic tap tap tap reminds you. Your life is not over. You are still at fault. You are not out yet.

You study the mirror. A moment before the day swallows you to reflect. You wonder is it apathy or self defense that keeps you upright. Your senses are taxed from your first waking moment. A cigarette a coffee a desk a screen a box. You torment yourself. You suffer but why. You ask too much of your body and it offers you less in return.

Your skin is calloused. You are resisting and your surroundings are constantly irritating and grinding. Your cycle is finite but the violence is endless. Wear thicker armor. Its weight will be greater and its strain on your neck and shoulders will keep you from sleep. Your head and your chest and your back will ache. You can swallow distractions until you are numb and when you wake up tomorrow you will need more. Your body will suffer.

You grimace and stretch and hunch your back. Your thoughts pull muscles closer and tighter. A puppeteer with hands through the sinews in your neck holds them taut. You feel the ratcheting tension. You inhale deeply until the knives between your shoulders stop you short. You wish to exhale the stress with a more forceful breath. You will rigid fibres to ease and release and they tense and inflame in defiance.

Your eyes close and you can block everything but the ringing in your ears. You reach back to dreams. You permit yourself to walk away from the mirror. You submit to your routine and your surrender is ugly. The daily gears grind into motion overcoming static inertia. Your involuntary groan admits what words do not express.

Your mind and body are at odds at every moment. The imaginary is made flesh in constricted joints. You ache from solitary hours. The pain is frequent and unrelenting and you rarely notice it except when your shoulders fall and the air coats your lungs and pushes your organs aside and you are relieved for a second. The pace slows. Gather yourself. You are obligated to proceed.

Your simple repast makes you full but not whole. It is poison. You chose it. Upgraded. Refined. Your molars fracture bonds and crystals and the whole mess. You consume. Your body struggles. The tasks you demand of your guts are cruel. Another cigarette another coffee another distraction.

You distract yourself with updates and characters and words and you feed your digital self and it asks more of you and gives your body less in return. You get the latest upgrade. You become the new norm. You make yourself written letters instead of human flesh. You deceive yourself.

You play the zero sum game. Today another withdrawal tomorrow another the next day another still. Until you run dry as the ashes to ashes and dust to dust and that is your memory. You only have now and you squander now for later. And you step towards the light but it is only a reflection ahead and behind.

Word count: 725