Post by Non Compos Mentis on Mar 30, 2013 15:48:40 GMT -5
Walking. That’s all I remember. Walking for hour upon hour.
Nowhere to go. Nothing to say. Nothing to think about but the emptiness left in my wake.
The Buffalo night air is cold, colder than cold. This asshole of a city sits in a perpetual cycle of cold and colder, before finally running all the way back to cold. In the height of summer the temperature stays low, in the night it plummets into the icy depths. If hell ever truly froze over, they’d start calling it Buffalo instead.
My feet drag me forward, though the muscles beg and plead that they no longer work. My brain pays no attention and focusses on trying to keep warm. Wrapping around my thick torso, my arms toil against the wafer-thin black t-shirt to generate friction, failing miserably. The bare arms manage to catch the chillingly cold metal that hangs around my waist, sends shivers through the rest of my body as if it wasn’t suffering enough already.
The PCW World Title, there in all its glory, dangling in the frozen night wind and growing colder by the second. It threatens to do one of two things; to weld itself to my skin like a stupid kids tongue to a winter lamppost, or become unbearable enough to discard. Which would be easier to accept? To be forever linked to that gold, or to lose it, perhaps for good?
Streets are oddly dead, even for a night in such a decrepit city. The people can sense that a new evil is on the streets, a new darkness beyond the twilight and the shadow of poverty and conventional violence. It’s a gloom provided by madness.
“Where can I go?” I ask, watching as my words drift up in the air and float away into the black sky. Waiting for an answers, they is none. Only the vague noise of distant traffic and the chaos of the urban sprawl, the wisp of wind in the ear. My feet stop moving and for a moment I’m surprised they aren’t frozen to the ground.
They are waiting. I am waiting.
“Wherever you want.” Comes the voice, the mirror-man returning from the void. It left me with nothing but the belt around my waist and the clothes on my back. It left me to shiver, to suffer, to dwell on the thoughts of what I put Rebekah through. What it put Rebekah through. Now it leaves me to make the choice of where my future lies, when my past is all but black.
“I’ve got nothing, nowhere… I’m lucky I haven’t been arrested. Where the fuck can I go?” I insist on an answer, but there is nothing again. Instead I begin to walk once more and continue until the time reaches an ungodly hour in the morning. No longer is it night, no longer is it the same day as my hideous transgression.
The walking takes me under countless stress lights, from the crowded inner-city roads and onto the bustling freeways. There are only cars and the heat of another person, no matter how far away, vanishes. Creeping into my bones the cold is intolerable, painful… deathly. Larger clouds of vapour escape my mouth with every breath, floating in the air for longer each time.
I am truly alone. I am in the dark. I would give anything to feel warmth again.
Another cloud rises into my vision, passing over my eyes as I look for some object of hope in the distance. The steam is a welcome respite from hopelessness. A break from depression and grey, featureless Buffalo. The freeway stretches off into the distance at my side, the cars that grow fewer and fewer now in the dead of night speed past with no care.
The mist rises, and I close my eyes to the misery. “How can I live now? Who would take me in after this?” I ask, knowing the answers before I give it a chance to reply.
I can’t. Nobody.
And then I open my eyes and the only thing that reaches my brain is the one orange light in the middle distance. The light of pure fire flickering with chaotic abandon. It beckons me, calling me from below the freeway as it bends around over the city. After walking for hours the few hundred meters between me and the light seem like miles but closer and closer it comes.
Even from so far away I feel the warmth, thawing the freezing blood and the blackened heart that lie within me. Thawing them into activity as the voice in my head awakens once more. “Follow the light. Follow it to where you belong.” It tells me, knowingly, wisely, deviously.
Hundreds turn to tens. The flyover looms overhead and the lights become brighter with every passing step. “This is where you were born. It is where you belong. You may have been Sean Rhodes years before you met this place, but you became alive here.”
The warmth now is practically burning, melting my solid skin and revitalising my aching bones. I can see figures huddled by the light, huddled by the many more lights that begin to spring up as they move into vision. “You have lost everything and yet you have your life. You have nowhere to go but you will be welcomed here. You never got what you wanted as Sean Rhodes, it is time to become what you have always been once more.”
The people huddled around the fires simultaneously turn, their faces engulfed in flame and burnished light. They look as I walk among them, my eyes staying on the fire, seeking the warmth. There are many different faces, many different ages, many different lives lived in different anguish. Some are young, sent to the streets by orphanage, by poverty, by choice. Others are old, forced by time and ungratefulness to spend their waning years on the brutal asphalt.
The heat warms my hands, it warms my body, it warms my soul. It warms the title around my waist. I stand by the fire and rubs my pores to massage in the heat, unaware that shadows begin to form around me. “Where am I?” I ask, and it answers welcomingly, “You are home.”
Lifting my head from the flames I see the face of a young man, grubby with caked on dirt and depressed tiredness. He stares back, disbelieving, his eyes on the gold I hold around my midsection and for a moment I believe I am about to be mugged, beaten and thieved from… like I deserve. But he just stares, this man, no older than twenty three, his bright blue eyes set on the PCW World Title. “Are you… Sean Rhodes?”
His words are tentative, reverent even, as if speaking the name would combust the man, make him unreal. It is my name. I am Sean Rhodes. But I hesitate and do not reply. Sean Rhodes is a good man, a caring man, a champion. Sean Rhodes is a man who lives in an apartment, who has possessions, who sleeps with a woman called Rebekah and wants to be a father to her son. Sean Rhodes is a good man.
I am not Sean Rhodes. “That’s not my name.”
I feel the warmth not of fire but of intimacy once more. Many people surround me, many faces filled with awe and reverence. Many people and my eyes fall on one, an older man of over fifty, heavily and darkly bearded, stony faced and harsh eyed. His words betray his cruel face with tolerance and kindness, and he speaks the name of the man I have become.
I feel at peace. I feel like I belong.
“We have been waiting for you, Non Compos Mentis. You are home.”
Nowhere to go. Nothing to say. Nothing to think about but the emptiness left in my wake.
The Buffalo night air is cold, colder than cold. This asshole of a city sits in a perpetual cycle of cold and colder, before finally running all the way back to cold. In the height of summer the temperature stays low, in the night it plummets into the icy depths. If hell ever truly froze over, they’d start calling it Buffalo instead.
My feet drag me forward, though the muscles beg and plead that they no longer work. My brain pays no attention and focusses on trying to keep warm. Wrapping around my thick torso, my arms toil against the wafer-thin black t-shirt to generate friction, failing miserably. The bare arms manage to catch the chillingly cold metal that hangs around my waist, sends shivers through the rest of my body as if it wasn’t suffering enough already.
The PCW World Title, there in all its glory, dangling in the frozen night wind and growing colder by the second. It threatens to do one of two things; to weld itself to my skin like a stupid kids tongue to a winter lamppost, or become unbearable enough to discard. Which would be easier to accept? To be forever linked to that gold, or to lose it, perhaps for good?
Streets are oddly dead, even for a night in such a decrepit city. The people can sense that a new evil is on the streets, a new darkness beyond the twilight and the shadow of poverty and conventional violence. It’s a gloom provided by madness.
“Where can I go?” I ask, watching as my words drift up in the air and float away into the black sky. Waiting for an answers, they is none. Only the vague noise of distant traffic and the chaos of the urban sprawl, the wisp of wind in the ear. My feet stop moving and for a moment I’m surprised they aren’t frozen to the ground.
They are waiting. I am waiting.
“Wherever you want.” Comes the voice, the mirror-man returning from the void. It left me with nothing but the belt around my waist and the clothes on my back. It left me to shiver, to suffer, to dwell on the thoughts of what I put Rebekah through. What it put Rebekah through. Now it leaves me to make the choice of where my future lies, when my past is all but black.
“I’ve got nothing, nowhere… I’m lucky I haven’t been arrested. Where the fuck can I go?” I insist on an answer, but there is nothing again. Instead I begin to walk once more and continue until the time reaches an ungodly hour in the morning. No longer is it night, no longer is it the same day as my hideous transgression.
The walking takes me under countless stress lights, from the crowded inner-city roads and onto the bustling freeways. There are only cars and the heat of another person, no matter how far away, vanishes. Creeping into my bones the cold is intolerable, painful… deathly. Larger clouds of vapour escape my mouth with every breath, floating in the air for longer each time.
I am truly alone. I am in the dark. I would give anything to feel warmth again.
Another cloud rises into my vision, passing over my eyes as I look for some object of hope in the distance. The steam is a welcome respite from hopelessness. A break from depression and grey, featureless Buffalo. The freeway stretches off into the distance at my side, the cars that grow fewer and fewer now in the dead of night speed past with no care.
The mist rises, and I close my eyes to the misery. “How can I live now? Who would take me in after this?” I ask, knowing the answers before I give it a chance to reply.
I can’t. Nobody.
And then I open my eyes and the only thing that reaches my brain is the one orange light in the middle distance. The light of pure fire flickering with chaotic abandon. It beckons me, calling me from below the freeway as it bends around over the city. After walking for hours the few hundred meters between me and the light seem like miles but closer and closer it comes.
Even from so far away I feel the warmth, thawing the freezing blood and the blackened heart that lie within me. Thawing them into activity as the voice in my head awakens once more. “Follow the light. Follow it to where you belong.” It tells me, knowingly, wisely, deviously.
Hundreds turn to tens. The flyover looms overhead and the lights become brighter with every passing step. “This is where you were born. It is where you belong. You may have been Sean Rhodes years before you met this place, but you became alive here.”
The warmth now is practically burning, melting my solid skin and revitalising my aching bones. I can see figures huddled by the light, huddled by the many more lights that begin to spring up as they move into vision. “You have lost everything and yet you have your life. You have nowhere to go but you will be welcomed here. You never got what you wanted as Sean Rhodes, it is time to become what you have always been once more.”
The people huddled around the fires simultaneously turn, their faces engulfed in flame and burnished light. They look as I walk among them, my eyes staying on the fire, seeking the warmth. There are many different faces, many different ages, many different lives lived in different anguish. Some are young, sent to the streets by orphanage, by poverty, by choice. Others are old, forced by time and ungratefulness to spend their waning years on the brutal asphalt.
The heat warms my hands, it warms my body, it warms my soul. It warms the title around my waist. I stand by the fire and rubs my pores to massage in the heat, unaware that shadows begin to form around me. “Where am I?” I ask, and it answers welcomingly, “You are home.”
Lifting my head from the flames I see the face of a young man, grubby with caked on dirt and depressed tiredness. He stares back, disbelieving, his eyes on the gold I hold around my midsection and for a moment I believe I am about to be mugged, beaten and thieved from… like I deserve. But he just stares, this man, no older than twenty three, his bright blue eyes set on the PCW World Title. “Are you… Sean Rhodes?”
His words are tentative, reverent even, as if speaking the name would combust the man, make him unreal. It is my name. I am Sean Rhodes. But I hesitate and do not reply. Sean Rhodes is a good man, a caring man, a champion. Sean Rhodes is a man who lives in an apartment, who has possessions, who sleeps with a woman called Rebekah and wants to be a father to her son. Sean Rhodes is a good man.
I am not Sean Rhodes. “That’s not my name.”
I feel the warmth not of fire but of intimacy once more. Many people surround me, many faces filled with awe and reverence. Many people and my eyes fall on one, an older man of over fifty, heavily and darkly bearded, stony faced and harsh eyed. His words betray his cruel face with tolerance and kindness, and he speaks the name of the man I have become.
I feel at peace. I feel like I belong.
“We have been waiting for you, Non Compos Mentis. You are home.”
