It was a solemn two years before I had broken up with my ex-girlfriend, because a long-term relationship needs to be of two years length minimum before it can be constituted as such. Of what requirements I had laid out for her, she fulfilled only three: physically abuse, moderately narcotic, and conventionally attractive. Her aberrations were still conjured in the memory, not as a footnote, but as scripture, that of which I had wished the least. My life is a blunder. The stains of her dollar store lipstick would forever taint my dress shirts while leaving me no closer to the late night apparel that I sought so desperately to attain. There are cameras in her eyes.
I work a dreadful nine to five for the sake of misery. It's a cozy office job, but my cast of coworkers are comprised of seven whores (a male among them) and a scant college graduate intern. It fills me with great displeasure that I am forced by the hand of God to commit a portion of such magnitude to retrograde commandeering, me, the soldier, the strings attached to my limbs held in the hands of lethargic criminals who know not my value. There is a camera in my office.
My home is cleared of most belongings. There is a yoga mat thrown over the living room floorboards beside a carpet terrace facing the television. The apartment is on the forty seventh floor of a building that's a five minute walk away from the station. I don't own a car. I dream of the day that I kill the man above me in his sleep and move into the penthouse floor for cheap. The audience doesn't settle for second place. The audience doesn't settle at all, actually. There is much insolence in the world that deserves not to be remembered. There is much insolence in the world that deserves not to exist. There is a camera in the corner of my room. Always watching. There is an ecstasy to the climb. The rolling stone has merit on misery itself. Misery will fuel me.
I met her first under a railroad bridge. She had on her person five dollars and a half eaten macaroon. I greet her with a poem, one detailing our automated post-agrarian future, as I lean my back against the underpass wall behind her and look upwards towards the railway. The train passes by, and my hair flutters against the wind. The scene transitions to us the next morning in my bedroom, when the both of us are naked. We are sharing drinks in a niche bar at the edge of the heart of the center of the top of the bottom of the city. She elicits concern. I am sober. The hands of my watch are ticking, but time doesn't pass. What stories I am told are entered into one ear and exits out my eyes, into hers, into the aperture that watches me always and tells me to keep my face still, expressionless, stoic. I bed her, and the morning after, I throw her off my balcony. She plummets sixty meters before hitting the ground and flattens a toddler on her way down.
I am brought into questioning at the police station. I am brought into interrogation. I am declared a suspect. I am ultimately innocent because the charges can't stick, and my father's friend's friend is the head of police. I am in profuse sadness at her funeral. The family greets me and I make up a story about how we've been dating for weeks and how it wasn't a one night stand, followed by her boyfriend coming up to me which ends with her sister getting punched in the face trying to break the fight up and being sent to the hospital. I think about murdering another, but the first one went so poorly and the aftermath was ridden with so much pointless drama that it forces me to reconsider.
The night I return, the ghost of the bridge girl floats over my bed and stares at me. Her presence is cold, and she seems ambivalent to me and my actions. I fall asleep with much the same reaction. The morning I wake, my bed is covered in ectoplasm. My body is pale. The ectoplasm is smothered over the surface of my skin, caressing me with an encompassing, soaking coldness. My body shivers under the pressure. I walk to the kitchen and make myself coffee. Coffee is an appetite suppressant. I was fired from work due to my lack of commitment to the company. I am hired into a better, less aggravating position in a larger corporation. My coworkers are less annoying. My coworkers don't know my name.
When I was thirteen, there was a girl in my class who I liked. She was blind in the left eye and wore long sleeves to class. Her hair was glossy and curved into itself in an entangled web of strings and one time I pulled back on it and ripped her wig off. She was bald, and she didn't cut herself but rather was undergoing chemotherapy which wasn't a very compelling backstory so I lost interest in her. There is a brownness underneath my skin that I scratch away at when I am at work. The serrations flow right before the edge of my flesh, covered by the soaking plaque of a white complexion. When alcohol seeps into the holes, I feel a light sting that is followed by a geriatric soreness that cripples that arm for the rest of the day. I've grown to feel nothing now.
On my way home, I encountered a mademoiselle lingering beside a half-hourly train with a bouquet in her hands. Her expression is morose, and she looks over to the side and maintains eye contact with me. She cracks a grin, and raises her right hand to wave. Her porcelain fingers are laced in cigarette smoke. I push her off the tracks onto the oncoming train. Her blood paints my suit in a filthy ashen red. The train is stopped to investigate. I take off my outer coat and walk home to end my day. The blood washes off under the shower and paints my curtains with splashes of gray. Gray. All gray. The film in black and white, colourless television at twenty four frames a second. The cathodes are in my eyes. I stopped going to work. The paychecks continue to be sent, anyways, and never stop. I am alone in the place where there is nothing, trekking across the city to find something. My phone rings twelve times before I return and the messages number fifty. The moonless night is quiet, but my thoughts grow louder, louder, and I am drowned in silence. I dose my heels with peroxide to kill the fungi. The music begins to fade.
I am returned to a furtive existence. The daisies are blooming without my watch. There is nobody to catch me, but toddlers and strollers and the brittle floor. Plastic clashes against each other, secreting invisible fibers that are lodged in my lungs. The world asks itself for cheese. The land of snow and twilight gardens. The tree blooms an incandescent purple, violet hues and a distant luster of white falls beneath the tear ducts of my eye. The luminosity is faint, but I reach out for it, only to be burnt, and fall, and fall, and fall.
The pendulum has a similar period to that of transfixed departures. There is no other self that would swing quite the same, unstable, the opera of one, the column of ego, the story, the story, a pitiful tale of one, of two, of the ivory king who is sat above the clouds alone. The character shines above sentience, an infantile embrace of upwards gazing beliefs shone through. I find divinity in murder. The misery is collapsed, and I am left with nothing. The waning red chokes what vision I have. My eyes are an aperture that captures at one frame a second, two seconds behind, three meters away from the subject. Photography exists only in the past, and art the ontological parasite of truly happy smiles. The smiling man who finally looks happy. The ending of cinema is always misery.