drowning, I

I’m drowning. Drowning, drowning—in a sea of unforgivable ink—sang my mind to me whilst I read and reread the story that’d kept disgrace awakened throughout my affliction. Oftentimes do I reminisce about my hands creeping all the way up my neck and face until their fingers reached the roots of my hair and pulled, and pulled, and pulled, decelerating the dance that my head had begun as a means to oust intrusive thoughts out of my psyche. I knew not how to deal with the utter dolour and forlornness that had struck my chords, playing me as if I were some sort of a broken piano.

Life was no delight back then. Life was but an untidy, odd, and foreign room that I’d stumbled into, not knowing my right foot from my left, not knowing where or how to stand (still/and still). And being that “there is something fatal about a portrait [for] it has a life of its own”, I would regard my own with melancholic eyes that echoed those of the youth I had once been, they’d become memento to my immutable grief—and so had my smile, but nobody needed to know that, right?

Me and the Angel 🖌 Emilio Villalba ・{2017}

When Dorian was found, the only manner through which others could recognise him was by virtue of inspecting his belongings, such had been the changes that his person had gone through as a result of keeping up appearances. One’s miens had inflicted upon one’s visage the weight of their decisions and consequent actions. And, once I’d put down the book, all of these observations led my spirit to embark on a journey that halted at each and every depot in order to reappraise the meaning of life and its subsequent mileage (or what’s left of it).

This work of literature by Oscar Wilde shall remain, it seems, as the one piece that’s almost catalysed my brain into some type of mania. I felt the need to drag my trembling body and mind unto the psychiatric ward of the nearest public hospital in order to rescue what was to become of it. Prescription pills saved me from Dorian and myself; never had ever a tale impacted me so! Still, that same medicine extended the length of my mourning that piece of literature, for my days had suddenly grown longer and my continuance had become rooted to a habit of inhaling horehounds and exhaling insouciance meanwhile keeping up appearances—no matter for how long my knees have been quivering, now; I’ll still welcome you in my mother tongue and sell you the finest of spirits in french. And costumers and colleagues, and bosses will buy it—all of it—for “[…] youth smiles without any reason. It is one of its chiefest charms.”.