2022/08/16
I saw the sky collapse, gray pouring down and washing away whatever scrap of perception remained in me. A white light flickered from the lamp — not to illuminate the world, but only to sharpen the outline of my twig-like bones. My posture was contorted, my limbs numb, my lips dry; my thoughts had fallen into deep sleep, yet time kept turning, the world kept turning, and I was dragged along without consent by the earth and the second hand; and then my muscles gave out, I dropped my legs and my hands, lowered my eyelids, and in darkness failed at cursing everything I despised; and then the accumulated bitterness surged up, making the dimming of the sky inevitable, making the body disassembled by illness; so I gave up on rising, and so the dream’s final destination pointed straight toward death.
2022/09/25
Thinking, and dismembering myself. I enter the territory of poetry, catching at language to form jagged, malformed sentences, then letting them collapse and fester inside my head. In the loud chaos I’ve lost the gift of forging words; I trample through the pulp left by broken logic, reducing events to particles. What remains for time is slag, and I lick it from every side, just to keep the senses from going numb again. Then I regret it. But my loneliness leaves me no exit from this endlessly descending spiral. Keeping the screen lit is also a way of postponing sleep — or suicide.
The reflections from car bodies gathered, forming a shimmering ripple across the road. My state of mind the last time I stared out a window like this was completely different from now. Getting through the TOEFL by treating everything as meaningless might be my only choice, or it might be my greatest regret. The tunnel lights were arranged like a snake; I passed through and looked at the sky. The clouds there were at once unfamiliar and familiar — no longer swollen and heavy, just gazing at me and my rushing about with quiet stillness. Shadows lined the rooftops, all the city’s everything — so far from the lies I wrote down in the exam room. I wrote positivity against my own nature, fabricating a universal formula in blood; that’s not what words are for. Words reduced to a self-serving tool, moaning with false illness while cosmic imagery withered in coughing and phlegm. I played along. And then, in a jungle of lifeless words, I dug my own grave and buried everything. My body and spirit age alongside the sinking of this grieving silhouette.
2022/10/05
Under the overcast sky, you cannot see any sign of life in this city — rows and rows of colorless buildings, bare buildings, nothing of architectural beauty anywhere. Maybe this place was never meant for brightness. It belongs to the people who carve large-character slogans in relief on walls.
This is the view from an overpass, and the fading of life is apparent. It wasn’t until the crowd picked up in the city center that I felt the faintest relief.
“Encounter the Beauty of the Magic City” — that’s what the poster on the nearby wall said.