Hobbes Music

Standing within myself. Turn back to the cold. Little boy hiding in his packed snow fort. Now, after the warm breezes and radial light of the sun free the water now running from its frosty, lifeless fortress, he finds the sun comforting as it burns his flannel blanket into smoking embers and ashes. I do not recall being so changed, being so changed without a firm form. Don’t forget being older and all of its advantages. This is not my old self anymore. This is change for a reason, a purpose, and for many more reasons and higher purposes. This is for something more.

But by my soul I swear this will survive. This is all of me: tall tree waiting for the current of this misty misery to pass, swaying with the warm breezes and thriving in the sunlight, waiting for the current to pass, to dissolve, to disappear. This will survive: my will. This will survive. Will I? Yes.

All the middle moments flashing by my face, subway cars streaming with their passengers staring me in the face, leaving strong and strange impressions of a changed man’s reflections. How I crave for reflection now. In the mirror of the water, through the bonfire that fills me, called love, this will challenge my survival, but so necessarily. Necessary, oh so as before, as of before, and for certain, in the hopefully short long term. So easy to recall the humming drum role of it all. This is universally blessed. It brings all to their places. This is necessary. This is love, and it’s all that I need.

In line with myself. In line I am. I am in line. Would not be upset here but for that presence of past false accusations that scream to me “It’s over. I am here. She is home. I am home.” My arm stretched out completes the line, clear black pen in this gray time. Exhale the cold air and choke on the fumes of my own bloody system. Focus on the blotches. You can play with colors. Wish that I had my colored pencils with me now. I’d sketch a sea foam green edge on the ocean’s horizon, with surf all the time crashing down on me, and I’d imagine myself on a beach with an array of clouds and colors, touching the sea foam green and purple horizons on every side. Make this world a giant cotton candy machine, just for a moment, my feet in the sugar sand. Whirl my body around in the sea foam green surf, circled by hovering seagulls as I run all the way around. People may stare as much as they like. I’m never stopping till I pass out and fall down, never forgetting this moment.

And when it’s over, I’ll go home happy. It’s good to go home happy. No, it can not ever end. Forever. It will be again, if only in my head.

The something that came with this room wasn’t a something that Anthony had intended to be any part of in his life. And yet, here this something was, gnawing at his jugular, tearing his gut up from the insides out. It reminded him of how, as a child, he would swallow mouthwash just to get a buzz out of it. But this time, however, the burn and rip wouldn’t subside or turn into a fuzziness and a glow. No, this something didn’t leave, or come to subside. That was a something of which he was sure. Devon wasn’t going to return from death, and that was final.

Oh God, he thought, how much time had passed since … since when ? A concept of time had ultimately been shot out of existence in Anthony’s mind, which had also been blown out by all of the Lucy he had known from since … not that again. Thoughts came and went in his head too, like subways barreling by through a tangled network of nervous tunnels, crackling with electrified connectivity, somewhere just out of sight. They rumble and roar through his head, and not only do the echoes remain in his ears, but they also shake his fragile frame, the only sign of which was Anthony’s shaking and directionless gaze at nothing, past nothing, and through everything. To be able to hold onto something in his head would be wonderful, but that ability wasn’t going to come back either. Nothing and nobody would come back. Yet, so much that he didn’t want to stay had remained, and would remain, with absolute certainty, for quite a long time, like the obituaries from newspaper clippings ripped up and plastered all over that living area.

To consider this something a living area … yeah, that was where somebody could find him, if they knew how to find him, or wanted to. But this wasn’t an apartment that truly qualified in the common sense of the phrase. At any rate, there we have it all: newspaper clippings of the obituaries and pictures from magazines of beautiful young men plastered to the white-washed, 70’s vertical planked walls; stuffed animals strewn across the thick, burnt oil brown carpet; random scattered piles of clothing with outstretched sleeves and spread out pant legs; and a mattress from the YMCA where, he thought, he had started out at about … damn concept of time.

“Oh well”, he shrugged, “it’s just like Einstein told us: everything’s relative.”

Anthony spoke out loud to the nobody else around him rather frequently. All acquaintances and visitors have pretty much given up on reaching this 25yo reclusive sort, for they all have a good concept of just how much time had passed, and figured him out of the game for good. After all, it wasn’t as if they hadn’t spent enough of their lives attempting to wrench free his tired, muffled soul from the taxing suicide of doing time in a personal prison, torture chamber included in the price of the package. Throughout his life, he had tried suicide a number of times, but without any more success than anything else since … since Devon had passed away. That was Anthony’s favorite phrase to make use of when he spoke of him. It kept any certainty toward what happens after we pass away ripe with ambiguous strife. And so, he curled up on his twin sized mattress, and sobbed himself into the numbness of this abysmal lacking.