Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back
– Robert Frost
for wordpress weekly photo challenge – path
photo101
anticipation
sting, oh salty tears
sweet, anticipation
of a day, on the water
once was,
and now
gone
anticipation for wordpress weekly photo challenge
vilnius(streets)
I’m selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle.
― Marilyn Monroe
I’ve been invited to present at a conference tomorrow morning here in Vilnius. I had two hours sleep last night and have a busy day ahead. It’s cold and raining. As I watched this city unfold in front of me as my cab driver brought me to my hotel I was reminded of another city, one that brought me great joy, and some photographic success, it also brought to mind this old Buzzcocks song and these lyrics (adapted)
Ever fallen in love? (Love…)
In love with some (city)
You shouldn’t’ve fallen in love with
Oh, Vilnius!
dark | side | thursday | thirtyfive
Do you need, desire or crave a new challenge? Are you open to sharing your dark side? Then read on.
Do you have a dark side?
Or, think you may have one. Or indeed worry that you might have one. Or, for that matter, worry that you don’t and would like one? If so, join me here each week for dark | side | thursday.
Over a period of 52 weeks, I am writing a story. A dark story that will unfold as the weeks pass. Each Thursday, at 13:00 UTC, I will post a new chapter. Each chapter will be exactly 500 words long, and will be accompanied by a photograph. You can catch up on the story so far by clicking here on dark | side | thursday
Share your dark side?
I invite you to join me either by writing your own dark story, week by week, or, if that is too much, by dropping by, now and then, perhaps when the mood suits you or, perhaps, when it doesn’t, and by sharing a photograph, poem or a suitably dark piece of prose. To cross over to dark | side | thursday create your post, tag it dark side thursday and link to it by clicking on the dark | side | thursday badge below, where you can also find all the contributions so far. Or you can simply share your link in the comments section of my weekly post. And, should the mood take you, you can add the badge to your post.
dark | side | thursday | thirtyfive
‘…realityytilaer
hisfingerssregnifsih…’
Melting into the wall, the white wall rippled, a stone flicking across a pond. Plink, plink, plink. His arm vanished in front of his eyes, sucked into the white wall, melting, dissolving, vanishing. Un-being. Words flickered in his mind, un-flickered, flickered again, brighter, coalesced, flared, bloomed and dissipated, words incoherent, yet full of meaning. Words he knew, word he had heard.
Before.
Her voice, fading, swirling, water flowing in antipodean swirls down a white drain. Swirling, straining, becoming. Nothing.
His arm had gone. The white wall approached his shoulder. Enveloped his shoulder. Engulfed him. He felt older. Colder. The white wall took his head. He stopped thinking.
He was not older. Younger. Bolder. Smoulder.
He was now all white. Like the room, the wall, the whole world. The world as it seemed to him. White, not right, no, so so not right. He could not write. He had to be right to write, right?
No longer observing the world. He was, the world. White rippling waves coursed through him. Unfolding, spreading, tightening. Not frightening. Pulsating, enfolding, enclosing.
Memories of the black plastic mask hovering above his face, the tube in his throat. They thought he was out. They thought he was all white.
All around him, white.
And then. And then, the voice.
Her voice again. He closed his eyes, but it made no difference, all was white. There was no dark. No light. No wrong, no right. Only the white.
The pain in his arm, that familiar pain, flared and snaked through his incorporeal body.
‘Close the pod doors Hal’.
White, all around him, white.
Memories of films and books and plays and poems. All white. Words blurred into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, paragraphs into chapters, chapters into books, books into lives. Lives into whiteness. Always the whiteness. Nowhere else. All was white.
Reality.
Was no more.
There was only the path through the white place.
And the cloying sweet smell, of the black mask.
Hovering.
Waiting.
He wanted the button, the sweet promise of being able to push the button. To unleash relief. To let all that whiteness suffuse him. Push the button.
He drifted away, through the whiteness. White walls, imperceptible, white walls closing in on him, taking his breath. Making him want, the black mask.
The man in black, lost in the white, wanted and needed the black mask. Needed to draw deep on the sweet dark promise of the mask. Needed to suck on the dark life inside, needed the dark infusion to balance the white confusion that suffocated and took him deeper, away, out, from all he knew.
Inside the white, a part of him, buried deep, knew he was losing his mind. Knew that the white illusion, that was growing inside, was no more than that, an illusion.
Like her.
Why, did it all come back to her. Why did she fill his mind. Obscure his thoughts.
He was the man in black. He feared nothing.
Only the white.
The portal to dark | side | thursday opened on the twenty first day of may in the year twenty hundred and fifteen and will remain open for fifty two weeks.
thirtyfive | fiftytwo
dark | side | thursday | thirtyfour
Do you need, desire or crave a new challenge? Are you open to sharing your dark side? Then read on.
Do you have a dark side?
Or, think you may have one. Or indeed worry that you might have one. Or, for that matter, worry that you don’t and would like one? If so, join me here each week for dark | side | thursday.
Over a period of 52 weeks, I am writing a story. A dark story that will unfold as the weeks pass. Each Thursday, at 13:00 UTC, I will post a new chapter. Each chapter will be exactly 500 words long, and will be accompanied by a photograph. You can catch up on the story so far by clicking here on dark | side | thursday
Share your dark side?
I invite you to join me either by writing your own dark story, week by week, or, if that is too much, by dropping by, now and then, perhaps when the mood suits you or, perhaps, when it doesn’t, and by sharing a photograph, poem or a suitably dark piece of prose. To cross over to dark | side | thursday create your post, tag it dark side thursday and link to it by clicking on the dark | side | thursday badge below, where you can also find all the contributions so far. Or you can simply share your link in the comments section of my weekly post. And, should the mood take you, you can add the badge to your post.
dark | side | thursday | thirtyfour
Reality.
He saw her reality. But not her. She was not there. Perhaps she never had been. Not in any real, or meaningful, sense.
He was alone, and in pain.
And he had not the slightest idea what was happening to him or why. His recollections of recent events were scrambled, incoherent. Flashing lights, sirens, her warm body, what she had done to and with his body, that hellish impact. Fragmented memories from far away, fragments long buried that had bubbled to the surface. The button. Tied to the morphine drip, he had kept pushing the button, long past that point when any pretence that he could control the flow had long passed. His teeth had hurt. Not his teeth, the space, he realised, where three had been wrenched, torn, out of their place in his face.
She had gone. This time, he thought, for good. Or bad, or, whatever. He didn’t really feel able to think, let alone assess the consequences of recent events.
He did want a shot. Some internal warming. Precious chance of that just now.
The room in which he lay was white. Everything was white. No relief from the white. He felt stronger. Relatively at least. He rolled, with some difficulty on to his right side, used his arm as support and pushed himself (slowly) upright. Most parts of his body sending signals to his failing brain that this was not the best decision he took this day. Ignoring the signs, the strains, he sat, upright. Took the glass that rested on the white table that sat next to the bed. Lifted the glass to his mouth, with abandon drank deep long gulps of cold water. His head span, heart beating faster.
He looked around the room. Apart from the bed, white frame, white sheets, white pillows and a white table, the room was featureless. He could see no door, no window, no cabinets, no life-saving machinery. He was wearing a single white tunic of soft material that covered his entire body. Only then did he realise this. The parts of his body not covered in white were restricted to his eyes, nostrils, mouth. The rest covered, enveloped in white.
This made him stop for a moment. To think.
He moved again, so that he sat on the edge of the bed. Placed his hands, palm down, on either side of his body and pushed himself upright.
He was surprised that this did not hurt him as much as he had feared. His body felt light, ethereal.
He walked. No. It felt more like floating. Floated towards one side of the white room. It was hard to tell where the room ended and the wall started, maybe there was no such division.
He paused. For a moment, he remembered her. The feel of her warm body. The touch of her fingers on him. Her warm wet lips.
Reality. He needed to get a grip.
He reached out his fingers toward the white wall.
Reality.
The portal to dark | side | thursday opened on the twenty first day of may in the year twenty hundred and fifteen and will remain open for fifty two weeks.
thirtyfour | fiftytwo
weight(less)
The body, she says, is subject to the force of gravity. But the soul is ruled by levity, pure
― Saul Bellow
a lifetime ago, this hand held
a new life, eyes barely open
(and more since, after that first new
life)
a weight lifted
a weight forever to carry
(whatever)
and now
that new life
will soon
also bring (its own) new life
the weight will lift again
and once more
become heavier,
and lighter
for wordpress weekly photo challenge – weight(less)
see also weightless on belgianstreets
dark | side | thursday | thirtythree
Do you need, desire or crave a new challenge? Are you open to sharing your dark side? Then read on.
Do you have a dark side?
Or, think you may have one. Or indeed worry that you might have one. Or, for that matter, worry that you don’t and would like one? If so, join me here each week for dark | side | thursday.
Over a period of 52 weeks, I am writing a story. A dark story that will unfold as the weeks pass. Each Thursday, at 13:00 UTC, I will post a new chapter. Each chapter will be exactly 500 words long, and will be accompanied by a photograph. You can catch up on the story so far by clicking here on dark | side | thursday
Share your dark side?
I invite you to join me either by writing your own dark story, week by week, or, if that is too much, by dropping by, now and then, perhaps when the mood suits you or, perhaps, when it doesn’t, and by sharing a photograph, poem or a suitably dark piece of prose. To cross over to dark | side | thursday create your post, tag it dark side thursday and link to it by clicking on the dark | side | thursday badge below, where you can also find all the contributions so far. Or you can simply share your link in the comments section of my weekly post. And, should the mood take you, you can add the badge to your post.
dark | side | thursday | thirtythree
His teeth hurt.
And he could see nothing. Not a damned thing.
Nothing.
Some good things. The lights had (finally) stopped flashing. The siren was (at least) silenced.
For now.
His stomach churned, he felt the ground slither and shift beneath him. Snakes twisting, hissing, embracing. Rehearsing.
He ached. Wanted. Needed.
Lusted.
Fragmented memories, teenaged walks. Darkened banks, distended rivers. Fumbled encounters with unknown territories. Soft, warm, cotton, elastic, plastic. Ridges, curves. Swollen, stolen. Stubble and trouble. Warm, wet and pressed. Repressed, depressed. No, yes. Please, and no. Crevices, false moist premises. Fingers entwined. Breathless promises, untouched premises. Unknown provinces. Breathless. Hard pressed fences, no defences.
Dark wet endings.
Fear and guilt. Tumbling, spinning. Mind unfurling. Twisting, turning.
Darkness gathering.
Nothing.
Water rushing. Trunks extending. Leaves unfurling. Shadows passing. Fingers, lips and tongues. Melting, melding. Branches poking, spreading.
Snow piling up in front of him. Snowflakes, she gave, he takes, she fakes.
Nothing.
Dials descending. Counting and measuring. Time approaching, receding, rushing, crashing. Time compressing, extending, unwinding, dilating, disappearing. Unfurling.
Nausea rising.
Spinning, twisting, retching, heaving.
Nothing.
Faces swirling in the mist. Approaching and receding.
Voices, echoing, booming, fading. Fractured. Silenced.
Twisting, a sharp pain pulled at his arm. Needle embedded. Fluid flowing. Pain pushed back. Clarity crystallising, crumbling. Push the button.
Nothing.
Tight white cotton. Curve and crevice. Hidden, bidden, unforgiven. Warm wet lips. Tight embraces. Hidden faces. Dark desires. Dark flowing rivers. Twisted branches. Elastic, plastic, closure.
Nothing.
Nausea rising.
His teeth hurt.
A lot.
Nausea rising.
Lights flashing, sirens screaming. Sirens taunting. Taut warm bodies. Beckoning. And then, the reckoning.
Cotton. White. Tight. Curves and swellings. Hidden promises, forbidden premises. White. Swollen. White and smooth. Stubbled trouble. Shaven, brazen.
Nausea rising.
Nothing.
His teeth hurt.
A lot.
Push the button.
Nausea rising.
Blink.
His eyes, open. Rivers frozen. Love left frozen. Give me a dozen. Why so cold, not so old. Bold, sold. Shoes un-soled. Left untold.
Nausea rising.
pushthebuttonpushthebuttonpushthebutton.
Nothing.
Eyes blinked open. Morphine seeping, through plastic tubing. Bloating his arm, warming, pain receding. Floating, fear receding. All receding. No preceding.
Dry mouthed, he reached out. Cold glass. Rolling over. Crisp white cotton. Sheets not shrieks. Shaking hands, cold wet (water) gasping, fetching. Life giving.
Nothing.
His teeth hurt.
Less. Than before.
Nothing.
Eyes open. Blink. Think.
His teeth hurt. His face hurt. He hurt. Everywhere. Faded memories. Washed up. Tied up.
Nothing.
His teeth no longer hurt.
Now he lay still. Seconds passed. Minutes. Hours. Days. Weeks. An eternity in the sweep, of a second hand.
Second hand dreams. Long lost dreams. Fading fast. Taught white cotton. Curved promise, false premise.
Push the button.
Eyes wide open.
Hurting less.
Gathering memory. Firm if fanciful. Must not lust. Grasping memory.
Push the button.
Warming. Memory storming. Flashing lights, screeching sounds and sirens calling. Falling. Breaking. Warm, wet, bodies joining.
Push the button.
Nothing.
Push the button.
Falling.
Eyes wide open.
He saw her then. Saw her,
reality.
The portal to dark | side | thursday opened on the twenty first day of may in the year twenty hundred and fifteen and will remain open for fifty two weeks.
thirtythree | fiftytwo
dark | side | thursday | thirtytwo
Do you need, desire or crave a new challenge? Are you open to sharing your dark side? Then read on.
Do you have a dark side?
Or, think you may have one. Or indeed worry that you might have one. Or, for that matter, worry that you don’t and would like one? If so, join me here each week for dark | side | thursday.
Over a period of 52 weeks, I am writing a story. A dark story that will unfold as the weeks pass. Each Thursday, at 13:00 UTC, I will post a new chapter. Each chapter will be exactly 500 words long, and will be accompanied by a photograph. You can catch up on the story so far by clicking here on dark | side | thursday
Share your dark side?
I invite you to join me either by writing your own dark story, week by week, or, if that is too much, by dropping by, now and then, perhaps when the mood suits you or, perhaps, when it doesn’t, and by sharing a photograph, poem or a suitably dark piece of prose. To cross over to dark | side | thursday create your post, tag it dark side thursday and link to it by clicking on the dark | side | thursday badge below, where you can also find all the contributions so far. Or you can simply share your link in the comments section of my weekly post. And, should the mood take you, you can add the badge to your post.
dark | side | thursday | thirtytwo
She smiled, and laughed.
A twisted girlish grin, lopsided, her dark eyes widening, her lips, moist, pinched and puckered, as if to kiss. But kiss she did not. She leaned over him, lips brushing his with a quick upward flick, leaving him wanting more, his mouth open, ready to taste her, even bound as he was. Needing. Aching for more. Of her. All of her.
The sirens did not abate. The lights flashed. The road ahead endless. He strained against the ties that bound him.
He felt her body hover over his, his arms pinned and absent. He felt her hot breath on his face, felt her sliding up and over his prone and strapped down body, belly rubbing over his, soft thighs spreading, squeezing, her breast soft, teasing, taunting him. Slim, delicate, fingers stroking and caressing the cracked contours of his face, her body pinning him, enfolding him, devouring him.
Memories of a cold white hospital cell. That time, long ago. Their bodies shared for brief moments. Given and taken. Wanted and feared. The pain they shared. And all that followed.
The dust. The blood. The fear.
Her lips grazed his, flickered and fluttered, never quite connecting, never lingering, her tongue licking and teasing. Again, and again. He ached. Her body rocking against his, a perverse parody of passion.
Unable to move, his body straining, hardening yet withdrawing, she took him and made him hers. Pain flashed along his arm. Light fading, vision blurring and darkening as the dwindling tunnel of his vision squeezed and contracted around him in time with the practised, clinical, movements of her body. His breath fading as he felt snow begin to pile up and cover his prone body. Cold, wet, snow. Fanciful crystalline flakes, tumbling and floating in front of his eyes, iridescent and flickering. He struggled to breathe. Her cold, dark, empty eyes looking into, and through, his, as he felt her tighten around him. And, all the time, sirens screaming, lights flashing, snow flakes falling, gathering, smothering, stifling him. Her eyes grew darker and receded, he heard her cry out, with the voice that had haunted him for so long.
He felt the pressure of her body recede. His wanting to rise up off the boards to which he was strapped,to follow her, to feel her lithe body pressed firm against him, to feel her hot breath on his face, her wet mouth pressed against his.
The impact was intense.
Sudden.
Brutal.
The sirens stopped. Dead.
His body, and the boards to which he was strapped, slammed into the tarmac with a fierce wet smack. He couldn’t help connecting this with the sound her body made against his as she had rhythmically soared and swooped above him.
He tumbled, over and over, feeling, far away, his face tearing as his body slammed into and across the empty wet road. The ambulance, a mangled blazing wreck, smashed against the razor-wired concrete.
Lights flashing blue and red.
Not again. He thought.
The portal to dark | side | thursday opened on the twenty first day of may in the year twenty hundred and fifteen and will remain open for fifty two weeks.
thirtytwo | fiftytwo
dark | side | thursday | thirtyone
Do you need, desire or crave a new challenge? Are you open to sharing your dark side? Then read on.
Do you have a dark side?
Or, think you may have one. Or indeed worry that you might have one. Or, for that matter, worry that you don’t and would like one? If so, join me here each week for dark | side | thursday.
Over a period of 52 weeks, I am writing a story. A dark story that will unfold as the weeks pass. Each Thursday, at 13:00 UTC, I will post a new chapter. Each chapter will be exactly 500 words long, and will be accompanied by a photograph. You can catch up on the story so far by clicking here on dark | side | thursday
Share your dark side?
I invite you to join me either by writing your own dark story, week by week, or, if that is too much, by dropping by, now and then, perhaps when the mood suits you or, perhaps, when it doesn’t, and by sharing a photograph, poem or a suitably dark piece of prose. To cross over to dark | side | thursday create your post, tag it dark side thursday and link to it by clicking on the dark | side | thursday badge below, where you can also find all the contributions so far. Or you can simply share your link in the comments section of my weekly post. And, should the mood take you, you can add the badge to your post.
dark | side | thursday | thirtyone
He placed the painting face down on the desk. Slowly, and with care.
He could not bear to see that triangular face gazing back at him. Not any more. A child’s rough depiction of a demon, or worse, some desperate child’s scribbled self portrait, a glimpse into a reality he could not countenance.
Either way, it was too much. Now.
The pain in his arm was worse. Tendrils of fire snaking along the inside of his arm towards his shoulder. His head was pounding, his chest tight and aching.
He turned and stood, shards of the shattered glass, pointing to his earlier rage, sliced into the soft underside of his bare soles as he did so. Opened a cabinet, grabbed an open packet, pulled out one of the shiny foil trays inside and clumsily, his finger shaking, pushed out one of the small white tablets, dry gulped it down, his throat dilating in disgusted disapproval. He staggered to the sink, turned the tap, leaned over, his head beneath the spluttering siphon, and allowed the water, water he normally refused to drink, to drain into his throat. He squeezed out two more of the waiting white pills, swallowed both. Sat down at the desk, his clammy forehead hard pressed on the smooth laminated wooden surface.
His eyes closed. He felt his limbs begin to separate, finger tips and toes began to tingle, sensation fading, fast. A tightening tunnel threatened to envelop him, swallow him, digest, dismember, dissemble him. The antithesis of birth. Dark thoughts gurgled through his fragmenting mind.
He drifted. Into deepening darkness. The last sound he could hear, the insistent whirling of the fan inside his Mac. How pointless all that seemed now. Then the fan faded as the last lingering light abruptly left.
The strident screech of the ululating siren shattered his shutdown consciousness.
Cracks appearing on the surface of a long forsaken frozen lake.
As those cracks enlarged, forked and multiplied, so his mind grasped for the edge, anything on which to hold.
He was pinned down. He knew that. If little else. His mind was grisly grey swirling slurry, his limbs heavy and immobile, his mouth dry and foul tasting. He felt bitter bile rising in his throat. Panic. His head aching and burning. His lips spewing foam as his head shook from side to side.
The sirens continued to clear the road ahead. He was flat on his back. Blue and red spinning lights, flashed and flickered, insane, fake, circus lightning. He tried to lift his left arm, it was heavy, his fingers, dim, long forgotten, body parts he could barely feel, let alone move. No longer his. No longer his parts. His left arm locked down tight. His other arm, and his legs, the same.
As the red and blue lights continued to splat and sizzle, as the sirens soared and screamed, the fissure in his mind ruptured.
She placed her cool hand on his burning forehead.
Turning her head, she smiled, and laughed.
The portal to dark | side | thursday opened on the twenty first day of may in the year twenty hundred and fifteen and will remain open for fifty two weeks.
thirtyone | fiftytwo
andy townend 