Fragments of Dark: Julian

Julian…

Call me dramatic, but there is a black, spherical void at my core. at least, I imagine it is black. The type of black that is so black, it misses the point of being black at all. And everything else that I am, all my solid matter, my emotion, my human soul, is constantly on the edge of falling in. My heart is particularly close, and the void darkens its vibrations, tainting it so that sometimes I think it has already fallen in and is now pumping the void around my body. My soul is dark too, from the void in me. It feels tortured that it should go on in this conscious host instead of being at one with the infinite void. My mind, I think, is not wholly convinced that the void is where the heart and soul should belong, but then my mind is tainted with human arrogance as well as eternal darkness.

People say there is a sadness in my eyes, especially when I smile. My sinister dreams are built only from ordinary memories, but there is something beyond the symbols – the bricks if you will – that makes my dreams sinister.  It is something intangible and barely detectable that constructs them and holds them together. Something beyond sight, sound, comprehension. But not beyond seeping into veins and bones.

There is something coming through the cracks… There is another frequency phasing in, permeating our reality. Sometimes it is ultraviolet and sometimes it is black and grey. Much of what humans see is merely a perception: fragments made solid by our own neurology. So we are blind to them, the things coming through the cracks. I expect that they perceive us, but in a different sense to how we perceive one another.

There, I’ve said it. I’ve told you about the things coming through the cracks. I feel somehow more pure when there is a flow and the thoughts are out. Like a tap, there is built up pressure when closed and a constant flow when opened. Is that even what a tap does? Probably not. But a tap, or whatever it is, is something different when closed to when open. It is more noticeable and purposeful when it is open, but it can also cause more damage in this state. And the tap itself is just a vehicle restrained by its design. One design, many identical copies. It’s designer, of course, is way beyond caring about any particular tap, let alone any cracks it might have.

More and more of them come: memories of things that have never happened in my lifetime. Memories from behind the cracks, seeping in. They permeate my dreams and my memories of real events. Grey, ethereal chains.

I seek out external situations that mirror the void in me, that match the pace and mood it inflicts. Abandoned buildings, places of extreme depth, disused quarries and mines. It is in the rumbling of huge machines launching from the earth; in  the screeching of train on rail; in the static surrounding transmissions. It’s in the things humans create from the earth’s materials, but rarely in things they inhabit and never in the sounds they make with their own bodies.

The void, the cracks and me. That’s how it is.

 

Fragments of Dark is a hand bound, illustrated zine compiling short bursts of creative writing about depression and madness. It is released in limited editions for a small charitable donation to mental health organisations in the UK. For more information or a physical copy, please email me at orchidslantern@gmail.com