Lost

The nasty taste of tobacco like poison in the mouth makes my entire being bitter. Nauseated I sluggishly stretch my torso and emerge from the layers of bed sheets and peer out the tarnished window. The careless rain has soaked every crooked building, scrubbed the dirty asphalt washing off the filth into the sewage and now pouring down the broken gutters. Rains guilty claws stained every wall and its culprit fingerprints remained all over the town.

In the past midnight hours of the street, the traffic light rules like a merciless murderer with a mood swing. First it sprays the vicious red on the wet payment like the spilled blood of his victim. Then his temper sways to a jolly green as if no crime was committed just a few seconds ago; yet its short- lived mania is bound to soon turn into a dull amber as it craves for the ensued blood.

The capricious rain, this mindless accomplice to the crime of the night splashes the tantalizing colors of neon signs on the ground in concert with the perpetrator to portray the somber void. A homeless sleeping in the corner catches my eyes. The lackluster mélange of conflicting beams of light is etched in the fiber of the soaking cardboards sheltering the vagabond from the frigid autumn in a hidden corner of the dilapidated street.

My room is inundated with a haze of confusion, the air is musty and light scarce. Mere breathing damages my lungs and thinking does the same to my mind. I talk to myself yet my thoughts are stale, my words blank and my heart aching by a growing void. I have to escape, that I know, where I don’t, anywhere but here I murmur. As the hours pass I finally manage to stand on my exhausted feet to leave the rotten comfort of my room and to roam the hazy streets on a whim.

The cold gust scuffs my skin as I approach the homeless coiled under the soaking cardboards with his right shoe knocked off his pale feet at distance. Cautiously I take a few steps closer to the dark speck on the sidewalk and stand by him overwhelmed by a bizarre sentiment. I take a glimpse at his face and realize I know this man well. I know this corpse by heart. And if I carefully examine the subject, I can detect his interrupted pulse, caress his frozen love and perhaps register his long lost memories. His ominous soul permeates my entire being just to spread his solemn words through the dark streets of this town. My diligent attempt to break away from his morbid yoke on my thoughts only furthers the urgency of transcribing his melancholic words.

The collapsed drifter on the pavement lived every moment of my past and I’m destined to live every one of his in the future. There is no exit in horizon from this quandary, only an end in sight. With every breath I take, I’m drawn anew by an impulsive stroke of a whimsical brush on the precarious canvas of life. My dim impression is rendered lifeless before me yet I’m manically intoxicated by a mystic aroma that levitates me from the mundane anxiety ordained to sketch a vivacious scope against all odds. Like an entranced dervish I whirl uninhibitedly on the pristine tapestry of distorted lights and drift away from the fallen man on the street engraved in oblivion. My calling is tainted, my roar stifled yet I’m sentenced to write only the dark shades of the night in a desperate hope that sun shines tomorrow.