Tired

HGR

Days become reflections, facing each 24-hour period until you can’t see the end of the rectangular maze, because it is pure, unhinged infinity staring you in the dead eyes. Your sticks move beneath you, bending at the branch; the engine inflates and compresses, forcing hydraulics into your skin sack,  pumping you up and down like a balloon. You hunch, twist, shout—but the one thing you have left to your control, your mind, is stagnant.

Life rolls on. You are but a toiler, your task being to continue as light stretches its same path again and again. You mustn’t faulter, you mustn’t stop: the expectations, in their great power, press into your pores, commanding your unable body to preform. With each discrepancy the pressure builds, and you wade into it faster, not by your own choice, but by some boiling instinct within you that cannot survive without it.

The strings apon your hand clack, the tendons within your back tremble and slump.  You are embraced by black, an embrace so warm it magnifies your discomfort. There is a trapped luminescence hanging over the plateau. It slices through the embrace, allowing the connection between your hands and eyes to strengthen.

It incourages you. You muse to yourself: the expections, though mighty, have no power over you; who are they to command you? Mere ghosts that you have convinced yourself of reality. So, exorcise them! And finally, sleep.

They have come for you. They are here for you. Wolves in the night, they race. The engine pumps. Fingers flash, eyes dash, bones stiffen! So what can you do but run, because the time is on your back and it becomes heavy as it thins and stagnancy imprisons you to watch with burning eyes as everything tumbles to the bottom of a hill you have built up for a year out of tears and sweat and unhappiness all for nothing and it will crumble beneath your feet in the moonlight if you dare to stop don’t you dare stop. 

Your sagging eyelids raise to find your lamp on your desk, still glowing in the deepening night. You sigh and continue your work.