The Ancient Abbey's Library

And after some months of it, my life degenerated to an absurd, baroque clockwork of my own health managed at my expense. Slight weaknesses travailed me to incredible flounderings, stomachaches from a slightly upset PH laying me up as if it were salmonella, tension headaches from any number of mundane deprivations turning into debilitating rushes to get whatever drug I desperately lacked in that moment. My surroundings took on the exterior wood paneling of the grandfather clock I operated within myself, the lush jungle of tapestries, paneled walls, rooms half-lit by afternoon sun coming in hazy down half-drawn curtains to illuminate dark green carpeting and gout Rothschild couches, formal gardens overgrown to woody thorns in neglect, dried out fountains where I take coffee and fight through a partial migraine to peel apart the musty yellowed pages of some ancient printing of a classic far more have bought than penetrated…

Coming in as a kaleidoscope I could never comprehend as others can so effortlessly, the few channels of processing available to me trickle down all things to settle in the lowermost dungeons of my being as the only eternal emotion I could comprehend - contempt. Contempt for those close and far, the ones alike me and the ones opposite. I’m served breakfast and my lip curls as I see my father’s hands curl around porcelain, dried-out paper skin wrapped on decrepit bones, the overweight waitress bulging out to stifle her own hypertrophied heart in service of the marionette skeleton before me. Not a single morsel of food has ever tasted good, the sky here having an uncanny ability to be slush-grey every single day I can remember. 

I beg her to stay, just a little bit longer, to remain in my hands so long as she can be illuminated by the light that chills me since birth. Of course she does, she can balk no argument and breaks my heart for it. Her body, that of a porcelain bird sings to hum with the same song it always had, helping to unfreeze something that dams up constantly, welling up tears until sleep calcifies them once again. I ask her as if she’ll refuse, in order to open the possibility. A question implies 

I take coffee with my grandmother on the balcony, overlooking the tangled thorngardens, hedges turned to rosy tangles. I lose what I’m saying, my derealizing lengthened out to be chronic now. I fake conversations as though I’m on acid, words expected, responses contained in the questions, pouring out from my mouth, spilling onto my lap, soaking through my pajamas, coffee stained as they are, smelling of lavender and must.

On a walk through the woods, I find an occulted hole. Roots circled around a cave leading into a world of carrots and soil, illuminated mushrooms for a witch’s hovel cut like Bag-End in the base of a tree. It spirals up, knotting and twisting in countless strands of a great knotting rope, the base wide and sprawling out across the blackbrown loam. Someone is talking to me inside. I see her at night, fingernails scratching loving bloodstains into my nightgowns as I awake eagerly in expectation of the next mysteries awaiting me. The fog deepens. I breathe it purposefully, filling my lungs with a full imbibing of the smoke around me.