The Entire Universe
A plunge toward heartbreak.
Quadrant I
You're sitting in your living room. Cool gusts of air keep your home at a comfortable temperature. Outside, a scorching summer lingers on. Somewhere; loud laughter, people playing on their front porches. The bay window directly in front of the couch you sleep on shows you a lush world beyond your own grayness. A stale silence enveloped your psyche long ago, now it's touched every room you've stepped into for the past decade-plus. This one holds the most pressure. This, room. You feel it pushing down on your shoulders, seeping through the cracks in the drywall, crawling downward like a poisonous vine until it convinces you to fall back asleep, back to an underworld of muted heartache that only you could ever understand. A place that has just enough familiarity outlining its perpetual rainfall. You shut your eyes and begin to feel your body drifting off to this land, again. You begin humming some song that's been stuck in your head..., but that in reality, is just some melody you made up at some point in the far past that you've forgotten about. The notes rise and lower, like your chest. Then, the melody drowns into a deep, thickened bass, submerged somewhere in the depths of pure darkness, hardly recognizable anymore, like your mind. Then, sleep.
The very few memories you have of your father trying to teach you lessons on 'How to be a Man' don't particularly stick out in the sea of other moments from your youth. His voice was stern, powerful, so they always seemed like important bits of information at the time, even if they weren't. You try to remember more every time you think back, but your mind's eye only sees so much. It's been ravaged by self-induced comas where instead of calling out toward the skies above, it was the chemicals which you'd praise. So now as you find yourself back in this other world's grasp once more, you cover both ears with your palms and squint your eyes, struggling in vain to hear him say; "don't fall asleep here son, you'll never wake back up."
But I'm already asleep, your mind whispers back.
This place is constantly wet. Either from the rain or sleet or collective teardrops, the water never evaporates off the concrete. It's usually a city-setting. A metropolis straight out of some type of post-apocalypse. Usually, but not always. You've found it take other shapes before, other forms of dystopian coldness.
Once you'd found it a vast highway, so enormous and gargantuan that the cement stilts holding its hundred-lane body many miles above the earth were wider than any building you'd ever seen back in the real world.
Another time it appeared as a never-ending beach front, stretching on forever in either direction. A singular structure protruding off its darkly-sanded face; a pier. One that led out into the very middle of the largest body of water your mind could conjure up. A pier that took days to reach the end of and once there, had no railing to protect you from falling over the edge and plunging into the abyss below. Like it almost...called for you to do just that.
Usually however, its face was that of a downtown. A large sprawling place where the sun always seemed to almost rise, but never did.
It'd unsettle anyone else, but this is where you’d felt at home. This is where you'd kept your last sliver of security. Where Billie Holiday was always playing from some window on a higher floor inside random skyscrapers. Where Pablo Neruda's words made sense:
"I love you as certain dark things are to be loved, in secret, between the shadow and the soul."
You did ... and she was.
Quadrant II
Who "she" truly ends up being is so inconsequential to her overall impact on this realm and directly, your life. "She" is everybody and nobody at once. "She" is and isn't you. A fierce sun that hangs high above the desert during midday and a frigid, lonely moon that's full of craters, devoid of any warmth; she is both of these simultaneously.
Violent gasps of air, in and out. Sucking her essence deeper with each breath. Is it any wonder you consciously choose to go comatose in her memory?
Keep swallowing—, even though it feels like something sharp.
Keep breathing—, even when there is no more air.
Keep seeking a salvation within her embrace—, even if it's an insincere one.
The ground opens up and you fall in, further. Spiraling with a strange elegance toward impending personal doom. Grime. Vile. Lust. Beads of sweat rolling off of familiar hips. Pounding. Pounding. More pounding. More wine. More excess.
It all feels so...magical. Until...it doesn't.
Then..., the hatred and self-pity ease into play. A darkness threading itself into the very fabric of your dual- existence. But do you turn away? Do you fall to your knees and pray? Never. You accept it with open, scarred arms and the fakest grin you've ever seen a face make.
Past telephone wires and rusted car parts. Past lifeless trees whose branches hang like pinned skeletal arms. All, permanently set in some type of celestial stone. Fate?
Past your laughter, moaning, and anger-filled threats. Playing, fighting, sleeping. Rinse and repeat.
These are the things love hides from newcomers. These..., secret side-effects that will grow to haunt and maybe even, destroy you. These..., compulsive cravings to bite her lower lip so hard that your teeth pierces the skin and rips apart its armor, letting your own liquid code mix in with her exposed scarlet DNA. No drop to be wasted. No moan to be forced.
By the time you catch your breath...she's already swimming freely inside your veins.
"Now..., do you still love her?," the heart asks. You do ... and she is.
Quadrant III
If you blink your eyes for even a second, you'll miss it.
Large smokestack-factories have the run of its land. Industrialized sorrow at every turn. Her laugh, her fingers clenching the bedsheets just to feel a pull, and her sadness —, you remember all of these with an intimate, infinite energy.
Material is everything here. Red dresses. French tips. Good pills. Sweet dreams. Wasted youths. Fallen angels. And she...?
Where is she?
What a torturous self-inflicting wheel of pain we strap ourselves to. It outdoes any and all, before or after.
LOVE; loss of valuable energy.
If you blink your eyes for even a second, you'll miss it. It —, her.
You will ... and she'll be.
Quadrant IV
Where does the lover begin and the other end? In dreams, it’s the instant your mind fills the room of your first kiss with two bodies. In deep thoughts, it’s the snap of strange fingers alerting you to the length of time you’ve been quiet, subdued. In reality, it’s the first time you whisper, “I love you,” to another and know down in your soul just how heavy those words truly are—, how unimaginable the depth of their meaning really is.
Only then can the lover disappear completely into their other—without shame.
When does the heart break by its most anguished degree possible? In books, it’s after you’ve read the last line of the last paragraph in the last chapter and still feel an unfilled void in your chest. In the stars above, it’s being unable to make out their name anymore. In reality, it’s the first time you whisper, “I love you,” to another and know down in your soul that no matter how many seconds tick by, you won’t hear it echoed back to you.
Only then can the heart cut off all ties with every other organ in the lover’s body and willfully implode from crippling agony—, without reserve.
The true lover is vain and exposed, they rip apart all armor—, no barrier.
The true lover is appalling and full of self-hatred, they poison their own souls—, no pride.
So now, at the end of your journey, squeezing random shards of glass with one hand, clumps of hair in the other, how will they say you lived your life? Will they fill in the blank after your name with happy, veiled things? Will they smile to each other nervously, for they all know deep down you were nothing to be proud of? Will they go on to remember you at all...or will everyone you’ve ever known simply, forget?
When Virgil and Dante finally reached the ninth circle of their trek into the center of our world—where the gigantic Lucifer forever flapped his enormous wings, encasing himself further in frozen ice—they didn’t begin heading back up to escape, they climbed down further. When a world as dark as theirs needs an exit, even it stays shrouded in shadow.
So dig further.
Dig further down.
Further darkening your fingernails with dirt and grime. Further letting the last bit of candlelight inside your soul go out without so much as a whimper.
Further down, past old regrets and cherished memories.
Further until you’ve almost bled yourself into the nothingness around you.
Until you can’t keep your eyes open from the deafening silence of your world’s misery.
Until it’s no longer air your lungs breathe, but something thicker, like chalk.
Until the very blood that runs through your veins starts to feel cold.
Until you realize that there’s some type of familiar light shining onto your closed eyelids.
Familiar but artificial.
You stop digging and open your eyes.
You’re alive.
You’re sitting in your living room.