aaron_the fall of america_chapter_05

Chapter 5

Although I'm still troubled over the distinction between dream, memory, and wakefulness, I'm starting to regain my capacity for reasoning. Hunger plays the odd deceitful game with my mind and fills me with dread. I lean uncomfortably on the edge of the abyss peering dumbfoundedly into the unknown. I sense a perplexing disorder focusing on entropy.

In my frightened lack of validity, I'm tempted to cry to Jesus, or someone similar, to beg for a point of reference. If I could eat from the branch of redemption, the euphoric poison of that fruit could help numb my mind from hungering irrelevance. Unfortunately, reason and doubt have made my stomach too weak for such pleasures. I am left floating in a sea of absurdities with the demons of the deep below me and a endless naked void above me.

I think I've eaten a bug.

It wasn't a cockroach but it's the only symbol that came to mind. I always hated living with cockroaches. If, and rarely is it so, there are only a few, it is not too bothersome. At times, I can admire them. They are basic carbon based life survival units, a simple and durable design.

My own instinct to survive causes me to loath them. When I lived with Brent in the market, there were millions. Millions in our little apartment. The market had billions and billions of cockroaches along with millions of rats and mice. These are the creatures that own the city.

Because of the stench of the hair salon below us, the population seemed to be in check when we first moved in. We could keep our food locked in the refrigerator and not have to eat many cockroaches. Some days we wouldn't see any cockroaches, only scattered mouse shit. But there was a few months when all hope was lost. Our neighbours, who had yet to move to yuppy-ville, had sprayed their three story home. It was then we had a complete invasion. We put roach hotels out for their comfort but each hotel only housed a little over a hundred roaches. Inadequate accommodations. If we came in from a night at a club and turned the light on, we would see a blanket of hard brown creatures on the floor. They quickly ran for cover when the light was on but we found them everywhere. There was a nest under Brent's bed. I had one run over my pillow, just missing my head.

After that apartment, everything seemed better until now. The dread I had then has returned. Although I haven't visual evidence because I still can't see, I suspect I'm living with large numbers of small crawling creatures.

I fear I may be sliding into a sullen stupor, trapped in a dark tunnel of conviction. Where went my belief that I hold the mysteries to the universe within my massive mind? The fight is grim. There is only a small flame flickering in the mud. Madness may be the only thing to drive me on to recapture the spirited child that lies still in a coma hooked onto a faulty life-support system.



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by Joanne B. Washington

© 2001 | the jose wombat project