Each person is meant to encounter some singular, piercing truth that, once revealed, grants them the peace to meet death without resistance – a slow, agonising death, felt with every fibre of their being, much like the way a departing train strains the rails as it pulls away from the station. Some people do not get to t.t.t. touch that and I, for one, have brushed against that fleeting spark countless times, yet it has always slipped through my grasp. I remain adrift in the wilderness of my own making, in this tomb of a house – not dead, but becoming-death. Each morning unfolds like the last: empty streets, the distant hum of the old wood-processing factory droning like a hymn. The grid of this town extends outward – a repetition, a cloning of communist-era apartment blocks, their rooftops punctuating a sentence I can no longer decipher.
I walk carrying an ache. I am not moving toward something. I feel the unbearable stillness that clings to me. Each step fractures this map, the sidewalks: fewer pathways than conduits, in a system that refuses to cohere, a neighbourhood that is everywhere and nowhere. I see cracks in the pavement and wonder: If I follow them long enough, will they form a pattern? Is that what I am supposed to do? Find a pattern? Find myself? I wait for a rupture in the monotony, for something to break the suffocating repetition – the infinite sprawl without centre or edge, a rhizomatic network of images, disembodied voices bleeding into one another. I feel myself distancing, slipping, my judgement clouded, and my brain exposed like an open wound. I open my notebook. I write something. Then I redact it – pressing the pen so hard that the words become irretrievable. This is still writing.
At night, I dream of roots beneath the asphalt – twisted filaments defying the rigid logic of roads and cul-de-sacs, growing without a plan, an origin, and a fixed destination. In the morning, I look for them, for weeds breaking through the pavement – an insurgency of green against the concrete grey, uncommon, paradoxical almost. They do not begin; they spread just as I do.
I emerge like fungi after rain – unpredictable, swarming. My coming into being was an event, not a fixed point but a shifting surface of meaning. My truths are transient, staining the sheets of my memory only to be erased as soon as they take form – a sprawl, endlessly mutating. Blanc. Stained. Blanc. Stained. Repeat. I am a patchwork, and my selfhood is a collage of everything I have ever read, seen, and absorbed – an assemblage. To exist is to compile. Somewhere in my thoughts, an echo of another text surfaces: There are no points or positions in a rhizome, only lines. Just another fissure, a line of flight – click, and the landscape shifts. If meaning exists, it is only in its temporary crystallizations, before dispersing into the next connection, the next link, the next unfolding.
Survival and desire collapsed into one, devoured by the rabid hunger of reality. My veins coil backwards around my body, my pulse howling in a jagged, metallic shriek, my blood an unbearable inward tide, thick as crushed velvet. The space I left behind has deformed itself; the air hums with the taste of rust, a low, grating vibration gnawing at the edges of perception. I choke up the void and there is nothing else.
No doctrine can withstand the crushing force of expectation, and yes, some manage to carve out a place of higher worth in this absurd spectacle we call class. But that only happens because we, as a collective, choose to anoint them, to elevate them, to summon them into significance. When in actuality, we are all living in grayscale. There is no colour, no vibrancy. Just the numbing ennui of existing, of being unfortunate enough to participate.
And yet, some part of me stays. We paint over the cracks with borrowed desires, feigning purpose in rituals that have long since lost their meaning. We chase illusions of escape – status, indulgence, momentary highs – anything to distract from the quiet horror of stagnation. But deep down, we know: no matter how high we build our walls, the machinery churns on, relentless, pulling us through the same monotonous cycles, the same empty performance of existence.
What was I saying?