I woke up to my favourite song, a song about heaven and where we went wrong.

My limbs feel heavy, poured concrete, sap-sticky webs of thought crowding the corners of my mind. The fray of my shorts splays and separates on the pink flesh of my thigh and I absent-mindedly pick at it, pondering, wondering, pulsing with fullness. I am over-flowing, past full-capacity, swollen and drowning in you. You pull parts of me through the pores in my skin, suck my soul from me, leave me concave and wilted. I bristle, pinpricked with this love, it's a stranger to me and I'm unsure of what to do with it. I'm backed into a black hole, swallowed down into it's belly and digested in the dark. You are elusive and intermittent. Your brief flecks of presence stain my eyes with ice and I forever see in shades and shapes of you.

Woke up, toes stretched, eyes tasting near-afternoon light. Dressed and wandered into the park when suddenly the crinkled waxy-green was sliced through by borders of yellow police tape. White cars housed black-clad officers with stern lines for lips. My casual steps turned tentative and my eyes darted through the brush for clues. I was looking for drug dealers, specks of blood, smashed cars, anything to explain the stain of policemen on the otherwise bright surroundings. A female cop, sunglasses hiding her boredom explained that a body had been found naked, abandoned in a shopping cart.
"It's all over the news," she grunted, dismissing my curiosity with a flick of her wrist. My mind started sculpting fantasies of gangs and unpaid drug debts and the sex trade; I was taking the wet mass of scattered information and trying to create something terribly exciting from it.
Continuing on towards downtown, two names jumped from a gallery sign like twin flashes from my past. Barton and Leir. I was suddenly pulled back to their old studio out on farmland, my Mom had taken us there when we were young. Their art was like stepping into an antique store while dreaming. Everything was ethereal and poked-through with columns of colour. I touched everything, tasting textures with the tips of my fingers, drinking in shapes through swollen pupils. You picked up leather-bound books, running your palms over the covers, one by one. They were made in India by a generations-old family of leather workers. They had sacrificed their culture to make a living wrapping sheafs of recycled cotton paper in the skins of animals they were meant to regard as Gods. Just looking at them, I felt a flush of that ever-present Western guilt.

It's always the morning after around you, I can remember nothing but my body screams with some undefinable message. I fall apart into a multitude of pieces, each one telling me how it fits back together but I'm unable to listen to all of them at once. I just sit and deny the static snap between our eyes, blue on blue like warm sky meeting glazed ice, the atmosphere between us clouded and crackling.

There are some people in the world who have an insatiable urge to remove parts of themselves, whether it be a finger or a couple toes, or a whole limb. I wonder if they feel liberated once the alien flesh is removed, leaving only a ghostly, tingling reminder of what once was. I wonder if sometimes the wake from nightmares fighting invisible demons, only to realize they have no fingers to grasp collars, no way of making a fist, even, no means or reason to fight anymore. Are our bodies not built to cope with and resist feeling pain? By some fluke of evolution we are able to push memories of terror so far back in the mind they turn opaque and hard to decipher. The edges of rage soften until other emotions take over, weaker emotions like desire, longing, love. We construct means of escape, healthy and unhealthy. We exercise obsessively or drink ourselves to stupidity every weekend. We rely on escape much in the same way an addict relies on their fix. We aren't programmed to handle the reality we've created for ourselves. We are so quick to blame our imbalances on the hectic pace of life but we have no one to blame but ourselves. We created it all. Sometimes corruption, deceit and lies can be as organic as flesh and blood.
What is it about modern middle-class life that makes it so hard to get out of bed in the morning and get to sleep at night? Knowing we have the basics for survival, and then some, and still finding reason to complain?