Angel

I want to see too much. I want to see everything there is to see and I want to feel all there is to feel. I don’t want to go to heaven. Heaven is a place of half hearted emotions, everything just comfortable and numb. I don’t want to be comfortable. I want to be on fire, in ice. I want to bleed to death and be taken to the highest points of ecstasy. I want everything. What will a cloud feel like should I lean out of a light aircraft at five miles high and trail my fingers through it? Will it be like an angel’s wing? What would the wind be like? I will undo my safety straps and tumble down head first. Throw out your arms. This is real flying.

Every day I wish for more. I am not satisfied with this half arsed existence. This scope of normality. Every day the same journey by train, watching the other commuters nod off or stare out of the window. Man on the phone natters away to his mate. I want to drive the little red hammer you break glass with in an emergency through his skull. I want to see the look in his eyes when he dies. His blood spattered on my face. I don’t. I trudge through the streets I know so well I could travel with my eyes closed. I know the shops, the texture of the kerb under my heel, the uneven ridges of badly set paving slabs. Only the scaffold outside one shop is new. The faces are all the same. They are not the same people, but I do not see them. I am so far gone into apathy I wouldn’t recognise my own mother as I walk to work.

I had a girlfriend once who liked to sit on the roof of her flat and watch the sunrise. Not sunsets, she said that they were dull and boring. She only liked the dawn. For the three months we were together she forced me to sit and watch the sun with her every day. I don’t like heights; the thought of hitting the ground scares me. All through the winter we watched dawns we couldn’t see for cloud and mist and rain. I caught hypothermia and she dumped me.

I go to work with cotton wool jammed in my ears. Everything that is said is muffled. It’s like that feeling you get after a properly loud concert, but without the fading euphoria of being alive. Even if it was only for a moment. I look at these teenagers, waiting outside the clubs all done up in black or glitter and frills, shrieking, shouting, singing. I watch them stagger out afterwards, drunk on noise. And there is a light in their eyes I’ve never seen. I feel like there is this great big party going on and I’m just standing on the sidelines missing it. Too scared to jump. Maybe I’ve haven’t been alive for my entire life.

I watch the approaching train and wonder what would happen if I threw myself in front of it. I cam imagine the scene, business men arriving and cursing my corpse for delaying their journey home. Poor things. Wife and kids will have to wait. Maybe you won’t have time for your mistress tonight. I am shivering in the cold of my imagined death. The boy next to me offers me a drag on his cigarette. He says I look tired. I can’t be tired, I haven’t woken up yet.

I’m living in a bubble, a shell devoid of the song of the sea or the breath of life. I am contained in a padded universe where I can’t get hurt, where I can’t feel anything. No pain, no joy. All I get is this warm contended feeling in the pit of my stomach. I can’t even find euphoria in touching myself. Put your feet in slippers and sit in the saggy armchair your grandfather occupied and your father too and all the past relatives. Be comfortable with a wife and a child. Sit in the mediocre job that pays well. Never forget your mortgage. But I want blood and sweat and tears of pleasure. I want to break out and snag my elbow on a rusty nail. I want to cut myself on a sharp of broken glass. Where is the scent of sex?

Once I had a boyfriend who would only make love in the morning. Seven until ten, that was my gap, and never on a Sunday. He wasn’t religious, but he said it was wrong. On a Sunday both God and the Devil can see you. I didn’t care if the whole world saw us as him pulled me down onto him. My body would go into over drive every morning, whether I was with him or not. I was too full of lust to care about intangible parent figures. All I wanted was my name in his voice.

A Friday night came when I began to annoy myself. Sitting in front of the TV, five hundred channels that might have well as been playing the same thing for all the attention I could pay them. It was all rubbish. I wondered why a fat woman was urging me that greed was a sin, and that I should give all my money to starving African children. I got up, got dressed and left the house.

The club was thronging. Black leather, big boots, eyeliner and slick straight hair. All these moving twisting bodies in a sea of sweat and alcohol. The lights playing havoc with my distance perception. Beautiful faces, gorgeous bodies. I got myself lost in the music and the crowd, dancing like it was the end of the world. Ended up in the disabled toilets with some girl kissing me, all black glitter and skin tight PVC. She said her name was Scarlet. Who was I?

Angel.

She falls about giggling, kneeling down and opening my clothes. I never saw her again after that night.

I took to going to clubs often, buying more and more expensive and outlandish clothes, constantly cutting and dying my hair. I became something of a celebrity. When your popular everyone wants to be your friend. But I started to become content with that too. So pile on the drugs and the alcohol, take yourself to the extremes. More and more varied sex to louder and harder music. Bring it into your home like a whirlwind. Spring clean your soul. It wasn’t enough.

I met a guy whose arms were dark on the insides. He showed me all the lovely parallel lines that made up his ever changing body modification. The ultimate release. Tried it, liked it, kept going. Drive yourself faster and faster, shoot up, get high, drink whiskey until your numb with pleasure and drive the point of a knife under your skin. Drink your own blood. I did it with my so called friends and we drunk of each other. Such a high. Room full of bodies like an orgy. All sharing the same knife.

I didn’t have a job anymore. I was a creature of the dark, this was my day. Harsh lights of the night time places, hang around and let someone else find you. Sex in back rooms and cars with complete strangers. Get high, get hit and get out. The world is one big drug habit. Too many things became habit and lost their fun. I needed something new. What was there left?

I picked up hitchhikers, fucked them over and stole their money. Got guys in clubs drunk or stoned and left them in other peoples houses. I’d walk across the road with my eyes closed. Bleeding was still good, it didn’t lose its edge. More and more blood, longer and deeper cuts, drunk on absinthe and high on acid. Seeing strange things. Good things. I sat on the train and got stared at. I stared back with hollow eyes. I pity their disaffected lonely lives. Fools.

This girl and I shot up everything in the house then drank whatever we could find, mixing it with wine. I got into the bath and she brought me a knife, sitting over my kissing my chest. I sliced the base of my neck and she laps up my blood. Drive the knife into my wrist and she puts that in her mouth too. Then the world is fading. It’s all gone fuzzy and I realize to late that I cut too deep this time. My life is flowing out of me. The last thing I hear are her screams.