"...With A Broken Smile"

It was with a broken smile that I abandoned my youth in an instant; the same twisted Cheshire grin that has accompanied each cackle of insanity the bereavement has drawn through the tepid mesh of my soul.

The air was a sticky fog of mildew, trapping the vapors of innocence in a lump at the back of my throat. Each tortured breath was an exercise in asphyxiation; my lungs rejecting the poisonous air in futile efforts of avoidance.

It was a time of reckoning, unrelenting to the continuous stream of half-hearted prayers my sacrilegious mouth woke to find tumbling forth. Faith can burn as the fuel, igniting torrents of energy to power the machines that we have been conditioned to believe our humanity makes us; that every flinch is an error, that every moment of reflection is an omen reflecting weakness.
Faith is a homeless vagabond within the confines of my mind, but it remains loyal and homesick, never finding the will, or losing the pity, to leave behind the pockmarked battlefield that I call my consciousness.

The decision was made in an instant, flashing subliminally in the panoramic movie being filmed with my eyes. Time was not made available for logical scrutinizing; my direction was preordained in the pathway the electrical current representing the answer traveled through the lattice of lies from which I am constructed.

That any answer can maneuver through the labyrinth of grey cells without sliding into a murky abyss is in itself a miracle; miraculous benevolence being the last remaining refuge of a destitute intellect.

Swaths of color blended together as they spun through my vision, tempting me with the possibilities of infinite regression, dancing to the rhythmic sway of time.

The landscape at once became surreal, melding a universe of thoughts into a palette to be digested without contemplation. Each instance hung from the Heavens a tapestry of beauty; vibrant as if containing every drip of color my eyes could absorb in a lifetime.

These tapestries, as they were redrawn with every crimson-stained interruption, embodied the sins and sacrifices repressed to the furthest recesses.

The colors bled from the sky, an acid wash of reality to the fantasy I was enraptured by.

Monoliths of slate sprung from the barren ground, a perverse and corrupted forest of ennui.

The air was saturated with the stench of bland; cutting through my lungs to release neophyte despair into my already darkening bloodstream.

My smile, at least what lingering remnants could be classified as such, was confiscated as a reminder of the slow death I was to incur.

The aura was toxic; living became a poison, and innocence lost proved for naught.

It was with a broken smile that I abandoned my youth in an instant; the same twisted Cheshire grin a contorted byproduct of a flash of reality striking from the sky, driving the truths of life to my very core, leaving me an empty shell in search of reason, in search of anything to fill the ache.

Christopher M Colavito