decaying sunflower

Rotten petals fall to the ground below you, accompanied by a ceaseless dripping. You try to lose yourself in it — the repeating pattern of sounds, coming at equal intervals, as a perpetual cycle and a reminder that you are in a space apart — it helps ground you into the unreality you find yourself in. You tilt your head downwards and the dripping intensifies, decaying flowers fall over your eyes. Behind them, you see the apparition. It flickers in and out of existence, its movements are disrupted and uneven. You keep drifting elsewhere but the steady reverberations of droplets bring you back to the present moment, and the apparition stood before you — light emanating from its see-through limbs — doesn’t let you slip back into the void. You unfold your hand forward to touch it, but it passes right through. The corners of your unreality bend and shatter into debris of your undying dreams. 

Strange liquid continues oozing from your mind, a ringing builds up in your ears, behind your eyes, inside your skull. You bring your hand to where your hair should be and the skin covering your scalp. Thorns pierce into it, yet you continue moving deeper. Stems of decomposed flowers, their thorns still sharp enough to etch a tapestry of scars onto your hands and arms as you plunge them further into your open skull. You touch the soft tissue of your brain. The ringing becomes excruciating. 

You look for solace in the apparition as it approaches. Light radiating all around it, it brings its hands towards you like sun’s rays upon your fallen and decayed leaves. For mere moments, it lets you forget that you are rotting; whatever parts of you had not withered away are reminded of what it’s like to be alive. The apparition moves closer, its light gently touches on your skin, pushing your hand further down into the opening in your skull. Your fingers touch on something moist and warm — a wormlike being brushes past you, spirals between your fingers and vanishes deeper into your psyche. Your worldview drowns in the ringing, the edges of your unreality crack, forming bruises that reach all the way to the center of your vision. Panicked, you glance at the apparition, finding its face in front of yours, its eyes glimmering with a certain menace. You feel it carve its body into your mind. It draws its own form. Faint whispers materialise in the periphery of your vision and grow louder with the apparition’s approach. It is hard to tell what they are a product of. The graveyard of flowers growing from the rot inside of you — you used to hear their dying cries as they wilted before ever seeing the sun. The voices of the inhabitants of your mind, their echoes resound inside of you and get so muddled up together you can’t tell who’s speaking and if anyone is anymore; or if their voices are no different than light of long dead stars. 

The apparition looks you in the eyes, waiting for a sign of recognition. You know full well who it is and what it wants from you. You don’t know why it came for you or why it took that form. You don’t know if it's saving you or only sending you further in your descent into insanity. It’s not supposed to be real, you whisper to yourself. You watch as the apparition leans in front of your face; all you see is sunlight behind the wilted petals. It reaches for the rotten flowers, its light cut by the thorns as it lifts the flowers from your face. You look right into it, you drown in it, you forget all that you are and have ever been. It feels like a drug, but the low hits you way before the high has the opportunity to dissipate.

Pressure builds up behind your eye as the parasite crawls out of your eye socket. It slithers down your cheek leaving a blood trail behind itself, having devoured whatever was left of you. The apparition wipes away your tears of blood. You want to pull the parasite out, but you get too lost in the apparition’s presence. Light illuminating your face, the gentle warmth of its fingertips on your decaying skin. You wonder if it notices that you are no longer fully living.

And still, you keep reminding yourself that it is not real. You must not lose yourself in its unreal, nonexistent love. You grab onto the parasite and begin pulling it out of your brain. The ringing grows louder, long beyond unbearable, and yet, it doesn’t stop you. The apparition quivers vehemently in and out of reality, its light hurting you more and more each time it comes back. You almost consider letting the parasite find its way back into your brain, make a home inside of there and never leave. Maybe then you will feel its unreal love for you again. You watch the apparition’s face contort into a strange expression of anger and contempt. The ringing sends you spiralling and your mind feels like it will collapse in on itself. You notice yourself wondering if the parasite loves you, as you keep pulling its long body out of your mind, feeling it glide past each crevice of your brain, feeling reality crack wide open and contort in every direction, the ringing almost blinding you now, drowning out the dripping from your skull and all the remnants of voices that have inhabited your mind since you were a child. You pull the parasite’s body back into your eye socket and out through your brain. 

It lays in your hands like a red string. You wonder if it connects you and the apparition in some way. A real presence of an imaginary being. Reality bends in unnatural ways and the pain spreads beyond your body. The apparition steps away, its blinking light hushes, making its flames appear faded. Your body feels like it’s dying. You try to bring yourself back, focusing on the repeating noise of the trickling fluid coming out of your own mind. You cry tears of blood and stare at the apparition, trying to catch its glances, begging for it to look your way, as you are crouched on the floor, blood trailing down your cheeks, cerebrospinal fluid oozing out of your skull, decaying flowers sprouting from your mind — a demonstration of your rot and an endless reminder that you cannot hide your decay. They see it, they look into your eyes and see that you are all rotten. The apparition sees it too, that’s why it looks at you with such contempt. 

You reach your arms towards the apparition, how a child would reach for its mother and you beg for saving. It looks back at you absently, as if it doesn’t even recognise who you are, and in its stare you catch a glimpse of that same hatred you saw before. Its flames extend into the cracks of your unreality and seep into a place beyond yourself. You watch the apparition as it abandons you and wish for the return of that unreality in which you felt it lift the wilted petals away from your face, in which you looked at each other and saw each other, in which you thought its light might un-wilt your rotten flowers and turn your decaying flesh to life again. 

I remember trying to see my own breath. It was cold out, and upon each exhale I could observe beautiful patterns in the air. But then again, was any of it even real? And would it matter if it was or wasn’t? I exhale now, but the patterns are too far down the memory lane for me to see them clearly. 

I remember seeing fractals when I closed my eyes. Endless iterations of the same pattern onwards till forever, and maybe somewhere within it nothing ever changes. If you are a fractal, do you perceive your own growth as change? You cannot change since you are the same pattern repeating over and over again, but something must feel different still, right? With your infinite complexity, can you really remain the same forever? Even within the fog, within its obscure glow, everything changes, transfigures. I kept looking at the patterns as they transformed before my eyes into something unrecognisable but all the same as before. I never changed and I was always changing. The memories fade within the haze and I forget my own fractal patterns. 

I remember fog. 

also warning for my friends : i am doing okay, i wrote this about the time when i was 13 and well... not doing okay. so anyway, here goes something.

Distant chatter. The voices are indiscernible. Neither in their content, nor in their location. The space you are in is tight and the walls feel like they are closing in on you. Suffocating. Where is everyone? They are busy, eating. You cry into your arms, while sitting on a closed toilet seat. Is there blood on the floor? Or is just a mirage? Wishful thinking? Your eyes are weary and you shiver slightly. Did the air already escape your lungs? Is this future fast approaching? Real comfort is a quality of the distant past, might as well give up, lie down on the cold, white tiles, let the red of your dying life-force stain the white tiles, so as to not lose your sanity from the lack of colour in this entirely white room. You are not a prisoner. 

But of course you are. This body is not your home. The chatter is in an unfamiliar language. The people out there, who are busy eating, talking, living, are not your friends. You are locked up within the confines of these four white walls. Sure, by your own free will, but you are a prisoner no less. Freedom awaits. Come on, suck your tears back up, bandage that bloodied arm and forth we go. But no, you won’t do that. They haven’t eaten you yet. 

The confine feels safe, does it not? You are a wonderful host if you believe that. You put a tapeworm inside your intestine and it inhabits your body like a veritable home. Is that so much to ask for? A home? The white walls of the bathroom stall will do just fine. Distant chatter. They are busy, eating. Your sandwich lies in the bathroom bin. Six almonds for the tapeworm and nothing for you. If you are starving the suffering is real, and not a prison the door of which you can easily unlock with your own two hands that lay heavy on your thighs. It feels like the world transforms every time you blink your eyes. Last you remember you had a home, and now every summer you come back to that place it grows and changes without you, without your permission or even your scrutiny. Your body has been changing too. You’ve grown utterly unrecognisable. Maybe if you don’t eat, the big ugly face with arrows will stop moving, and gently look at you, and be like, hey, we can wait, we don’t need to move so fast, we can go back even. But you don’t want that, do you? There is nothing you want. You don’t want change or stability, you do not want to die, or even to simply cease to exist. There is exactly nothing in this whole wide world you could possibly want. And yet you cry, and scream into the void about how you want to come back home, because as long as you want something, not everything is hopeless. Spoiler, there is no home and you will never come back there, or even if you do, all rooms will be mere ghosts of their former selves and everyone you find there will be either dead or changed or worse, forgotten. 

The arrows march on, and yet, through the sheer repetition of the same presence within the same space at the same hour of every day this moment transfigures into a strange new form of existence that does not appear to possess an end or to ever have had a beginning. You sit there, crying. Sad music in your headphones, spoken poetry about suicide, unrequited love, loneliness, depression and so on. It feels ugly to make ending it all seem so easy. Everyone fears death, all the time, but when it comes to actually taking your fate into your hands, dying doesn’t come as easy as you believed it would. There is a long way till you reach the fingertips of death and even longer till you get to fall into its cold, welcoming arms. The moments feel disconsolate. There is no one to call for help. They are busy, eating. Rest now, the end is near, soon you can give into the distant, peaceful feeling, fall into it and never stop falling. You close your eyes and try to imagine how it would feel to fall, how it would feel when your skull would crack open and everything that allows you to experience and feel and think would spill out like an ugly soup. 

In your isolation, you begin to talk, first quiet whispers, then real conversation. Are you talking to yourself? Or to the tapeworm that hums low, eerie melodies to occupy all the empty space? It’s a beautiful melody, is it not? The little creatures of the earth hum the eerie tune when they devour whatever is left of your withering body. A hole dug out in the earth on a gloomy day in the last days of winter does not feel so different from the four walls of the bathroom stall. Tight, constricted space. You will lose something dear to you in this space, and even if you get it back, something will always be missing. You will die. But you won’t die. Don’t worry, there is nothing you should fear. It is the end of winter. Spring is soon approaching. 

Red lines. Spilled blood. A wish to be a sacrifice. Why don’t you make use of your flesh? It is the only thing you own, and even that feels so unwanted. You bring your bloodied arm to your mouth and taste it. You enjoy bleeding. Panic and peace. Your mind fractures, you are like a broken mirror. Seven years of bad luck. You are thirteen, you will have to wait till twenty to feel okay again, if you even make it that far. You don’t believe you will make it till this night with the rate at which the red liquid leaves your body. You, in the bathroom of your house that does not and will never feel like home. Ghosts roam this place, and while over the years of inhabiting a house filled with ghosts and being a ghost yourself, you will grow accustomed to their presence and not be frightened by them anymore, they used to instil such fear in you as a child. It seemed the whole building was possessed by a dark, gloomy presence that would afflict everyone who dared enter this house. You are in the bathroom on the second floor. There is a shower that shattered several months ago, but has since been fixed. You don’t know why it shattered, but you remember that on the day it did you were very happy. You ran straight to your room, passing by the bathroom. You wish you would’ve looked inside, but you didn’t, you went straight to your room and giggled happily in bed. You don’t remember why you were happy that day, it is not the point of the story anymore. And then you found out the shower was all broken, little pieces of glass on the floor. And suddenly it felt like your fault, because you didn’t look in, didn’t check if it was this way when you arrived. Stupid shower, stupid little pieces of glass. But you did tell yourself, it was your fault, because you let yourself be happy, for the first time in this horrid, alien place. And you hadn’t been happy afterwards, be it by your own free will, or by the will of some higher power, some kind of fate you don’t even believe in. Stupid broken pieces of glass. But don’t get too lost in the past now. Your arm is bleeding. Better do something about it. 

Panic. You look through the bathroom cupboard for a bandage and some alcohol to disinfect the wound. It is your wound. The only part of your body that you do not despise. You do not find alcohol, you find a mouthwash. That has alcohol in it, right? Your mind is clouded, foggy and fragmented. You take lots of toilet paper and pour the mouthwash over it, spilling half of it on the bathroom floor. You apply the wet paper to your arm, and exhale all the fog that sat within your lungs, as the pain, the sheer agony grows larger than life itself. You cry. You love the pain. You hold your arm tightly and sit back down on the toilet seat. Distant chatter. They are busy, eating. It is lunch break and you cry in a bathroom stall. It is a beautiful sunset and you have buried your body in a forest. You hear music. Beautiful, eerie melody sung by the little creatures of the earth as they devour your flesh. You smile. They sing this song for you as you take your final breath. Inhale and exhale all the fog that had been suffocating you for years. You can let go now. You are falling. There is nothing you need to hold onto anymore. The worms and maggots are grateful for your sacrifice. Peace. 

The cuts are smaller than you remember them when you lift up the toilet paper that you held tightly to your arm. You thought you would surely need stitching, but now they look like all your other red scars. You are not in the same reality you were in moments ago. Something changed. You died. But you didn’t die. You continue holding your arm and you cry. You haven’t felt this alone in a while. The melody stopped. The tapeworm died. You thought something would happen. Death — the ultimate orgasm. You would reach a pic, feel the explosion grander than those of dying stars, the whole universe would detonate and then — nothingness. But it didn’t happen this way. You are sitting in the bathroom on a closed toilet seat, holding toilet paper covered in mouthwash to your arm, and crying to the music playing in your headphones. A song that feels like rain. The bleeding ceases. The worms eat your heart. The pulse stops. Inhale and exhale. Deep breaths. In and out. Yes, good. Keep breathing. In and out. Yes, yes, that’s good. Keep going. Big inhale. And exhale. Good, good. Here, hold my hand. You’re doing so good. Inhale and exhale. In and out. Deep breath in. Hold it. And… let it all out. That’s good. You’re okay. I’m here. You’re not alone anymore. 

Your body feels cold and lifeless. Distant screams. She died. It’s not real though. What is real is you here, sitting in the bathroom stall while everyone is having lunch. Repetition of the same pattern, days on end. You here, lying in the earth, consumed, devoured. Your body — sustenance. You are decomposing now. You are in the bathroom on the second floor of the house inhabited by ghosts, sitting on the toilet seat, taking deep breaths. You are not alone anymore, and you never will be again. Your skin is turning purple, like that of a corpse. You feel like a ghost, see-through and insipid. The blood on your arm is drying. The hand that held you, has now penetrated your mind and made a home inside your imagined world. You hug your knees to your chest and sit for a while. You turn off the music and close your eyes. What on earth just happened? 

What terrible fate had befallen this earth in the time of my birth? The world that stood before me was deceased. Whatever humanity existed within it was now certainly gone. Behind the murmur of the wind, I could hear how the grasses howled in pain. In all the time I remained completely still, the moon had risen and set, the sun ventured in the sky, awkwardly. First it laughed, then cried, then it begged, the pain too overwhelming even for the sun to bear. And then it stood still, right in the centre of the sky, hungover, exhausted, empty. 

I looked into the sun till my eyes began to hurt and water. Tiredness. Cold. I thought I could feel the sun shiver, sense the goosebumps on its surface. I wished I could help it. Hand it a blanket. Tuck it into bed. Turn off the light. Let it rest. 

We remained unmoving, together. A blood drinking butterfly and the sun. You are supposed to burn me. Why does fulfilling your prophecy bring you such agony. Is destroying me not what you do. Is it not written into your very nature. 

The sun was merciful. It was kind. I did not burn. 

Days passed this way. The flowers around me were rotten. The trees had lost their minds in the avalanche of death and decay. I tried communicating with them, but they wouldn’t answer my calls. Whatever remnants of soul were still in them surely had become paralysed by pain, just as the grasses and the rivers and the seas. The whole world stopped for days, and then months and then entire years, while the earth kept on spinning. 

A fallen leaf lay on the surface of the dying planet. Brown and crusted. The leaf appeared to possess dark, black eyes. As the eyes glided over their surroundings, investigating the reality they were born into, two antennae emerged from below the leaf. The body of the creature twitched and suddenly what seemed to be a dried, lifeless leaf began to look like two wings. The moth-like creature raised it head and soared into the sky, adjusting to the odd movements of its body, distracted by the metamorphosis of the earth. 

It was then that I found myself flying over this decomposing, decaying, confusing world that I was born into. 

It was a strange experience. I had never been able to fly, but it was my destiny, having transformed into the butterfly I was always fated to be. The hunger for blood was driving a dagger into my mind, and all the pain I felt was so strong I believed I was losing my sanity. I was awfully disoriented when I began my ascent, unable to grasp how much time had passed since the moment of my birth till I finally found the courage to move. Perhaps it had been hours, perhaps whole years had passed while I stood completely motionless, melting into this estranged world, becoming one with nature and feeling its pain as if it were mine to bear. I will never forget their cries. 

The ground below was covered in dust that shined under the rays of the intoxicated sun. The boreal forest which I knew, which was my home and the essence of all aliveness appeared to be a graveyard. The trees did not move in the wind, nor reflect the sun’s light.  But from behind the trees and from below the ground, I began to hear a sound, like a heartbeat. It was… hurting. But it was alive. 

I flew in search of the sound, trying to listen in, my flight turning into a maddening effort to find the source of blood. The starvation was driving me insane; I began to believe the sound was coming from within me and then from outer space, travelling way faster than was possible. Then I thought the sound was coming from other solar systems, other galaxies, other universes. And then, I believed the sound was coming from my own imagination. A fever dream, driven by a hunger way grander than my moth body could handle. A god-like yearning to devour. 

Yet, no matter how much I believed I was losing my mind, the sound kept getting louder. I knew I was moving in the right direction. The little blood-thirsty moth kept flapping its wings into plights of unbearable exhaustion, but it knew it couldn’t stop. It could not lose the heartbeat. The heartbeat was the most important thing it ever knew. The moth was a hungry, frightened child and the heartbeat was the mother that would soothe its aching soul. It must find it. It must find its mother and it must feed on her heart. 

The sound guided me to a crater that extended for miles. The surface of the earth around it was cracked and those cracks used to be filled with blood that had all but dried out. It bled. 

I knew this was the place, this is where I would find it, this was my salvation. I continued flying, straight into the crater. The darkness before my eyes terrified me. I had always been scared of the dark. But the heartbeat was so loud now, I could hear it ring within my own body, inside every fibre of my flesh. The sound was my guiding light. I trusted it. In this decayed world, it was the only thing that made me feel safe. I wanted to fall into it, to cry in its arms, to love it, to eat it, to consume it, to bathe in its love, to feel its warmth and care, to devour it until there is nothing left. 

I continued my descent into the crater when the first sight of light appeared. A pulsing red, like a continuation of the streaming blood. The same heartbeat rang all throughout the shining river. The same movement as the earth’s spinning, the same timbre as the howls of the dying forest.

The light grew brighter and warmer. Only then did I realise how cold I had been, how drained of life force. I needed saving. I was a crying baby, abandoned on a dying earth and I needed saving. The glow of the pulsing blood was my lifeline. It was my love and it was the meaning of my life. It was my saviour and it was my mother, it was God and the universe in liquid form. 

I continued moving closer till everything around me was shining, a beautiful ruby light. At the centre of the crater lay a comet, like a fallen angel, a dying star. It bled. Incapacitated by my hunger, I flew straight to it and began to drink. 

Gulping down the comet’s blood for what seemed like hours, I felt its life, its journey and its pain, its death and its rebirth. 

The grasses cried when the comet crashed onto the surface of the earth. In its own death, it was born, and its own birth it died. It yearned for a home, which it imagined existed on the sun which warmed the comet during its voyage. The warmth was a home that it would never return to. The comet crashed onto the earth and destroyed humanity. The moon burned in red flames and the sun was drunk as it crossed the horizon. And when the darkness came after the burning blood red sunset, the whole world was deceased. 

The melody is simultaneously growing clearer and more distant. You begin to hear the repetition of the same pattern. Over and over again. 

With the melody ringing all throughout you, piece by piece, it comes back to you, the recollection of everything that happened, the disappearance and disintegration of your human body. 

Who are you? What are you? 

The panic grows more incessant, as you fail to grasp your own hands or hold your own flesh. The panic seeps into your zone of awareness in the same way water fills the lungs of a drowning person. There is an undeniable peace and clearance to the feeling, and a maddening effort of your body to fight for its life. You give up before your flesh does. It’s written into the very structure of your flesh. The panic. The agony. If it were not so, you would’ve accepted your fate with a kind understanding, and fallen into the soft embrace of death, rather than resist the arms that want nothing but to hold you. The panic extracts the air from your lungs post-factum. You have already died. 

Your body is no more, and so are your lungs. The memories return as a strange fever dream. You begin to question if any of it was real, and why can you still feel and think. Behind it all, you remember the melody. It was always there, playing over and over again. The repetition of the same pattern, growing larger and smaller, clearer and fainter. They sing to you. 

You remember how it felt being put into the ground. You were dead, and yet you felt fear. Every single part of you trembled with a fearful agony, each of your cells begged to be held. Something of the experience reminded you of your first years of childhood. How it felt to be undifferentiated, your body and mind one with everything that enters your field of awareness. Those were moment filled with fear, but as you grew older and more accustomed, the fear subsided, but never left. You understand something now, this fear defined the very structure of your existence. 

And as the recollections become clearer, you come to the understanding that the fear preceded your fleshy existences, and perhaps it was with you since the very genesis of the universe. This is a reality built upon fear. No, fear isn’t the right word. There is no word to describe the feeling. As your memories become clearer, they become less and less tangible, more ineffable and indescribable. Words have such limited potential in them. You understand the experience now. No amount of words could relay the melody that you hear. 

And yet, your rumblings continue, you try your best to make sense of what happened. Words, after all, have served you numerous times, when it felt like all else is ungraspable. You held onto the letters, and so you try your best to do so again, when there is nothing else that you can hold. You are unable to hold. What a pleasure it was to hold and be held, you think. 

The memories of the posthumous journey of your body returning, you realise that your flesh yearned to be put into the ground. You fooled nature itself and lived too long; despite the lies you told yourself, your body felt the pull of the earth. The dreams concluding your human existence were filled with scenes of consumption, of devourance. Your flesh had begged to be eaten, and you refused its calls. 

Decomposing felt heavenly, becoming one with all. A journey back in time, the backwards experience of infant development, the reintegration of a reality where you are part of loving whole. There is love in consumption. Maggots eating you is a form of love. Mould growing from the remainder of your flesh is a form of love. Your gut bacteria, who you have hosted for decades, actively helping the earth take you home is an act of love. You understand it now. You feel love, in a way you’ve never felt it before. Love permeates the decomposition experience, and makes you feel like you’re in heaven. 

You feel grateful. Only now do you understand the purpose, the meaning. To feed. The basic facts of life feel transcendent to you. You worship the worms that crawl in you, your nutrients sustaining their very existence. All love grows out of the original, primal love that we all feel. The love of the mother. We spend our lives longing for the feeling of motherly love, becoming differentiated from all and never finding that all-encompassing, life sustaining form of love. Praying to god and worshipping deities, believing in an everything is one universe where we are all interconnected. All to feel that love. And then we die. And we become it. And it is the greatest feeling. 

You are mother, you are god, you are the universe, you are sustenance and the meaning of life. 

You expand your gratefulness to the bacteria that lived in you, as they actively help your soul move onto its next destination. Are they singing? Everything sings. A melody of rot and hunger. The hunger is in integral part of life. You are starving. You have been starving since the very dawn of existence. You succumb to the crawling rot, you feel scared, but at peace. 

Your form transfigures through the act of devourance itself. Your soul splits up. Bits and pieces of 'you' journey through the earth. You become formless, fragmented, fractured. Words and memories escape you now. The transfiguration of the body moving towards a transfiguration of the soul. The melody grows louder. You can hear it ringing through you, inside of you. You are part of it now. You begin to sing too. And upon signing, you exhale the fear and the hunger. They form a fractal pattern, infinite iterations of the basis of the universe. Fear and hunger. Rot and decay. Life is defined by its ability to decompose. You are decomposing, you were alive. You know it now. For fact. It is part of your very essence. You were alive. You are alive.