STEVEN DUPLIJ

CRAMPED IN TIME

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          Sleepless night. On the ceiling—other people’s shadows. I’m wriggling. On the single in the solitary.
         What’s eating me? Her? Disease? Of the soul? My body?
         I don’t know, but everyone gets the same. Pictures . . . Memories . . . I can’t sleep.
         In this horror of images. Pictures. They’re all over the place. Childhood. Relatives. All that is not now. Not her and can no longer live and help me survive.
I don’t know what to do with them. In myself, and on the walls. They are waiting for me. Because they don’t exist, I am the only one among them here. Forgotten by them, as if by accident. To go in for a moment, and not to come out. Not to come back. How?
         This world . . . It’s always been like this.
         Why do I need it? Everything is a lie. A game. Empty texts. The wrong images. Mocking reality. Everything is wrong. Everything is not mine. And no one’s.
         Scolding out loud. To distance myself. No one will hear. But even if they don’t...Nonsense. They are all those. Aliens. What can they understand? Only the intonation.
         A tear. A chill. No. I doubt that as well.
         Again. My tongue is my salvation. I may be decent. I don’t care. No one needs anyone. Not here. Not there. It helps. Get over it.
         Everything that’s piled up. It hasn’t come true. Scattered. Forgotten.
         Damn paper. It conveys so little. Even the seeming.
         Where is the pain and suffering? Where are my feelings now?
         It’s white and that’s all. Like my consciousness during this night.
         What is wrong with her?
         Laughing, blackening, she suddenly stops. And I, frozen, can’t even walk half an hour in her. The cramp of time. The languor of space. And myself.
         Where is the promised infinity? Where is non-existence? Only eternal and spicy perishables: everyday life, idleness, vices, roles.
         What to write? To whom? Why? Who will read it?
         Except me, and only at the moment of creation. What is written is alienated from me. Immediately. The real lines are no longer mine. They belong to my not-me, which is not here. But where?
         What happens when you’re not in you? It is so difficult. The whole world is yours. It’s rejection in return.
         Why do I need all of it? Illusion. A quantum. Mine, untouchable. For them. For him. For me. For cardboard skyscrapers of nothingness. Chilling everything, and cooling.
         All around, a suffocating mixture. Of love and hate. Sincerity and the spectacle of the sincere.
         How to understand what is where? How to crystallize what I will not let fall?
         The impenetrable wall. What to say into it, if it reflects everything, distorting.
No, I do not put my hands together. I press them together. Until they crunch. Until they are numb. To the truth.
         This is different. Maybe the opposite.
         Outside the opaque window, a rainy wind. Day or night, no one to ask. There’s no one to ask. There’s no time.

                                          Original Russian: https://proza.ru/2012/01/14/1719

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