The Stagnant

YOU HAVE been caught running in circles. The scenery whips past you, always moving but never really changing. Every inch disappears, merging with the sky above you – a consistent reminder that you are infinitesimal. Muscles burn in the Stagnant created by their movement, they scream for relief; maybe the clouded sky will have mercy on you and relinquish some of the pent up pressure in your chest. Or maybe it will turn its presence against you, cooling for a moment before freezing you the next.

There is no give to the running. The memory of Start was lost and the knowledge that Finish is growing near has never really been given. So you’re stuck running in the In Between, caught up in the simple will to keep going. You must keep going. Determination refuses you any inclination of a halt. You can’t speed up to beat time to the finish line, can’t retrieve the End your brain tells you it needs when muscles are strained and heavy. And you can’t slow down, not when everything you fear is right behind you, snapping at your heals – clawed hands with poison tipped nails, reaching to sink into your flesh and rip you apart. So you keep twisting and turning, never able to break the path your feet have worn into the earth like some horrid scar. Nothing eases the racing – the racing of your shattered heart, the snapping jaws of your fears.

The sun changes, slipping beneath the horizon, allowing the moon a chance to watch, but then she too grows weary of the constant Nothing you have bruised into the world.

The ground beneath you grows slick with its bleeding and you stumble, nearly choked to death on the terror of your fears gaining a hold on you. You lose count of how many times your balance has been compromised. The In Between remains perched ahead of you, content to keep you tripping, to keep you moving. After awhile the pace becomes second nature, the beat of your feet over a world now flood with your tears becomes a toon you can navigate by. You know you’ve fooled yourself, convinced yourself that if you only keep going, eventually the Finish will find you and it will all make sense. For a time, you believe this wholeheartedly. For a time, running is all you know. All you need.

You no longer remember what set you into flight in the first place. All you can process is that the running, even from the fear, numbs the ache that became present after the thing you call your heart was decimated. You’ve tried to put it back together but running was easier – doses of morphine cushioning the jagged pieces.

You don’t argue. You think. You run. The excuses drop heavily to the ground, opening voids that could easily grab you on your next pass. But there is no way you can explain to those who sometimes run beside you that you can’t go to Finish and you can’t go back to Start. It begins as a dawning realization, almost a hope at first, that Finish is intimately connected with Start. The hope sours when the only path to Finish is the facing of memories you can’t (will not) acknowledge. You forgot how to in all of the running. So desperate were you to forget them that you trampled them into the earth where they became fossils, waiting under the blood and the tears and the bruises. And you can’t stop to excavate them, not with everything right there clamping teeth at your heels should you slow.

So you don’t. You just keep going. You are out of breath, bleeding, chest caving in under the pressure of the world without a heart to keep it solid, and lungs attempting to do the heart’s job by filling with blood so that your chest doesn’t crumple into the empty space. After months, that fight echoes so loudly, braiding into your strangled breaths, blurring it into something unidentifiable that sometimes fills up the voids created by the Stagnant you now operate within.

You have lost your beat; lost it in the constantness of thinking, of running. You dropped it in one of the Nothings, allowing it to be consumed by the knowing that you can’t stop, you can’t slow down less the water you’ve been fleeing over swallows you whole. The moment you stop, the moment you still, the surface tension will give and you’ll be drowned by all the things you fear facing. And there are a great many fears to steal the little breath that remains in your lungs.

You are afraid.

No longer can you feel the jagged edges of your heart. You can no longer feel the spikes of pain caused by the little that still inspires you. You fear you have lost it too. Or maybe it has abandoned you, tired of its fractured state, no more able to keep up with your pace than you yourself can. Is that what moved you? The emptiness? Is the stagnant so much better than the ghosts that came with battered walls? You wonder if the terror of touch was the mind behind the creation of the In Between that has ensnared you. You know you’ve fallen, immersed yourself in the world behind the walls you erected to keep The Others out. You’re the only familiar, the only safety you think you can be offered. Is this why the path circles? Is this why your beat, your heart has left you? Can’t it see… you had no other choice; you’re tired too – so excruciatingly exhausted past your own endurance.

One day you’ve weakened and a keening clatters up your throat, echoes out into the Nothingness where it bursts open the Stagnant into a wound of stars. You can only beg now, pleading with anything, anyone to tell you how to stop, to tell you how to breathe, because you don’t know how. You realize the slip up, attempt to clamp your hands over your mouth to keep the hysteria trapped in your breast, but it’s been given form and refuses to relent.

Suddenly your legs stop as you fight your own will, trying to tame it into something manageable, to bend the Stagnant back around yourself. But its open to the world now, leaving you exposed. You crumple to the blood and the tears; maybe you’re even bowing down to the fear that’s kept you moving.

Could this be the end you have been searching for? Had your path finally broken? For some reason you thought there would be more peace in its arrival. Instead there is the insane panic, the racing alarm of starving lungs and shaking legs and an empty chest that leaves you grappling in the air for the Nothingness that had disappeared.

The panic is eating at you, the fears are gaining ground and you can’t seem to take up the racing again. So you’re reaching, searching for anything that will save you. Your hand comes down on something, sharp and insistent. You know what it is without looking; know with some baser instinct the thing that demands your action.

A pen lay beneath your hand.

Hope and pain and fear crashes over you in terrifying waves. Inkwells of memories slosh black in your head, waiting patiently for physical existence. Everything you’ve bottled up, finally finding an outlet. Your pain is dripping from the tip of the pen.

Running never sated it. Forgetting made it build. You tried for so long to keep it there in your chest, invisible to all who looked. But it refuses to be quiet any longer. The need of it pushes you hard. You need to breathe!

So you take what has made you bleed, every shadowed part of it hidden in yourself and you give it voice. It is the only thing left for you to do, the only choice you are given. You had to purge the blood from your lungs so that you could breathe. No running, no forgetting, no hiding – you had to expel it.

After the carving of the first word into the face of the white paper, the pressure shifted. Power wove through your veins as the next came out, and then another and another. The inhale after so long drowning was pain-filled bliss; a full retract to muscles extended far past endurance as the rich taste of iron-tinged oxygen swelled and then collapsed in a tear slogged gasp.

Finally, you could breathe.

One breath.

Two.

Three.

It was only a moment.

So you continue to write.

Ink embraces the dark that had so often run at your heels. You opened your arms to the fears, collecting them only to seal them away where they could be shared in anonymity. With their cover exposed, they had little footing to haunt you with.

Relief was been born through words, small curves of black along the crisp white of a page; a diary assembled from the gruesome, macabre conditions in which you had so often existed.

How had you not seen it before? How had you let the wound get so deep? Even with the purge you have been scarred irrevocably. But then, maybe that was the only way to break the grasp of the In Between. You haven’t reached Finish yet, but your path has begun to straighten out. The scenery actually changes now, sometimes too slowly after so long racing. Yet now you know you’ll get there, as long you continue to learn. The lessons are difficult; you’ve begun to exhume memories so that you can understand Start, that way when you come upon Finish, you’ll appreciate just how much letting go freed you. And you’ve learned a new toon, a soft beat just gentle enough to coax the fragments of your heart into the rough shape it once held.  You’ve found another substance to hold them together; it’s a refined thing, made of all the elements that you had spent so long speeding over – a little bit of past blended with the purge, and the hope that takes residence in the aftermath of it. It’s by far the most resilient thing you have come across. The racing stopped, but the moving on hasn’t. The purge is teaching you to take the moments that existed in the fracture that became of the Stagnant, insisting in paces to pause and observe the constellations freed from the infliction the Nothingness caused.

It’s going to take a long time to heal from the wound, you know this. But now as you travel, you’re beginning to see life reappear in the wasteland that had been shadowed in red. Green has eagerly sprouted and now tickles bare feet as you tread. As long as you keep a pen in your hand the In Between stays away and you move forward continuously. You’ll never be caught in circles again. It’s a promise you’ve made to yourself. One you will fight to keep.