Trickledown

It’s ten AM on a Saturday morning and it’s raining. I’ve left my window open and there’s water all over the LCD display of my alarm clock. It’s as if the numbers are melting and time is flowing away. Thoughts are trickling down into my head like clockwork.

I was sleeping, before we started talking. The blinds slash horizontal stripes in the sun, hot in descent. Before you woke me up I had been dreaming. Dreaming about needles, tight syringes pressing air bubbles and a clear liquid out. I woke up in my own sweat and disarray.  I don’t want these dreams anymore. I got up, and waited for the customary head rush to pass. The room spun slightly, as my flesh crawled and the white plaster wall disintegrated into a haze of prickly black dots. From the street, from below, an indistinct melody mixed with the sounds of the breeze. Homeless men and drug addicts walk around aimlessly in the alley two stories below. The sound of glass syringes breaking under their feet creates an eerie symphony. It sounds darkly familiar, but forgotten, like those memories from childhood that surface for a second from the gray pool of unconsciousness. They glisten with painful precision, and are gone, gone as the tongue twitches, the lips quiver, and a half-breath tries to pronounce a word that’s no longer there.

The rain has stopped while we’ve been talking. My alarm clock is dry and the numbers aren’t melting. Time hasn’t been carried away with the water and down into the sewer system. It’s still here. One of the few things we can count on that’s fixed, unchanging, it will always be there. As long as we are of course.

Time to take a walk. The city is rendered in High Definition, a billion pixels take up my eyesight and it's like seeing in color for the very first time. My pocket rattles as the tiny pills inside it cascade and crash into each other. Death in a pill, killer in a capsule, that's what I sell. I tell people it's happiness, pure ecstasy wrapped up inside a Tylenol sized capsule.

Look, I'm not a bad guy ok? I'm just a person, barely even a man yet, rolling with the punches. We're all just people trying to roll with it as best as we can. I help people along, even if it's just by taking them on a little road trip through their minds for a couple of hours.

Are you actually happy with how you are living what you call alive? Are you feeling 100% truly alive at this very moment? No? I didn't think so. So why do you continue to live your life in a manner you are unhappy with? If you're expecting me to tell you the answer then that's just too bad. Nothings free in life. I ask myself, “why is it better to put out an introverted personality that will let you push me around as much as you like rather than reveal the true me and take a chance at being able to say what I truly wish to say to others?” The real me can tell others when they are overstepping their grounds or what I believe in.

         I want you to go find a comfortable place to sit down and think on these words. Ask yourself, “Am I living the life the way I’d like to live it?” Do you think that if you were living it differently things would really be worse? Look around you at other people who act the way you wish you could and think to yourself how, even if you aren’t as interesting as they are, it couldn’t possibly be worse than the way you’re living now.Y ou need to change yourself. Not slowly over time, I’ve always thought I should change slowly so people wouldn’t say to me, “Wow, you’re different all of the sudden, what’s going on?” Fuck it. Change on a dime into who you are and stop hiding behind this fog.
         
         I step out of my apartment and onto the dirty streets. I feel like the object of a blowtorch’s passion as a superheated wind rakes across the streets and whips my ears with half whispered words. I make my way across the crumbling concrete quickly, half expecting the bridge to give way beneath my feet and tumble into the grimy water. The air hung thick and heavy with heat on the other side. The asphalt of the street was sticky, as if it wanted to melt under my feet, so I walked in the smoking grass to avoid being welded to the pavement by the arcing sun. I looked for signs of life, but there was only the crackling silence that the city sang to me.
         I step over the legs of a homeless man. He mumbles and slurs, asking me for change. I ignore him. A needle rolls out of his pocket and down the drain. The fresh heroin trickles out of the fragmented syringe and into the water. His mind is cracked and fragmented like the needle; his thoughts are heroin, pouring out and into the collective pool of this city. Its sludge, a cesspool, but it’s beautiful. He cries.
How do you react when you see someone in pain? It’s just a question, humor me, please.
I don’t react. I don’t feel anything. I avert my gaze to the cracks in the pavement rather than watch a baby cry.

I.. I’m.. I’m ashamed of emotions. This is hard for me to write. All of this is hard for me to write. As I was saying, I'm not a bad person. Up until right now you've been reading my thoughts, my soul. My still beating heart, pulled out of my chest and thrown at a peice of eight by eleven printer paper. How can you think I'm a bad person after seeing what goes on inside my head?

I started thinking these thoughts late at night. Lying on my rusted mattress and listening to the sounds of crack combusting under the intense heat of a lighter, hearing the smoke whistle through the pipe and into a woman’s lungs. It drives me crazy. Sleep is restless when it comes at all. Sleep has always been a previous commodity in my world. Sleep, sleep is what I need. Sleep is the magical cure for the disease that ails us all. It’s no small wonder to me that so many people have succumbed to sitting down in alleys covered in alcohol, rain, and urine. They sit there inhaling toxins, injecting poison, swallowing death, and all the while sleeping their way through life.

A man begs for change. I look deep into his eyes. He seems honest. Unlike most homeless people, his eyes aren’t dead. They still retain small glimmers of hope, even at the very bottom of this incredible cesspool.
         It strikes me as odd that people suffer. Generally, we all suffer. Sure, there are places in the world where people suffer more than others, yet to a certain degree we all must face the same terrible milestones in our lives. We all will face a time when the phone rings and a calm voice tells you your mother passed away. We all will face a day when a loved one throws the ring in your face and storms out. Or maybe you’ll get lucky, and you won’t have to deal with that. I didn’t get lucky.
         Even our very existences must ultimately end in a similar fear. We die alone. Even crowded around with family, each and every one of us passes through that fluttering veil utterly alone. We know this for a fact. What’s more, whether clergy, paupers, or princes, there are no reprieves. That lonely priest dying huddled and frightened in his dimly lit room is dying from the same cancer that’s eating the guts of the housewife up the hall. There’s nothing he with his hotline to God, or I can do to alter that course. Nothing.
         If it’s inevitable, we must embrace it. I suppose. There’s little else to do.
         A baby cries in a stroller outside a cafe, I look away. I want you to change, but I'm not ready to change myself. I step onto the train as it pulls up. A cracked up homeless man stumbles by me and yells at me.
         "Look at me man!" I don't know what to say. "I'm not shit! Don't fucking think I'm shit!" He speeds away from me as the train moves out of the station.  Another casualty of popping pills, shooting up, smoking up. We all make and pay for our own mistakes, but just once I'd like to be able to help.
         Ironic. I know. I'm the reaper of death trying to save lives on these brutal streets in the middle of a shitstorm.
         Right now, I think we’re living in a seriously fucked up world with far too many people simply pretending that everything is running along perfectly, smoothly, happily. Answers for the hardest questions simply materialize out of thin air and come far too implausibly and easily. Scientists crash particles together and unlock the secrets of the universe with about as much excitement as a high school student in a math class. Instead of actually lending ourselves, we dissemble to one another. Popes and priests, warlocks and shamans, Gods and Devils, we’ve invented countless names and titles for these we’ve elected to explain the sacred mysteries that were never really all that sacred or mysterious to begin with . We know few things for sure, but the ones that we do are not merciful. We know that the fabric of our reality is unbendable, immaleable. This fabric shows no signs of mercy, no signs toward striking bargains with us. Still, we continue to kneel before our gods and whisper our desperation into the shadows of our midnight bedrooms rather than provide that much needed compassion and empathy to one another, to ourselves. 
         Bumper to bumper, cars honk on the streets. People slam their steering wheels angrily. It’s far too early for this. Every day we crawl out of our lonely little boxes at precisely 8:15 and hurry across highways in our tiny metallic boxes so we can stuff ourselves into different boxes by 9:00. All the while we work diligently to create a mask of strength and impassiveness in everything we do. We are embarrassed at the sight of someone crying, usually avoiding them, or pretending we fail to see them. Why?
         It’s a crazy, fucked up world. I know.  Even in a crazy world though, this makes no sense to me. What great and terrible tragedy would result from lending hand, or a comforting word, or even by shedding a few tears for the sorrows of another?
         I get off the train in a better part of town. Better, because all the houses are perfect cutouts from Readers fucking Digest magazine. Your perfect little duplexes with white picket fences. This is a worse area of town though. This is where I make all my sales. This is what people want to escape from.
         What the hell would the world be like if one morning we all walked out of our fucking lonely overpriced boxes and actually noticed and looked at each other instead of standing by in our cloaks of emotional isolation? What would that moment be like?
         I want to see peace and happiness in someone’s face before I visit them on their deathbeds. I don’t want a new car or five TV’s or a brand new computer to distract me from reality. I don’t want bigger, faster, longer, or leaner. I don’t want to be a model. I don’t want to have world power. I’ve just got this one crazy fucking wish that one day I’m going to be able to walk up the street where people look me in the eyes instead of burying their gazes in the sidewalk cracks.
I want to see a world where people aren’t ashamed to feel toward one another.
I want to see a world where I can cry on a park bench, like I am now, and not see people avert their gaze. I want any of these people walking by to sit down beside me and lend me a shoulder. I want someone to sit beside me and shed a few tears for my sorrows. Or are my pains not worth it?
         My watch beeps. 3:30. Time flies when you live in your head I guess. I get up from my perch on the park bench and walk casually down the upper middle class sidewalk. My contact is right ahead of me. Two rich guys who want to score some cheap speed and freak out all afternoon. Be my guest, just stay out of my way while you're doing it. These are the kind of guys you don't fuck around with. Rich, preppy guys who are angry at their parents and society for sheltering them. Just out of their teens, they're pumped full of testosterone and ready to pick a fight. These guys aren't small either, that probably comes from working out at the gym all day. Maybe I should get a little bigger, hit the gym more. Fuck a gym membership, I can do sit-ups at home.
         "You got the stuff man?" No. I don't have the stuff. I walked all the way here and didn't bring it with me. Dumbass. Why am I in such a bad mood? Something about this neighborhood puts me off. Maybe it's all the money, all the squandered talent, all the people yearning for an escape from what seems like heaven.
         "Yeah." I pull it out of my pocket. The pink pills reflect the sun and almost sparkle. We're in a back alley. No one will see us, and even if they do, they won't care.
         "Oh man! That's a hell of a lot!" says one of them in anticipation.
         "Hell yeah, we're gonna get so fucked tonight!" he replies to him.
         "Now I need the money," I say neutrally. He pulls out his wallet from his pocket. The wallet and pants are probably worth more than the money he carries around in them. We exchange our treasures and start to walk away. A rustling sound, a crunch, and heavy breathing make all three of us turn around. There's a kid standing there, skinny and wide eyed.
         There's something about his eyes though, something that makes him different. They're blue, bright blue, almost shockingly so. They gaze out at me with an innocence, a sense of decency, a sense of mercy. I guess it's the same with all kids. They've all got much more decency in them then the rest of us do. Help me, those eyes plead. Save me.
         "Little fucker shouldn't wander so far away from home," says one of the guys. They start to walk towards him menacingly. I freeze. Don't hurt him, I plead silently.
         "Go on, fly away home birdie." The kid starts to walk away.
         "Wait, what if he tells someone?" Both our hearts, mine and the kids, stop.
         "He wouldn't."
         "Well how can we be sure?" Tears are streaming down the kids face.
         "I won't tell anyone," he says, choking on the words. Both of the guys just laugh.
         "Looks like we're gonna have to clip this little birdies wings," laughs one of the guys. I shiver. I should do something. I should stop them. I'm not a big guy, I wouldn't stand a chance. Better me than the kid though. Better me.. The two of them can smell my fear. They turn to me slowly.
         "Aww, looks like you're about as scared as the kid," says one of them, laughing stupidly. I've seen people get hurt before. I've seen men and women overdose behind warehouses, seizing on the ground with their eyes rolling back in their head. I've seen the very worst of people cut each other to ribbons over a little drop of liquid. I've never seen something like this though. Those people I'd seen get hurt? They got what was coming to them. This kid was innocent, clean. He was just in the wrong place, wrong time.
         "Tell you what, why don't you do the honors?" He hands me an expensive looking switchblade. My hands are trembling. The situation is out of my control. If it was ever in my control in the first place.
         "I, I-"
         "It's either you or the kid." I turn to the little kid. He's sobbing quietly now. He can guess what's coming. His blue eyes look like they're melting as the tears stream down his dark skin. I can't hurt him. I won't hurt him. And yet, my hands move even though I will them not to. Maybe after you go through your whole life hurting people you just can't help yourself.
         I've been kidding myself for far too long. What have I been doing? Those pills I just sold aren't helping anyone. What's the difference between stabbing a kid and selling his dad death in a bottle? Not much I'm afraid. I'm tired of hiding. Tired of tricking myself. This is clarity at the end of a knife.
         He gasps as the cold steel enters his flesh. Warm blood pours out of his armpit and into my arm. Teardrops stream down my face and onto my hands. His tears crash down like a waterfall, mixing with mine. The Savior has left my heart. I am the Angel of Death.