Continuance. A story of insomnia and war.

4am is the exact time that the daemons come, forcing me to lie still and dance upon the surface of my own skin. 4.01 is when I get out of bed and walk out into the yard, I look up at the branches and the birds are asleep, the lizards are still hiding in their cave. I find a beetle. I find my sixth sense. I wrap myself around it’s fingers. The moss is tingling against my skin. The slippery blue green algae glistening. This must be where my love of humans ends. The gargoyles with their flaming swords are no match for shadows that hide beneath shadows. The moon peaks out from the clouds but we are done with it.

My friend the large black cat. He is the same cat that was fabled to exist, along with flying saucers and moon landings, the cat that hides in the shadows of dreams and that people photograph and send in to magazines for money. He stepped out from the collective unconscious one day to befriend me from a rock in the forest near Penrith. He accompanies me on a fool’s errand. To find ourselves alive. Sometimes I’m photographed out of focus too, blurred into the background. Imagine being in focus though. Everybody hates that. Like the cat I embrace the edge. Like the words ever really mattered. Like the pain ever really left. Like the spirits were always there. Like the spirits ever left us. Like the birds really ever mattered. Like the clock ever stops clicking. Like it’s ever really too early to drink wine. Like there’s such a thing as early.

I’ll never get the worm if I’m awake before the council workers. A jet-black raven flies from tree to tree in and out of all things. I’s material and its magic and its alchemy and its everything we don’t see really. The moss is still tingling against my skin. The moss is manipulating and has an agenda. We have the same agenda. Continuance.

There were always two suns as I squint into the light. It’s just that only insomniacs can see the second one. There are stories of solar flares but I can’t care about them, I don’t think the world matters that much to the suns. Does the paper really matter to the ink? Can my old brain concentrate on any sickness that doesn’t affect the cure or the consequences. Still the suns rise, just for fun, juggling the world in one hand and a man on fire in the other like a pro that doesn’t have to even look to catch them. Those who remember still dance and swirl around in multi coloured skirts until the bombers come to turn everything to grey. The bombers will come anytime soon and turn the world to grey and bones and blood and ash, and a child will set on a rock and look west, befriending a large black cat that was manifested from a nonexistent collective unconscious to accompany him. To find themselves alive. “Sometimes I find myself invisible.” says the cat. “It’s a heavy load, the constant shifting, making sure nobody sees me exactly as I am. A few wavy people have come close to my power and appreciate the magic, pull my whiskers and feed me fish to manipulate me into staying. I wrap myself around their mossy fingers and I linger long. It’s a state of continuance.”

Before me and the boy and the large black cat a serpent was born from an egg. Mountains exist now where their old bones lay. Eventually they will cut down the trees and the soil will erode and expose their bones. “I am continuance” the wind will whisper to the old bones. “You are lucky that you lasted that long.” The bones will whisper back.

History isn’t written by the winners. It is written by the buildings that were toppled by the war. They rebuild them but they never lock the same, they crack like the cracks as our skin dries. Since we became materialists, we can almost see where our skin ends and the background begins. It wasn’t always this way. We used to be a lot blurrier and more melded in with the background. Now we are defined in books and smaller than buildings and bigger than life. We hid weapons in the walls. We learnt to never let the oak trees grow around the guns. We have also learnt to whisper kind words at the walls of the buildings so when they fall, they don’t turn around to bite us.

When the sun comes up, I stare at a bullet shell and remember today is a good day. Continuance. My parents gave me too much compassion and tried to teach me how to lie still and sleep, how to see what is there, what is actually there. But I lay there and my tired eyes could see nothing but the spaces and the spaces would watch me and I’d be looking at myself from above sitting down on a rock with a large black cat by my side, waiting for the light to come in. Too much faith and the teacher will be wondering at you measuring the circumference without mapping out the radius. To much faith and the crops will find circles and the meadows will be in lines. Too much faith and the sadness in the eyes is mistaken for kindness, the cape on the shoulder will be mistaken for wings. Too much faith and the lines you draw will be loud and angry and knock over table lamps. I have the kind of kindness that explodes. Take a bow at the offering but don’t stay for the explosion. The large black cat won’t stay. Blue the colour of the planet. Brown the colour of the earth. Grey, the colour of this whole fucked up year. Continuance