markbousfield

This is the re-edit of my last film, not quite finished yet as the sound hasn't been fully mixed. Have a look and tell me what you think



The Day My Heart (and Body) Broke...

By Mark Bousfield

The dull blade on the razor cuts my neck, listlessly I stand there like some statue caught in the rays of a fresh days sun. The blood forms a bubble over the wound, swelling with coagulated vitality the vein slowly closes. Still, I am immobile, the blade held mid air in my right hand. As blood flows from the severed vessel leaving my heart my left and empty hand starts to tingle and quiver of it's own accord. Tentatively at first and frightfully it lurches to one side. Off balance I fall and drop the razor.

After what seemed like hours I resigned myself to getting up, I pulled my self to my bruised knees, the flawed purple flesh around the inside of my thigh inflamed in agony. As I slowly unbend upright I look into the mirror and I can see the hollows of my eyes staring back. With the density of the blackness surrounding them I can feel them sucking the light from the room. I can see the limp half shaven skin around my flaccid mouth. I hope for a smile, only the right hand side lifts leaving me with a filthy looking sneer. My smile used to be my shield to the world, my deflector of unhappiness, my winner of hearts. With a little bitterness I allow my muscles to relax releasing my face from that venereal expression. What happened to me? Where did I go?

In the riverboat on the water, like a circus freak welcomed back into the fold, his eviscerated sanity laying to waste in the colon of some clandestine ancient machine, the makings of brotherhoods, of sisterhoods and saint-hoods, this is were his last cogent thought lay. It was in this riverboat that I lay, the enclosed walls, tight spaces, coffin-like in its solitude, this is the place I chose for my recovery. My sallow eyes deadened and dull, glazed mostly, a glaze of morphine (if I could stomach it) and apathy.

My faculties have become weak, not getting any better that's for sure. Fuck I should have died, would have been a lot more pleasant than living this nightmare, stewing in my own piss and shit because I can't stand or walk fast enough to make it worth the effort. Woolf style knights rife across the blazing sunlight, searing blood spots pattern on the faded sickly wallpaper, on my failing retinas, burned with some indescribable lurgy from my childhood, they warned me I would go blind, in my convalescence I was due to go sightless, that much I could fucking guarantee, my only pleasure in this emptiness.

Within the ravages of my perverted soul I have sought solace, well no longer. No longer will I graze in the pastures ripe with young new heifers, not yet born to maturity or stature of repository (in relation to rising expectations of age) at any given moment. Damn, this here riverboat leaves me to bounce every last dejection I never had until I was bound here. Every last flounce of decency lost until I came upon these depraved hills where I stand up and call justice to my fucking emaciated muscles. This weakness I am left with is my final and failing strength.

I drift off in the old leather chair in the corner of the living quarters. It is an rustic sagging thing. Quirky in it's own way, eccentric wooden framing with bulbous and fruitful patches of over stuffed leather lined with intricate golden stitching, The indentation I had made fitted my frame when I was far more robust, Now, thin as I am, I struggle to even place the fibres of the beige leather under duress. I am becoming one with the chair, wasting away together with our destinies forever linked.

Like an accidental kiss on the lips, one that stays in the memory. Extricated from the rest of existence. The firm lips sticky with gloss clinging to mine across the from seat of the car, the darkness, the haze of the street glow in Kensington. My memory seems to have fully dissolved from my body. I can still remember how she felt on my tongue, on the skin of my mouth but I cannot feel it. I cannot recreate the sensation in the same way.

I scratch the back of my right thigh, some sycophantic varicose veins have decided to consolidate my physical woes. I notice that with some concentration I'll soon be able to put my hand (thumb to pinky) all the way around my rotted thigh. good times! I'd rather have died when I was still young, let this malady be only a shadow of a future not yet spent, a rumour of a forthcoming existence I would never experience.

My left ear rings incessantly, it pops and buzzes like a fridge. Sometimes it can burn with agony so much that this washed up physiology that I call my body refuses to register any more, yet I don't pass out. Nothing so easy or straight forward. I lay still, paralysed and uncomfortable. I am completely frozen from head to toe, my eyes roll into my head and I will my lungs to keep on breathing, for my brain to continue to speak to me.. Only by the warmth of my skin can they tell I am not yet dead.

So I switch on the TV, one handed of course, my blood pumps uselessly through one side of my body. It's lifeless excess makes me baulk, all the needy partitions of humanity; the poor, the victims of disease and famine, sufferers of AIDs and oppression, they all have the sympathy of a world audience. Their plight whilst unstoppable, will at least be well documented. My slow passage, painful as it will be, will largely disappear under the nonchalant waves of apathy gripping the caring gene in pretty much fucking everybody. The abyss which I so unwillingly approach from this rapidly downhill slide accelerates onwards to Hell. The glows of scorching blood, cold to the touch but hot in the veins forces the slow retirement of life from my bones. Alas, the kisses of moments gone into the ethereal copulation's of Time and History are never coming back.

I flick the channels lifelessly, the ache in my fingers ruminates through each joint, electric jolts of narcissistic pain flowing through the wrist, up my arm and to my brain. I wince (although my left eye hangs open, the skin droopy, yellow and dead). I settle on some empty drivel involving nubile young things stretching up and down, I have no idea why. Like the pornographic swallowing of syrupy medicine all over your teeth and lips, I wretch at first, only because the arousal repulses me, I slide my hand into the grave of my sexuality. The place now forbidden and ignored by the outside world exotica of the female form.

Exhausted I fall deeper into my seat. The remnants of my exertions lay like shameful barristas steaming walnut and honey across the incandescent yet lustreless encounters of a virgin all lily white and her intoxicated farm hand. Spent in fields of poppy and virtue, amongst the meadows of sexual frugality that became her open smile. Exhaling heavily I slowly feel the familiar sensation of pins and needles in my left hand.

With every bit of concentration I could muster I focus on the feeling, trying to control it, manipulate it into a benevolent being. My fingers twitch uncontrollably. I clamp them with my right hand and attempt to gain some composure. Not easy when one half of your body doesn't know you exist.

After the failings of the afternoon I retire to bed, the phantom of love that existed within me before this sclerosis of conscience that I am booned with took hold flickering as a distant memory at the end of an empty tunnel. I reminisce over fond recollections of holding hands, the blissful merging of bodies; healthy and youthful and full of lusty exuberance. What is it that they say? Live your life but leave ten years to remember. Well, alone, I half lay/half sag and try and remember. I wish I could remember with absolute crystal clearness, with photographic accuracy becoming one from two, the slight brush of delusion as we contemplated life far beyond our means.

As well as I can visualise you in your lingerie I can visualise the moment my youth died, when my heart and body was broken in two. When half of me died, when my hopes were split, two equal tragedies in open conflict between the left and right hand sides of my brain, of everything that is made of me. The moment I split in two, one half empty and dead, the other sad and bitter, resenting each capacity of breath that still remained.

The phone rings, with great effort I swing myself from my corpse like resting position and finally answer. The bright sparkly voice on the other end momentarily blurs the lines of reality, I smile and stand. I ruminate on the options thus presented to me. I articulate with passion and conviction each succinct and well crafted sentence, what charisma! What charm!

With a crash I was brought back to Earth. The voice no longer bright and sparkly has become cautious and wary,

"Sir are you OK? I can't understand a word you are saying, are you drunk? Oh Christ, sorry I called...."

She hung up. With tearful frustration I try and throw the phone across the room. I succeed however in unbalancing myself from the edge of the bed. I slam to the floor in a heap. The choking tears of self pity take over, I don't move for what must be hours. This schism has taken hold and I am it's sorrowful soldier until the end of my days.

My annual check up has been fast tracked to today. The yearly topiary of dignity neatly trimmed back to the barest possible level. All is taken away until all that remains is the spiky and naked branches of my adulthood gone to waste. A joke in the waiting with a very mortal punch line, tasteless in it's jesting nature my stroke laughs a good old belly laugh.

Each stroke a unique collection of cells mutated so individually, no two ever the same. Each and every malignant nuance of my biology centred in this constipated culture of evil within my brain matter. A swirling fleshy swelling of foreign bodies living like a parasite inside of my consciousness, it's very presence killing the feeling in half of me, Eating those synapses like flesh eating termites distorting my perceptions of the world, it's smell, it's touch and taste. What I experience now is so alien to what I experienced before. The life, the memories I had before are different, the freedom I took for granted gone. Never to return, I am limited by sickness for the rest of my short internment in life.

Whether I will die soon I do not know. I feel every waking moment is an erosion on my eternal soul, an empty wasting disease forming an abscess cavity inside of me. A hole of darkness and tension deep inside the clean white surfaces of my skull. My cranial traumas forever imprinted on the map of my existence, pathways of experience lit keenly by the scarring of my skin. Consumed by the nearness of it I never blamed Heaven for taking her away until that day, the day my heart (and body) broke.

The day the stroke made me crash the car and kill her.