Her Industrial Wasteland Pharmacy

Another dream:



I had driven her to a bleak, industrial part of the city. A wasteland of abandoned buildings.

Even though I didn't recognise this place, it still somehow felt familiar.



The sky was full of grey clouds with jagged black spires, the concrete was shiny and wet, a light rain was drizzling down, putrid garbage and human waste littered the deserted streets.



She had a job in a pharmacy in this industrial wasteland.

This is the job she had always had while we were together. It was a part of her life that I never knew. I thought to myself "So this is where you go to work every day."



It was a grim, fetid and ghostly area, almost like the neglected zones of Detroit. Streets of moldered concrete and foul gutters with brown, rust-coloured streams flowed into rotted sewers.

I drove past barely legible bill posters that were torn and flapping, like peeled skin, from the sides of dilapidated buildings like decaying, gangrenous flags.

 

"This is the place" she said, nodding her head in the direction of a looming cluster of tall, blighted buildings. I parked my car in a side street, next to an old, polluted canal.



She got out of the car and walked ahead of me, her high-set ponytail bopping up and down as she strode purposefully towards the pharmacy. I lost sight of her as I was overcome by my dark, putrefied surroundings.



Suddenly, I was inside the pharmacy. I was standing behind an aisle and she was near the front counter. It was crowded, with lots of shadowy strangers milling around. I was watching her, but she couldn't see me. I was invisible. She was pouting and looking around the pharmacy, striking poses, as if trying to capture the attention of the faceless customers.



I felt a mixture of disgust and sadness. "How can you be so happy, spending all of your days in this derelict part of town, working in this dirty, rotting pharmacy?" I thought to myself.

I turned away from her and left the pharmacy. I felt a cold wind hit my face as I walked down the corroded streets towards the old, rancid canal where my car was parked.




I turned down a street that I thought my car was on, but it wasn't there. I felt a surge of anxiety as I looked for something familiar. I walked up and down the street, searching hopelessly. I eventually came to a chain link cyclone fence.



Through the mesh, I saw my car parked on the adjacent street. I felt a flood of relief as I walked across a nearby bridge, back to my car and drove away.

Mountain

I came to the mountain
To face my reflection

To see what it could teach me.

I could not learn the reason why
You continue to creep on my mind.

I came to the mountain to die
Only to discover that I'd never lived.

Thoughts

bush-bashin' with broheim

The Sharehouse

I stood at the steps of the tall, stone, rustic sharehouse. It was old and moldering, encircled by the Dickensian rooftops of a terraced moribund dreamscape.



This is where you live now. I had come to this place to find you.

I climbed the cobbled stairs, leading to a locked gate. A resident of the sharehouse emerged from a wooden doorway and approached the gate where I stood. He was wearing glasses that had no glass in them, the black wire of the empty glasses framed his mousy face. A scarf was wrapped tightly around his neck and his eyelids drooped and fell like curtains over his sleepy gaze.

"Have you lost your keys, bro?"

I didn't say anything. I looked at him blankly.

He glanced drowsily at me as he unlocked the gate and slithered past my withering glare.

Approaching the entrance of the sharehouse, I was met with the musty smell of unwashed clothes and marijuana smoke. I pushed on the wooden door and it creaked open.



Entering a long corridor, with many doors on either side, I began to slowly walk towards the room at the end of a hallway.

I knew this was your room.

The door to your room was open wide, as if to send an invitation to strangers to pass inside. A flickering, hazy purple light illuminated your room beyond the open door.

As I walked through the open door of your room, I noticed the decorative cloths that were draped from your ceiling. The patterned cloths gave the room an impression of a Bedouin tent from 1001 Arabian Nights, but without the jewels and without the magic. The room was dusty, old and decayed.

On the floor of the room, in the far corner, was a mattress where you lay. The mattress was covered in wrinkled, stained sheets that billowed and spilled over onto the wooden, white paint-speckled floorboards.

You looked up at me and giggled as you blew purple smoke from an ornate water pipe. You resembled the stoned caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland.

Beside you lay a small girl with jet black hair and a fringe that sliced across the bottom of her forehead. She appeared half-buried in the bed sheets.

Advancing towards the mattress, I crouched and stared at you. The small girl beside you peeked nervously at me, eyes half-hidden beneath her sharp fringe.

"This is your life now?"

I stood, reached for your arm, and pulled you out of the room. The small girl melted away beside you, into the bed sheets.

You smugly chortled as I took you into a small, dirty communal kitchen that was beside your room. Insects scuttled into dark crevices and brown stains dripped down the walls.

We stood beside a small window that looked out onto a grey sky.

I pulled you close to me. I intently searched your face for something familiar, but I no longer recognised you.

As I peered deeply into your cold inner landscape, I saw lightening flash behind your eyes.

A darkness swept across your gaze, like a storm rolling over a vast plain.



You smiled defiantly at me.

Your smile began to transmogrify into an oozing hatred that was only barely perceptible, like a whispering blade of grass.

While I was distracted by the emergence of your contemptuous smirk, your arm began to slowly reach outside of the kitchen window, unnaturally extending, like a long piece of pasta.

Outside of the window, on a small ledge, was a hammer.

As I stared into your smirking face, I saw your anger barely disguised.

Your arm suddenly snapped back through the kitchen window, clutching the hammer, smashing it into my face.

I was sucked into a blackness that felt like cold marble. Oblivion was complete. 

Star Familia

Brothers