Maybe it comes from all those little faults you start noticing, like cracks in your skin, wrinkles? And they stare at you in the most unwavering faces that ease into your eyes, pouring against your ribs like smooth whiskey, except this time it’s tequila and you laugh at yourself, knowing each night will lift the haze from your eyes, yet it isn’t completely gone just yet. So you stare at the fixtures of lights blending outside your only window, where your good soldiers rest for duty tomorrow on the windowsill, each second ticketing the sound of reality crashing in full when finally the rush of color overwhelms your senses and the light blinds you like another fragmented memory of a swimming pool in suburban Georgia, where the hot and sticky heat washes over you like honey, sweet and savoring and glistening, but the beast still stirs within thick fur, jagged claws and jagged fangs, each second bringing him closer to your wall and door and frame and you feel it on your neck, its red eyes reflecting the fires outside, knowing its claws are digging within your flesh and you scream, scream, scream, scream until the blood boils deep within your veins and all that is staring at you is the stale warmth of mid-winter sunshine and it feels like a dream.

This much though I’m sure of: I’m alone in hostile territories with no clue why they’re hostile or how to get back to safe havens, an Old Haven, a lost haven, the temperature dropping, the hour heaving & pitching towards a profound darkness, while before me my idiotic amaurotic Guide laughs, actually cackles is more like it, lost in his own litany of inside jokes, completely out of his head, out of focus too, zonules of Zinn, among other things, having snappy long ago like piano wires, leaving me with absolutely no sound way to determine where the hell I’m going, though right now going to hell seems like a pretty sound bet.