The Lunacy of Illusionary Choice:
Kelly’s Sorrowful Song
She put her knee-high boot on the table’s edge. Sliding her index finger along her orange fishnets, She idly adjusted the constricting leggings. Her slender leg muscle twitched at the contact; flickering her fingernail over the thread like a guitar string, she again stroke the meshed flesh of her leg. The bar table thumped from the industrial music. The vibration traveled down her leg, quivering erotically in her sexual organs. She gently rubbed her leg, closing her eyes to the world. Her finger tips depressed the material. Her shaved leg twitched faux orgasmicilly. In the midst of the audible torrent, her shoulders quaked. She rocked her red-dyed hair arithmetically, fighting the impulse of the metal-techno. She lit a clove and drew the cinnamon smoke into her mouth. Her tongue numbed and lulled satisfied. She drew again, blowing the smoke slowly over her pursed lips. Alone, she wanted to be parted, to be pleasured. Her eyes closed tight against the world, she gently rubbed her index finger along the hem of her skirt. In her mind, it clicked loudly, the zipper perhaps moving ever so slightly. The pit of her lower stomach felt a pressure, the bodily acknowledgement of a need. She hummed, feeling the erotic beat slowly harmonize. The base beat drove her steady along; her humming lips, the cinnamon smoke, the need… Her hazel eyes opened wide. She rubbed her flat stomach with an open palm, the clove carefully pressed between her index and middle fingers. She put her right foot back onto the sticky floor.
The club hadn’t changed. The music played on, the people drew sweaty against each other, a haze floated gingerly above the masses. She dug her nails into her fists until the pain subsided into a dull throb. Opening her hands, the crescent marks turned purple, small beads of vibrant blood pooled. More? No, she felt enough at the moment. She slugged back the disregarded vodka on the table. She leaned forward until her breasts folded neatly over the table top. She rose her small fist and punched the table violently. No one noticed. She did it until the skin about her knuckles swelled. More? No, that was enough. The clove, she realized, had fallen forgotten to the abyssal floor.
“Kelly?” She turned over her shoulder. “You want another?” Ashley, the club’s waitress, looked compassionately down on her. It made her angry.
“Two.” Kelly rose a peace symbol.
“One at a time, hun.” She said, placing an already-poured drink before her.
Kelly seized the jigger and shot it down. “Bring me another then. Please, hun.” She dropped the glass on Ashley’s tray unconsciously. Ashley blinked. Kelly read pity on the girl’s face. Ashley complied without another word.
Kelly slid another clove from her cigarette carrier. Looking down on the silver container, she noticed the insignia “K².” Kevin, she thought. She could already hear one of his bullshit lectures coming. She snickered. Cloves, cigarettes, clubs, whatever. She never minded his moral high horse, or the negativity stemming from his every breath. He was personable, his very demeanor a characteristic. To hold Kevin was to embrace vice. A card-toting iconoclast, he swore by his own name and strove to right his perceived wrongs. Right and wrong were not arbitrary, there was no gray to his world. The sun set, the pigs wallowed, the world drug its bleeding carcass onward. Empirically, he was wrong more often that not, but he loved and hated with passion. To say that Kevin saw the world through a glass darkly was inaccurate. To Kevin, he was the world. He was the sins, the wrongs, the wretched saints on the cross. He saw himself in every gutter, puking JD in garbage cans, and sliding a stiletto blade through unseen ribs. Somehow in the chaos, he was himself and she loved him for it.
There were times when she saw herself groaning, legs tight about another being. Desperation only, her heart stung with every sensuous pump. Her body desired; her mind resisted. Every ounce of her conscious world felt dedicated to him. But, like the saying goes, there was a “totally opposite reaction” within the bestial nature of her sex. In dreams, she groaned for another. In wake, she felt her very being drawn to him. Like a house plant to sunshine, she could no more break her passion for him than separate her self from her desire.
In the conundrum which followed, she drank and smoked and fucked. Not for mindless debauchery, but for hedonistic oblivion. In the club, she felt fully given over to the bestial world: the sweat, the piss, the sensuous dance. The sweet enumerable abyss swallowed her cognition. Here she was a mass, forsaken to Kevin’s unbearable individuality. If he was enigmatic, a product of a dizzying world of academic angst and pragmatic phobia, she was innately mundane. Not daft, but simple. Like a sated blade of grass, she had found herself gently brushed by a summer gust here and there, but she enjoyed the monotony of life while it had lasted. As with all things, time became cruel. Kevin’s firm appreciation of the cycle of life and death grew all too real. Her mother, her father…She paused in the contemplation. Some people found life in memory, she saw only pain. The remembrance of all those former pleasures—real, though temporal pleasures unfounded on artificial joy—urged the hedonism: gather ye sticky-icky while ye may. To rationalize ones’ slow suicide grew so painfully easy. Did he notice? She rested two idle fingers upon her stomach’s soft flesh. No. Kevin saw all intricate details in his contentious mind, and ignored the tell-tale heart, the broken shape of her being. And as she slid an unlit clove between her lips in complete awareness of the act, she refused to acknowledge her hypocrisy.
She flicked her thumbnail on a white-tipped match and lit the clove. The cinnamon smoke peaked about her head. Kelly drank deep the carcinogens. There was no fashion to her action, no style to her character; yet, there was individual desire. Her soul wished to be separate, piecemealed and sold away. Was there more to it? She squeezed the rolled paper between her fingers. Her spent saliva, the warmed tobacco-tainted moisture, dripped sickly from the butt. She saw the figure of it, the latent image of death. There was a joy in it all the same. But was there more responsibility for it now? She paused in her train of thought. It had to be acknowledged first, then recognition and reconciliation…perhaps.
The club blurred away as another of life’s distractions. She wondered if there was anything but distraction. Even biological reproduction proved a distraction from her intended course. Was it her purpose? To be a mother? Perhaps it was the inadvertent nature of her sex. She obstinately puffed deeper at the cigarette, knowing full well the smoke would infect their lungs. She knew Kevin hypocritically thought it a sin. Godless, he still found time to argue the sinful nature of murder, abortion, and the subtle links between the two. “Fuck it,” she thought, “Fuck it all.” She put the cigarette out in the Banker’s Vodka. There was more important things on her mind than pregnancy.
The whole story boiled down to it. She was pregnant. There, it was out. Had she intended it…She thought it out. She had intended it as much as the man who accidentally shot another with a loaded gun; the inevitable disaster will occur. The quiet ghost of her mother’s memory bristled. How could she compare pregnancy to murder? Kelly nodded. Yes. It was murder. Or at least it was to be, but not of an intended life. Why argue the branch that had yet grown, when the tree’s roots rot beneath was beyond societies’ worry; however, Kelly was too literal for such thoughts. The growth inside her was never intended to be birthed, only to be spawned. It had proved a point to her, as it was meant to, and in doing so, had fulfilled its course.
“Anything else tonight?” Ashley interrupted her dreariness.
“To drink? No. I’m fine.” Kelly responded, rubbing thin bracelets on her wrist.
Ashley pulled a chair up next to her. Unfortunately, the music lulled and the DJ took a break. Kelly grimaced. “Can we talk?” Ashley asked.
“Well, I’m gonna be leaving shortly. I’m not feeling well.” Kelly started to get up.
“It won’t take long.” Ashley leaned in close to her. “Have you done much thinking on god?” She asked slowly.
Kelly broke a smart-ass smile. “I think he’s got sick sense of humor.” Ashley’s morose face didn’t register the Depeche Mode reference. Kelly let it go.
“I was raised religious, you know.” Kelly nodded. “But, I don’t know.”
“Is it a boy, your parents, or your self?”
“What do you mean?” Ashley paused hesitantly.
“Let me guess in three chances: 1) you want to have sex and can’t mesh it with the bible, 2) your parents are pitching you a stale religion they’ve forced themselves to buy or 3) you’re a lesbian. You don’t have to answer. They’re all the same to me.” Seeing Ashley’s mood lighten a little, Kelly pulled out her silver cigarette holder and offered her a clove. Placing two of the unfiltered cloves in her lips, she lit them one by one and offered one to Ashley. “Try this, makes me feel better.” Kelly took a drag, swirling the smoke about her mouth as a wine connoisseur might dose their palate. “Don’t inhale it. They say it freezes your lungs or something.” Kevin and his fucking cigars… Ashley experimented smoking the clove, before allowing it to dangle erotically between her finger tips.
Kelly prepared
herself. “When I think about god, I think of the
“We can’t understand how God works.”
“No, hun, I agree completely. Let’s continue that. How do your parents understand how you should work? How can society, the same bastards that argue about whether to put that cunt Paris Hilton,” she took a long violent drag, exhaling slowly, “in jail for breaking the law! How can they hope to know what is best for you? They trump up religion, a set of goddamn social laws and finger feed morality. Morality!” Kelly leaned in to Ashley. “I’m going to sound stupid for one second, and you can go back to listening to me yell. Ashley, you live your life to love. Be it girl or guy whatever, you live it for love.”
Kelly grew embarrassed. She heard Kevin
yelling about the ramifications of love, how suicide bombers killed out of
love, about manipulation, etc. In her head, she heard David Bowie’s “Cygnit Committee” playing on repeat. She was no academic,
nor was she a Politian. She never tried to help people in
“I think I agree with you.” Ashley said.
“I don’t agree with myself,” Kelly mumbled.
“My brothers gay, you know.”
“Okay?”
“They don’t talk to him. And, when they do, they talk about Jesus.” Ashley sat back. At nineteen, she looked like she needed a stiff shot of Bean. “I’m not allowed home anymore.”
“Say what?”
“My mother’s been fighting with her family. About my grandmother. She’s dying. Cancer, from smoking, you know. Well, she wants to buried with my grandfather and my mother is fighting it. She has control of the burial land and stuff. It’s actually a long story.”
“You think she should be…” Kelly was afraid to say the word ‘buried’.
“Well, they’re all alike. They’re always at each other’s throats. Frankly, I can’t stand any of them anymore. But, my mom keeps saying that God will ‘deal with your grandmother.’ I don’t think it’s right…to wish someone to burn in hell and all.” Kelly thought of Kevin always descriptions of hell “a place of gray, heatless flames” and that the torment came, not from fire, but from an absence of a divinity. It always seemed to Kelly that Mike Ness was right to say earth was our time in hell. She would have told Ashley so, had she not continued. “Sometimes, I wonder if Freud wasn’t right.”
“Freud?” A name she couldn’t connect with religion.
“He said that religion was a fulfillment of man’s wishes.” Ashley stood up, carefully shifting her waitress tray. “I hate this place. I think I’m gonna quit someday.” She smiled, waving three thin fingers. “Bye Kelly, thanks for talking with me! I feel a lot better.”
“What the hell was
all that about?” Kelly said aloud. Noticing the clove butt in the ashtray,
Kelly rolled her eyes. At 8 bucks a pack, losing one was a considerable lose. She
gathered her belongs, ignoring the wasted jigger and
floating clove, and made for the door. Kelly snug her
black hoody about her frame. The club had begun to
empty, the young children abandoning their quest for sublimity for one more
night. Outside, the murky sky broke erratically with lightening, and the rain
fell oppressively down. The frigid winds rose over the distant
The night had proven to her that there was no rhyme to her reasoning. Instead, it had cemented her to the only individual force she had ever known. The passion of her final contemplations, had it ever been aired via voice, might have dissipated the sorrowful consequences; yet, with all great tragedies, the dismissed voices were often the correct ones. Somehow, in her thoughts, those same overlooked voices only forced her obstinacy. It was conditioned, social reasoning which urged her towards acceptable life, towards monetary success and the engulfing wings of neighborly love. No, only passion, even if it was entropic passion, led her forcibly away from dogmatic reason. This was no time for reason.
Like Ashley, she too was without a family or religion. Left to her own whiles, she felt dangerous. Like a true variant, she was capable of so much disrule, that even her compassionate motives seemed demonic. Why could she not think what she knew she was going to do? Lay it plain, she thought, and it will combust and dissipate. She stopped. The rain fell hard on her already soaked hair. She had listened to Ashley, and came away unscathed. Maybe there was something to catharsis. No, not for her, she reminded herself. There was no such thing. Only repression, only temperance. But now? Finally, was there room for expansion and expression? For the first time in her life, she saw an outlet to the control. She looked down between her leather boots. There, between the inch-high tread, she saw the stagnant puddles forming. The pathetic metaphor was not lost on her, but her thoughts turned from pastoral mirrors to individual relationships.
She knew what he would say about control, about the individual need to separate oneself from what society desired you to do. What of the sweet taboo, the distrusted things which tasted so sweet to the lips? The prelapsarian fruit of lunacy she desired daily make it impossible not to conform to deviancy. The paradox of it made Kelly wince. Kevin was blind. There was no right and wrong, only the arbitrary social deviation between the two. Worse, Kelly knew that benevolence was decided upon by the Hobsian masses. Left with no choice, she knew she it was better to please the self than to please the blind mouths. Rationally, she thought, the act must be done.
In the midst of the ostentatious rainfall, Kelly walked confidently home. There was nothing else to it, she thought. The act must be done. She adjusted the spongy sweatshirt as it uncomfortably chaffed her underarms. The rain poured down. In the precipitation, Kelly saw truth and religion before her: the oppressive nimbi bombarded the terrestrial world, the rain drowned as it healed, and the tempest engulfed the world; yet, she stove forward. Obstinately at first, but then self-assuredly forward, Kelly made her way home. She rounded the block, minutes from her house, and stopped again.
In murder, there was no difference between thought and action. She knew, as she imagined the bullets tearing his pale flesh, there was permanence in cognition. Could her physical form raise the heavy moral weight? Could she level the gun and slay all she loved? She ran painted nails through her dyed hair, turning twice around. Looking at the murky moon, she rubbed her eyes. She thought of the night, how artificial thoughts felt so realistic. She felt the oiled pistol in her hand, smelt the sulfuric reaction, the subtle acknowledgment of violence. Yes, she thought. To do is so very much harder than to think. She had the courage to die, but to kill? The death of the self was the fulfillment of individual will, the removal of the entire world’s adversary. But was it lunacy? She turned upon herself, kneading her thin fingers under her arms. She pulled her arms tightly about her drenched frame. “Am I mad?” she said to the frigid winds. But only oblivion greeted her inquires. In her existential angst, she cried to god.
“What remains, God?” she laughed maliciously aloud. “If I’ve lived lonely life, is death my universal bliss?” She squatted in the rain, watching the cascading drops blend violently into rippling puddles. She saw the infinity of nothingness. The abyss lies beyond those falling drops. The elements soon dissolved and were cast skyward, only to fall in the cursed cycle. Even as they were reformed, their individual courses and natures were lost to the masses. Such drops plummeted from the melting heavens, the briefest of vivid courses, only to meet with universal oblivion, never to be born again. For the cognizant, life was comprised only of the lesser fires, those wasted chemical reactions called happiness and hatred, joy and rancor, bliss and sorrow. Such was also social memory and immortality. But, for the passionate individual, only stagnant damnation remained. If the end was so clear, what was the purpose of the course? Kelly stood violently, shaking the beading drops from her forehead and hair. What was the purpose of awaiting nature to smite an empty life? Perhaps, after the cycle renewed, another form could gain joy from her bits of Caesar’s dust, as she perhaps leached from another’s miseries and joys. She smiled slightly at the awkward thought. Better to greet Nevermas on one’s own accord.
It suddenly occurred to her she had started crying. It was the sound of her steady, but halting, sobs against the now quieted winds. In her heart, she knew she was committed to the deed. It seemed, like when sloshed, that her body was protesting her daft decisions. Afterall, it was only biological and obeyed the foolish deeds she committed; it obeyed her irrational whim as god’s rule. Heedless, she walked home broken. Her soul, that fissured thing she identified as the self, dragged quietly behind her, saturated to its core.