Fiction

Vices

If you live, are you really alive? What classifies you into the perceived superiority of being a living human being? Is it the constant seeping of red liquid through your arteries, that slips your mind? Is it your heart sprinting at a thousand beats per minute, the soar of stimulants, the only substances that can supply satisfactory speed? What is ‘should’ and who decides it?

Is it reaching that ecstatic infinite pleasure, when your body is linked to someone you think you love? You, thinking you know what love is. Giving and taking become visible verbs.

Is it the employment of your patience and anxiety in restriction that gives you potency, a hazy sense of control driving your brain to correlate emptiness with good or bad? Or is it charging, restrained, eyes barely open but barely closed? Hunger gnaws out a hole in your stomach and your brain when it is voluntary.

Is it licking the last remnants of a double, extra special Gordon’s measure of regret from around your mouth? Is it staring deep into the soul of your own personal convert to heliology, or is it the tie of forbidden truths not untold, latching the secret keepers close in the presence of the subject? It is always a good idea to have another drink.

Is it a warm haze of intoxication fuzzing over your ‘better’ judgement? Or is it your better judgement being reversed in the presence of an idolised confederate. Is it the joy in your offspring’s eyes, as they tear light-reflecting paper away from their source of momentary entertainment? Only a child portrays greed in such a way, emanating content in the eyes of their audience.

Is it the tranquillity than only isolation seems to bring, a lack of words sounding your voice? Is it the withdrawal into the smallest shell of yourself that I have never set eyes on? Is it the outburst of precipitation from the heavens, soaking you in drips of pathetic fallacy? Or is it the warmth of a thousand tropical sunbursts?

I think it is a tongue enveloping itself in steaming bitter liquid, a cardboard cup full of generosity. It is the embrace of a companion at the coldest point of another’s life. It is the upturned mouth created when a grey fog stretched out across all that was visible, and all that was invisible. We never speak about death; it is the inevitable taboo governing our consciousness at all miniscule minutes and hours.

Maria Vegro