UNE: COMMENT_DIS-TU_CES_MOTS?

My family taught me many things. The most notable of which was their faces.

I shuddered as the moonlight loomed over my back, through the slight gap between the curtains. There was no wind this night, or any other night. In the daytime, when the sun invaded and burned us all with its summer hate, however, I knew what to blame that on. The sun loathed our faces.

We had so many of them.

In the dead of the night, we had them too. It came with a bitter taste to acknowledge the fact, but the truth was the truth. My tongue was coated in something like the honey of a vulture bee. And that taste, yet again, had my mind on edge, surrounded by the thoughts which could only be somewhat outrun in the daylight.

Would it have been any lonelier to pluck the eyes from my head and lay down on the roof, waiting for the blackbirds to take me apart piece by piece? Would it have been any sweeter to have something making better use of me than this? Would the flies, and the worms, and the insects appreciate this body more than I do?

A girl on a mattress near mine snored. Her hand drifted toward the corner of my pillow, and I brushed it away, gentle as I could. She would not encroach on what little I had. A set of deluded lovers cuddled together on the other bed, whispering greater delusion into each others ears. I put my hands over mine. I've lived here my entire life, and they have lived here most of theirs. Late in the nights, when others soothed themselves, my mind refused. In rest, nightmares. In waking, thoughts that were wretched enough to be equivalent.

Would the crooning crows make better use of these hands? Sheets rustled in that bed not so far from mine, giggles interrupted the twilight. Their shuffling around loosened something above, and a preserved wing fell onto the hard wood floor between our mattresses with a pathetic splat.

The wings of birds that couldn't fly served better as the decor hanging above the doors in my house. But my body couldn't be perfectly preserved. My gut churned at the thought. I curled my legs in closer to my chest. Would the larvae appreciate a home in my gut?

I pressed my head against my knees. One leg was shorter than the other, so one knee pressed against my eye. The other my cheek, just below where my nose ended. I have no use for legs. I'm never going anywhere, so of course the marching legions of ants would benefit more. I fantasized for so long that the bones no one would eat would become part of a pretty nest somewhere. Yet here they remain, coated in meat that nothing will indulge. How long would I have to lay still for the ants to start biting? Until they started taking away the pieces of me that weren't needed?

If I disappeared far enough into the woods, would I have the soft chance my body could go undiscovered for long enough? My fingers twitched, leaving little indents in the pillow's form. They would right themselves soon enough, and the minimal marks of my presence would fade away.

If I dug through the garage that I'm always scared to enter, would I find a rope strong enough to hold me? Or would it be best to just lay myself down in a river? Fish would appreciate some meat. Maybe if there were bears– there probably weren't bears– they'd make great use of that too. Or perhaps a caribou, staring into mine eyes before tearing through them as my confession demands?

Those were the depressing sorts of thoughts I had always lived with. Truthfully, it was a strange feeling, being trapped somewhere so long that you couldn't imagine ever leaving. Ever wanting to leave. My father had left a long time ago, driven by the call of a fortune he never found, but he too remained in a way. His shackles attested to by my mother's wedding band and gifts of money brought from those oil sands.

He wasn't very far, but he never returned here, either. He lived alone, in those isolated camps, tearing through the bowels of the earth for black gold. As had so many of the men that came through our little family. Joining for a little while, drinking in the comforts, only to have to return to the only place where profit could still be found.

They kept us well, but we did little for them when they were away.

Sometimes, in the worst of days, I entertained the thought of running out the front door, gripping only a few of my things and never coming back. Vanishing to the same sands that seemed to take away all the men, but practicality denied the dream. If I had sense, I would've stopped dreaming about any of these sorts of things.

I couldn't imagine a life outside the comforts of this town. Any school other than the one I had gone to since I was four. Any other house than the one I'd lived in my whole life. Any other bed or bedroom. It was how I lived now, how I'd always lived, and how I imagine I'd continue to live until my coffin was placed into its grave.

I had no business being here, but I also had no desires strong enough to leave. A woman sighed, eager to wrap herself in the inappropriate love of another. I reached for headphones to cover the sounds. I shared a bedroom with five other people.

Sparrow, the girl snoring, her brother who never spoke without hatred, a couple in rendezvous night after night, and a man who always reeked of alcohol. He always watched. He thought no one knew, but I saw those small eyes, open in the midst of the act. Watching all that went bump in the night in our room.

I laid next to a window, my body pressed against the glass and the curtains every night. It was hot against my back, providing no relief from the endless heat. It's thin glass. You can give this world the gift you've always wanted, can't you? A body to feast on for the vultures?

I saw them every night on the prairie, beaks bathed in the gentle flows of the river. And they lived spread across the flat lands of the prairie. Turkey vultures, eyeing me when I laid too still in the hot sun, letting trails of ants march across my chest. The ones that flew above when I sat, but ran off like cowards as soon as I swatted the slightest bit toward them.

Disturbing the hushed night's veil, the woman sighed, and to the tune of her lover's own breath, a rugged murmur on the other side. Headphones jammed into my ears as far as they could go, they did me little good, even as I pressed play on whatever music I could find. There was no completely drowning the sound in instrumentality.

The spirit of beer no doubt kept the watcher entertained, as the wrong melody lured him asleep, tapping his feet to a rhythm that clashed with the drums. The siblings dreamt undisturbed, the way they always did, punctuating the night with a snoring only mildly more tolerable that merged with the bassline.

I turned over, and tried to focus on the place outside the window.

The trouble, however, was that there was nothing interesting outside. A handful of houses which all looked the exact same. One that, year after year, right next to ours, sat forever empty. Forever in buyer hell, with the signs of different realtors going in and out, trying desperately to get the place sold.

In my house, we looked at that house with a hunger. Because our own house didn't fit all of us. But we could never afford that second house, so it continued to sit empty. Forever empty. Just like my heart, I guess. Sometimes, I imagine leaving to live in there. A nominal freedom, but not too much more. Not so far that the rest of them could not reach me. Not so far I couldn't rely on my mother.

I lived this sort of dream. My endless dying dream.

A dream that existed without sleep. Wandering in the gaps between rest and wakefulness. A place where nothing could decay, but could never vanish. Where dead bodies like mine still moved, dragging themselves from place to place like this.

Surrounded by these things, surrounded by these dead dreams, I could never bring myself to sleep. To fully give into the night just felt crass, when it had already taken so much from me. When it already left my spine sore, and my head pounding.

As the sun arched over the horizon, I could tell, another day was upon me. The others rose slowly. Sparrow the earliest, quick and out the door before I could say a word to her. The others followed in clumps not long after. I watched them go, not doing a thing to move out of my own bed.

Never sleeping came with unique complications. The major one I had the most trouble with was the need to not do anything. It was infinite. Apathy and lethargy came with the territory of being sleepless and miserable. I was drowning in doing a million escapist things for the sake of not actually doing anything of worth. But then when I did things of worth, it just wasn't worth it.

The effort to clean a bedroom. The pain in my joints. The way pain shot up my spine. The way my fingers became ragged and sore, skin hanging off in small triangles of white, the first layer peeling away. There was a joy in video games, even if the productive feelings it brought on were a pure scam. Why wise the crumbin is? Wisdom must be a lie. Elation is the low droning hum of the beautiful wisdom's crumbs we leave in our history because our heads and hearts are floating.

But I was not floating. I was laying across a mattress. A thing covered in the great crumbs of skin stretched over the bones of hard wood. Stained and scratched, worn down with age, and aching for replacement that would never come. I traced a finger along my knee.

Life's such a miserable loop.

The alcoholic rose from his bed slowly, and didn't bother to try meeting my eyes. The night was his domain. In the light, he never met any of our eyes. When his gaze couldn't be dismissed as any other shadow, he seemed to have the decency to be ashamed. He staggered out without a word, leaving behind the sour stench of sweat and resignation.

I stayed curled in my nest of sheets, watching dust motes drift in the slanted sunlight. The summer had arrived, which was always the worst part of the year. Coinciding with a slow, whispering break, which everyone else seemed to worship with a fervour that was beyond me.

In my mind, summer break was the most wretched times of year.

A time where everyone expected me to be doing something interesting. The times where everyone told me to chase after my youth with hands that did everything to grasp at the fleeting time. As though I hadn't been doing something for the rest of the year. To suffer through the days at school, and all the work that came with it. That shouldn't have been too difficult to understand. But no one ever acknowledged that, because adult life was harder.

Or maybe it wasn't harder. Maybe adult life just made you better at grandstanding.

Either way, it only made me never want to be an adult. Why did everyone talk like being an adult was so hard if they wanted their kids to live to adulthood? I kept negotiating when I would kill myself, and I had settled that it was whenever I could no longer put off adulthood. Whenever I could no longer hide behind youth or ineptitude, and was inevitably dragged away, I promised this to myself.

I revelled in the fact somewhat. Knowing when the end could come, with full acceptance of its coming arrival? Truly, an ideal situation. And it was a situation that I was certain could be dragged out for some time, at least.

The one good fact about the mess of people and squalor that made up my home, was that not everyone had to work to live here. So long as we abided by the codes of the house and did whatever the owners said, we could live here forever. My mothers arms, her shame, perhaps she would keep me locked up forever. Hidden from the world, a shame to her name.

A thing sitting in her home, playing video games and making nothing of itself through its whole life. Being the person of my nightmares was almost a dream in some ways. What a sick personality.

Near my foot, the brother awoke, stumbling out of bed, and toward the door, grumbling about breakfast foods and whatever other nonsense. A conversation flickered to life downstairs, as I closed my eyes again. Truthfully, these are nothing but colourless green ideas, floating through my head like blood. Wisecrumbin, low hum, elation we. Wisecrumbin, elation is a lie.

My eyes finally fell closed, if only to hide from the sun. But rest was not coming, instead filled with those thoughts of things. Too many things. My head never stopped it's silent, melancholic euphoria. I'm lonely.

A henceforth don wealth id speaks for me, to give definition to what defines the world and what the world is not defined by.