draft two

 In the winter he died, in the spring he was reborn, in the summer and fall he grew. The weather would always send him on a path of rejuvenation, until at last he was forced to resign himself — his body rejecting the one inside of it, his skin crawling off of him, his form rendered useless and mute beyond agonizing pain.

He thought it funny to think of the car as his mech, a mechanical extension permitting him the form needed to traverse the wasteland. Corporate symbols flashing past the windshield, triggering some half-baked memory of the lecture on semiotics he had attended starved and stoned. Funneling himself through traffic at max speeds, critical impact inches away and surrounding him on all sides, he’d suddenly break through the waves of metal controlled by flesh, observing the concrete roads carving themselves into the natural geography, the brilliant sky a hallucinogenic reminder of the violence and blood blessing these lands. And he’d stop, and for a moment time would slow, as his gaze fixed upon the roads leading between pockets of civilization, the endless rush of traffic at once endowing perspective with real-time clarity, and he thought to himself… utopia.

The mech, originally a horse, diluted down by aerodynamics and advertising firms into a sleek bubble gliding across the surface of the highway. The pilot, once a cowboy, now a citizen of utopia, a willing participant in the institutional maze of academia — sedated, with the perfect cocktail mixture to ensure every form of productivity outside the most urgent of tasks. Caffeine, weed, nicotine… adderall would make things feel psychedelic, moments of clarity spewing themselves across the brain and spattering into those shaky hands desperate for hydration and stimulation. But that was only on the off occasion of chance; for the most part, the stimulation provided by caffeine was enough to bring the pilot into a new heightened form of awareness, a sensitivity repressed through childhood and filtered through a selection of substances. The pilot would sometimes cry to the music, the waves mapping the inside of his car in three-dimensional pulses that penetrated to his very core (he knew, he always felt it in his chest). And when he cried he’d be grateful, because the tears brought to mind the beautiful memories that led him to be in this car, going where he was going; the destination didn’t matter anymore, had never mattered at all — he remembered the nights he spent crying in bed when his body had failed him, and was thrust into the future he imagined those same nights.

So, Utopia it was then.

He arrived only 20 minutes late to class. Upon parking he immediately realized that he had every intention of skipping, and despite the shiver of guilt that ran up and down his spine, knew that he had to occupy the next three hours with productivity. It seemed that they were always asking for productivity — moving forward, into the unknown and yet-to-be conquered. The fire lit under his ass had long smouldered to ashen remains, when he inevitably realized that they (who were so much older, experienced, and most importantly, paid) had really only learned how to bullshit in better ways, more refined and tangible methods of excretion to fund their lives. Whether they were clinging to faith or income streams didn’t matter; he was really beginning to lack either, and so he began to think of the institution as a center for [redacted], those unfit to survive in society without the imposing structures of the institution — a facade where play could validate itself, a self evident sense of ‘progress’ leaking out of every corner and orifice and draining into a collective pool of pride. Utopia!

At once he was both grateful and loathsome of his situation, trapped by expectation and the coldness of reality. But he knew it didn’t have to be so, and he stretched his legs and walked in the sun, the lacerations on his legs finally fading into a dull sting which he took in stride. The blanket of pain, which had clouded his vision months before, forced him into a sedative trance state; and with recovery brought along a wide range of psychological addictions, solidified as a necessary evil and reinforced by the outside world. The sunlight, then, brought a new sense of peace onto his body, which lacked inner or outer alignment — the warmth, a blanket of tranquility, the nagging feeling that the trance state was only transitory, silenced by the euphoric pleasure of experience. And he realized beyond anything that he was a slave to experience. He hungered for life, ached in every part of his body to be conscious and in the moment. To feel something that would make his face contort, and his heart pound, and his eyes question themselves. He felt too alive to be in his own body — he was beginning to seriously consider how much more he could achieve beyond the physical form, and tried to view the inevitable suffering as an advantage, making life taste that much sweeter. 

Oftentimes this search would bring him into a frenzied state of disorganization, most of his thoughts trailing into oblivion and leaving behind nothing but a real hunger (or a sick nausea). But today he was able to walk, and the more his feet propelled him through space the more his body began to feel as one, experience shifting by, seamlessly, into memory.

The people passing coalesced into a blur as his attention shifted to the architecture of the institution. Lacking any real canonical knowledge beyond intuition and esoteric conversation filler, his analysis of his surroundings became increasingly personal and wordless. Experience once again filled his peripherals with a deep sense of dissociation — history now zoomed out to an ahistorical degree, the past and future collapsed into moving images indiscernible in the present moment. The architecture was beginning to seem eldritch, the decisions made by individuals who were alien to this particular realm of reality. Like spaceships dropped down in worship, aesthetics caught between function and purpose — he could feel the tiny colonies moving within concrete bodies.

He thought it was hysterical, looking at the buildings, that humans could will themselves to leave behind such structures (responsible for shadowing the masses for generations). Meanwhile he could barely will himself to birth anything into the barren institutional barriers for all but a miniscule fraction of time.

Truthfully, it had become bloodsport, a spectacle of self flagellation and faux empowerment for profit. At best, his most sincere efforts had been dismissed as masturbatory outbursts of anger and passion; at worst, his shoddy attempts at meeting requirements were vigorously defended by his peers, while he shamefully nodded his head with every new development in discourse.

During one drunken argument with a TA, he found himself arguing the importance of atmosphere and ambience over narrative structure. The TA had responded that he was a romantic, lost in the overindulgence of youth — while narrative structure wasn’t a necessity, structure certainly was, and the TA told him to study organic patterns in nature before embarking on his next artistic crusade.

The memory began replaying itself in his head, growing ever more vivid as he began wandering off the path and into the brush. He looked up into the sky, the silhouette of leaves outlining fractal edges that grew both outward and inward. The sun hit his face through the trees, warmth collapsing on his nose and spilling onto his cheeks.

Intuition.

It was intuition telling him that he had to be right here at this very moment; intuition, which had led him into this light, caught by his ruined skin and savored by his soul. He wondered if plants were consciously growing day by day, or if their intuition was strong enough to lead them to the resources they needed to survive. While he knew that it was possible to figure this out (or find out if that’s even how it worked at all), he also figured that he shouldn’t bother — his body sharing their presence was enough.

So he closed his eyes. And he breathed, letting the swirls of darkness dance across his eyelids in spirals of iridescence. For once he didn’t feel the pain; the wind cooled his burns, the air healed his cuts, the sun warmed his face like a lover’s caress. He reached out to a tree and felt his flesh meet bark, suddenly grateful for the sweat droplets forming at his forehead.

In the midst of this growing heat he was reminded of last year, when fall turned to winter, and fog began to cover the land in thick, rolling masses. After a particularly late night he had driven off campus, piloting his mech through the unknown, the only markers of civilization being the overbearing silhouettes of the campus architecture. Through the mist he saw construction lights penetrating the skyline, the skeleton of a city unfinished and half-seen. His skin had already started deteriorating; no matter how hard he tried to ignore the issue, he knew deep down that his body was regressing, and he had no idea how to stop the oncoming onslaught.

Gliding through every twist and turn, he felt his flesh merge with metal; him and the mech became one, a new exoskeleton that could support his fragile body as he ventured deeper into the abyss. In the dark he could ignore the layers of flesh gathering around him in piles; as long as he was behind the wheel, the pain was nonexistent, a distraction preventing him from moving forward. The trail of human waste was beginning to make the car stink, and so he rolled down the window, and felt the cold winter winds whip his cheeks with a tenderness that reminded him of his mother. A tough love; a love fueled by anger, ferocity unmatched.

When he arrived at the bar by the shore he quietly ate his food, tuning out the sports games surrounding him on all sides. The laughing and jeering felt hollow, simple noise reverberating around a chasm of hedonistic fantasy. He asked the man next to him for a cigarette, and sparked up outside, wandering up and down the street, his reflection trailing him at distorted paces and sizes.

He finally stopped walking in front of one of the galleries, observing his smoking character in the glass. In the background he could hear the waves crashing; if he listened hard enough, he felt like he could hear the Christmas lights buzzing with electricity.

Inside the gallery were walls filled with hyperrealistic paintings of nature; every biome imaginable, diluted down to water colors and artificial moments of tranquility. He didn’t even bother to look at the price tags.

Instead, he dashed his cigarette into the ground, and sat for a moment, wondering where he went so wrong.