We are hurtling irrevocably into modernity. To look upon the date written above this journal entry is strange and seemingly surreal. I’m sitting down, knees up and hugging my chest, back to the wall, facing my large windows, which are covered by thick yellow curtains with intricate patterns knitted within their coarse folds; there is a strong, clean light seeping through them, covering my room in a hazy apparition of golden light, like sitting alone and basking within a warm cloud of mystical yellow hues. I’ve been sitting here silently for hours, immersed in the abstract technicolour scene in a profound meditative trance, the beauty and strangeness of this elongated moment has sent me deep into a dazed reverie and now, as the light slowly fades, I am being gently pulled from this peculiar waking dream back into a wider scope of reality. The world rolls on before my eyes, the enormous glittering tapestry of energy coursing madly through time and space in the form of cause and event and now, billions of years and moments later, here I sit, staring up at the yellow light, as if in the eye of the storm, the peaceful centre of a great tempestuously raging storm of meaningless havoc swirling and coalescing all around me, while I am frozen in a bizarre trance right in the centre, in a bubble, a void, a watcher of the world, casting my tired gaze upon the stunning immortality of the cosmos. Sitting here, I remember the bright haunting lights of distant city streets and stranger’s eerie stares and the endless nights roaming London avenues, drunk, consumed by the dissonant sounds of life and feeling the sharp steel of Death’s looming scythe, as it tickles my back and runs sensuously down my tortured spine, or as the angel of death herself follows me, always behind me, as she always has been, waiting patiently and watching my slow decay and deterioration with a sad smile and hey dark eyes, so grotesque, her pupils dilated, intoxicated by my suffering.
Journal Extract by Stamos Mardou