On the train back to London, I notice a sinister sinking feeling in my gut, as if my instinctual and primordial animal self is writhing behind the caged bars of my social nurture and is thrashing wildly with raging fury, screaming to me that there is danger near, that some imminent doom awaits me in the near future if I continue down this dark and gloomy path. It scares me, and I feel as if I am a child once more, sitting quietly, brooding on my way back to boarding school, to isolation, to solitude, or even back to the black abyss of death from whence I came, surging maniacally to my mortal fate with nothing but a gut-wrenching sensation of despair, blood curdling sorrow and vacant patience, a farewell to the reality and serenity I’ve known these past few weeks and a solemn return to the surrealistic void of my peculiar and maddening mind. As I close my eyes and wonder of my fate and dream upon the shores of time, the monstrous machine roaring mere feet below me rages furiously on into the night, carrying my soul – it’s morbid cargo – to the ill-omened future, mired in bitter frost and icy regret, or so we shall see, and of all the lost souls who roam the barren wasteland of this earth, my heart bleeds the most for those who are cursed to love me, and so I sit in a hypnotic trance, the train rumbling insidiously below me, and suddenly feel it all, all the harrowing sorrows of my past, all the sweet and sour memories of my childhood and the fantasies I once lost myself within, and I want to weep, to let it all out, let it flow out of my soul like a terrifying waterfall, a mythological eruption of soul-substance, but the sirens in the distance awaken me from my tortured reverie and I am jolted roughly back into the reality I so wish to escape.
Journal Extract by Stamos Mardou