The sheets of ice upon which I solemnly prance – that separate me from the freezing oceans of despair below – are starting to crack and crumble; I can feel the scorching rays of sorrow slowly melting them. They will soon be entirely eviscerated from the face of reality and I shall, once more, be plunged into another period of existential anguish from which I may never surface. To know my harsh fate so intimately sends sinister shivers, running like electricity, up my spine making me shudder with terrifying anticipation. I can feel the hangman’s noose insidiously wrapping around my neck, death’s cold hands bearing down upon my tortured mind, and the inevitable future – like a colossal wave of monstrous horror – steadily rolling towards me on the eerie horizon. How peculiar, that this frightful sense of doom can arise during a sublime walk through luscious English Spring fields, accompanied by symphonic birdsong and the mellifluous sound of a gently gurgling river; as if one had inadvertently stumbled into the utopian realms of Elysium, or the eternal shores of Nirvana, only to be “shocked out of my natural ecstasy” (Ginsberg, Howl) by the harrowing epiphany that these days of blissful joy are numbered.
Alas, now the tides of fate are turning, my mind is decaying into chaos and confusion once more, the gargantuan maze of abstraction that is my waking nightmarish reality is consuming my trembling pathetic soul like a feather floating idly into the rampaging fury of a tsunami, all that I have been working on lingers on now in the folders of my laptop as the tombstone, the forlorn legacy, of this happy period that is now solemnly coming to pass … so bitter the taste of life now seems when not one week ago it tasted like sacred fruit – slathered in ancient mythological ambrosia nectar – plucked from the eternal tree of wisdom and ecstasy that branches its fibrous roots through the vanishing veil of reality. I am mired in gloom once more, I must not reach for the crutch, the morbid bottle, as I have done in the past, I must allow myself to feel all this pain as it comes, pure, as nature intended, even if my brittle bones are to fade into dust, even if the darkness in my mind is to finally swallow me up whole leaving nothing behind but the memory of a dream not yet dreamt, even if the mere sight of myself brings acidic tears raging out of my tormented skull, that is my fate and I must accept it and allow myself to feel all the horror that I know is to come … a peculiar peacock squawks in the night, it must be roaming the distant pastures across the river where the Duke resides in his palace of skeletons, those rolling English meadows where deer wander aimlessly munching on moist grass underfoot and trees sway in the gentle breeze, their leaves illuminated by the holy rays of twilight … how strange it is to awake into this odd reality, as I have done, as if not connected to who I was just yesterday, as if I am teetering on the edge of reality and at the last moment lurch in the wrong direction, only to land incorrectly and my ankle splinter and shatter brutally under the weight of my mistake.
Journal Extract by Stamos Mardou