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=   F.U.C.K. - Fucked Up College Kids - Born Jan. 24th, 1993 - F.U.C.K.   =
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		          Solstice
                           --------

Darkness encircled his eyes in a betrayal of fatigue, not so much induced
by insomnia as by the unrest of his waking hours. No amount of sleep that
he could persevere to achieve seemed at all capable of counterbalancing
the impotent adrenal rush of feeling like a rat in a submerged cage -
like a lab rat in the process of sadistic testing; yes, that was it. That
was almost the feeling, depending on which numbers the hands lay upon.
But that was one of them, for sure.

How did it start again? Re-collection was simply too much picking up of
articles better forgotten. Instead, he simply wandered about in that
desolate hole and ruminated about whatever he came upon in his desultory
travels. How long had he remained in this fetid room? Too long. No, in
truth, not that long he corrected. Not that long, he affirmed, as he
struggled to remember the starting point of the Not That Long. Hell,
yesterday and its contents were mostly an inscrutable amalgam that took
more energy to comprehend than to forget. Why go to the beginning of the
end, when the end seemed much more a beginning?

He reflected upon why. Why he was here. Simply put, the solstice simply
didn't play savior to him this year. He continued through living his
life, but as he did, the days continued to shorten and shorten. He
assumed that such was a normal occurrence, or a fluke phenomenon that
would soon dissipate. The days continued, inexorably and seemingly
ineptly, as though time had actually lost tempo and continually
accelerated and decelerated in an attempt to rectify its error; and as
each day continued, so did the darkness creep upon and overtake the
light, until finally the light capitulated his world to the sable blanket
that now perpetually enshrouded it.

It was his world that was so devoid of light, as the others continued
their play. He still remembered the awestruck horror with which he beheld
that the others did not even notice the siege of the pall upon the world,
until it finally occurred to him, amidst the truculent battle cries and
cheerful giggling of one of their many revels, that they were unaffected
by this sinister eternal night. They seemed not to feel the biting cold
of forever's winter, nor did their eyes seem to speak to them of the
blindness that accompanies no sunlight. Days were spent in incessant
obsession: were they truly immune, or merely naive?...that is, was it
cognizance or common ground that was lacking?

The knife-turn of events left him sequestered in his room, lighting
provided by candles with bright, ardent flames so powerful that they
burned him when he got too close, but too weak to warm him if he strayed
away. Another peculiarity of these essential flames was their latency;
unless you felt them, or saw their effects on the other components of the
room as they filtered through the waving, dancing heat, they were fully
undetectable. Odorless, colorless - truly did they fit in with the
emotional inanition and listlessness of his room. The walls had a color,
to be sure, as all things do, but the light never found its way to them;
thus, he was forced to explore them, when he managed to confront the
dread it evinced, in stark darkness.

The walls, in fact, were quite peculiar. Albeit they were impossible to
see through the murk that surrounded them, he would get a natural feel of
their presence when it came time for them to do their job. They appeared
to be ever-shifting, vacillating between the vague regions of Near and
Far with an almost undetectable stealth and speed. They even seemed more
of dense, impregnable fluid contrivances than of inflexible material most
often used for confinement.

He would often wander in some odd direction, either by his intention or
by a mysterious external pull, and when he slammed headlong into the
wall, he would instantly recall its purpose there and sudden waves of an
alienating terror overtook him. In this state, he knew that he was
incapable of survival outside of this dank prison that held him...

Over time, whereupon his wounds simply healed into grotesque internal
scars, the discomfort and hideousness of which only he could observe, he
began to wonder why it was that he was so confined. Why it was that these
macabre partisans withheld his view of the outside world? Even the
windows had blackened over with grime from lack of maintenance.
Occasionally, he would hear voices faintly speaking his name, seeming to
talk to him, but he knew they were not for him. They never were before;
how could they be now? And why? No -- they were not for him. Not before,
not ever.

He said this to himself and a shudder virulently made its way down his
spine. Perhaps he was afraid. Afraid because he didn't know how to answer
back. Afraid because if he dared to even hope for a reply to no avail,
then the walls of his prison might just crush him under their enormous
weight. Afraid because it burned and ached and gnawed to be in this
feeble form of pseudo-existence, but he remembered the darkness and the
extreme, bitter cold outside and a deluge of memories taunted his
flickering sense of being and he said, "No."

As days increased, the candles grew ever hotter and more fierce, but
their flames boasted but little strength and but the slightest draught
would extinguish them -- curiously, though, he need never relight them,
as simply picking up a photograph or even a glance at the walls would
strike them up again with a new dead life.

Through eon after eon of the tense terseness and isolated immolation, he
remained within the dread walls that he knew not how long he had been
inside; more than a single day, to be sure, but of months? years? It was
simply beyond him to surmise. He was not altogether sure that it even met
his concern. He wondered if it could meet another's concern? Then he
would scoff outwardly at his gullibility to that impish Eros, Hope, while
his inner recesses would, quite secretly to all other regions of himself,
pray with the desperation of the condemned minutes before judgment.

Judgment, that is, in the form of internal apocalypses. Every prior
action, every move, every thought was subject to analysis and
cross-examination, every mistake was etched in a memorial wall and every
victory was debated as a mistake. Nothing escaped the prosecution, and
the defense was too wrapped up in comprehending the barrage to even begin
a response, much less a repudiation. Eventually he learned to tune out
the droning of the self-loathing-automatons when it was critical to do so
so that he could still function, from time to time, if functioning was
even still possible while within this gulag of listlessness.

Not all was lost, but it all suffocated under the dense cloak enveloping
the contents of the room. This asphyxiation was too inefficient to
actually kill, but enough to maim, or at least substantially sap, its
unwiliing underlings. Though it was too strong for him to destroy, it was
not so powerful that it could destroy him either; in fact it needed him,
in the parasitic fashion that a strangler fig needs its host tree to
remain alive before it finally destroys it and takes its place. The
difference was that this was actually manifesting itself within him;
changing him to a numb, cold austerity, and yet the rest became nothing
more than a bitter reflection of what those fragments once were. Slowly,
gradually, he began to lose himself. And in that was the true horror,
because the further along it got, the more it felt like there was no way
out, but the less time there was to check, and finally, it concluded,
with his old self far dissipated, and in its place was a stoic physical
replica whose innards consisted solely of an hourglass and an
inscrutable, viscous dark liquid.


- agrajag
http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Club/1610/

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