the doors opened backwards

1. a long hall. the walls are grey and papr’y flakes of red paint hang on for dear lives. 100 doors; 50 on each side with the empty sockets of shrines at the corridor’s each end. I’ve wandered up and down several times and inspected each door in full. Although similar, they are not identical, but vary often only in the smallest of ways. Different shades of paint. Different panels. One bears a keyhole. The next does not.
2. all are numbered. not in order. not in all same fonts. a few miss numbers but i can see the outlines of where they once stuck on so there is no surprise. i can’t make out any ordr to it but i’m not a real magician with numbers in that way.
3. A row of hanging lightbulbs lights the whole hall, but only barely. A quarter of the bulbs cast no light at all and stare as heavy as some dead dragon’s eyes hung limply from eyeholes unseen.
4. Each door is edged by locks and chains. Some contain just one, others contain 10, 20, 25.
5. Some locks unlock by a simple turn. Some face towards me keyhole hungry for little fingers or a pin but I have not the latter on my person and to touch the keyhole all it leaves are greasy stains upon my prints.
6. I open one door but it stops after cracking only 2”. A chain on the other side prevents it swinging any further. I cannot reach in to unlock it.
7. All other opening doors are similarly blocked. There is nothing but END. LESS. SHADOWS. on the other side.
8. YOU ONLY WAKE UP FROM A PLACE LIKE THIS WHEN YOU. LAY DOWN AND WILL YOURSELF TO DIE. WAKE UP IN YOUR BED ONCE MORE JUST GET OUT.

Time is changing every day; now when I think of looking at the former [__] THE BEAST, all those yearnings, wishes slip away, fall to the floor in polaroids, and when I look horizon-bound I find I’m not so yearnful after all. The fact that such a [__] could ever have become some stalker face-up all my dreams should have been the first tip-off honestly and even though the north country’s laid itself barren for only some short time, already I’ve found:

THE BEAST’s horns and crown aship at sea right now but soon enough returned and brought to coast

THE BEAST’s claws a dime-a-dozen but right now raking through soft earth in slight East loamlands:lowlands

THE BEAST’s burst-open brain-and-heart already beating, ticking deep inside a little thing once called out as THE TERRORISTA

go back to your sixth hell…666th hell….to join THE DEVIL in those all-pretenderers…sigh…I feel better without such sadists snipping at my back

I cut off the fangs of a creature that once might have stood as a man but who instead I’ll simply have to call THE BEAST; both THE BEAST and THE DEVIL are (j-u-s-t) figures now, cut-out paper dolls pressed tightly between pages of another book on a shelf stretching 47,977,377,636 feet and accessed via telepathic link with various tab-marked sections; a lexicon;

The past few days, the weather’s been quite nice; although my moods have been extremely up-and-down (partially due to illness and partially due to other physical maladies), summer makes me want to write and work hard and look at different things. I feel that I become an insular and reclusive creature in the winter and while I don’t say I could ever call myself an extrovert, the past few days I’ve wanted to- actually look at different writers, look at different artists. The norm for me is to compare myself ad nauseum to everything but I’m learning to shed those sentiments, slowly. I tend to avoid looking even at artists I very much admire because I start to feel so inferior in comparison, but then, I wonder why I do that when I don’t even want to be an illustrator in the first place? Art for me is just a means to an end and I’ll never call myself an ‘artist’ or describe myself as any noun- it’s too easy to box oneself in that way- sometimes I draw, mostly I write, but if I want to change my verb-of-the-moment I don’t want to feel so embedded in these set guidelines of what exactly I’m doing with myself, creatively.

Now that my illness has finally cleared (I was bed-ridden and even head-sick with fever to a point where I could, when I closed my eyes, feel my body drifting in a million places at once) I can work on writing with more clarity. I have so many words I want to put down and places that I want to not only go to but take others to as well. WILL you come on these journies with me?