Get it out of My Head

The song loops around and begins again. I still can't tell if it's coming from me or to me. All I know is that if I hear one more time, "that there's a-time to change," I'm, I'm going to smash every single window on this bus. The black things outside, the obsidian souls have started to abate from the bus. They were unable to rock it all the way over and so they are starting to move on to things that they can smash and flip. Maybe, they didn't want to flip it. Maybe they just wanted to get on it. Take a ride. We were at a platform after all and the doors never opened. Many of the windows have greasy grey streaks and hand prints on them. I succumbed to the realization that I'm never going to get where I am going. The driver won't let me off, nor will she tell me what is going on here.

"What do you want from this, us. What do you want us to be?"

"I don't know. I like you. I like you a lot, but I don't want to name it or put a label. That shit always screws it up. Creates a pressure that I don't think we need."

"So, what are we to you then?"

"These questions are so cliché. Can't we just be fun? I just want to enjoy you and what we have together."

"That's fine but how can I enjoy what we have if I don't even know what we have?"

"Ugh, you are no fun. The mystery and the joy of discovery are what is fun."

He never really got over that conversation. It made him so angry for so long. But he never gave up on me. He never left. "She acts like summer and talks like rain..." Ugh. Even the universe mocks me. My life, my love is so interconnected to the art and music I liked. They are both a light, defining me. I tried so hard to turn it off. But who can live without any kind of art? You can't live without light. In the same way I couldn't live without him. Loneliness. There is a massive hole inside of me. I can feel the air blowing cooly through it every time I think of him now.

There are more of those black things, those obsidian souls as I'm beginning to think of them lining the sidewalk as the bus glides by. I can't tell you when I heard sound last. I can't even hear my own voice when I talk. They are waving at the bus trying to flag it down. The driver kisses her teeth at them and spits at the floor. I wonder what that's all about. The one thing I miss about him was that he never looked down on anyone. Didn't matter how much money they had, what colour or creed. He never cared, it didn't even matter how horrible they were. He'd correct the assholes, ever the up-stander and never the bystander. But that was it. It ended when the situation did, no drama or grudges.

The energy changes outside, the obsidian souls amp up. Something is happening up ahead causing the lines to bunch into groups. They're no longer just standing there waving for the bus but scrambling for it; some dive into the street and are crushed beneath the wheels sending out splashes of strange coloured ichor back onto the sidewalk and spattering the others, which don't seem to notice as they fight one another and run this way and that. They're panicked, but why? The sky darkens causing the streetlights to come on filling the air with a strange, dim green light. A few of the creatures are able to get their fingers onto the windows or trim on the side of the bus and are dragged for a while before they finally let go spinning into the gutters, their skin ripped to tatters, flayed leaking that same ichor which has a strange luminous quality to it, their limbs broken and bent at horrible angles.

The bus speakers crackle to life, static fills the buses intercom and then in that old crushing gravel tone,

"This is not your fate."

"Huh?" I can't quite believe that I'm being spoken to by the driver. Not scolded this time but actually communicated with. Then the realization that I'm really not in control at all. I'm lost and I have lost control over my life. I always believed in free-will. But this bus ride has done a lot to illuminate things for me. Which is odd, because I've always hated the boundaries that bind a person. Only now, these boundaries are liberating. For so long, I've been on this bus not knowing a thing, confined to my own confusion and misunderstanding. Where the fuck am I? And, where the fuck am I going? I had completely gone mad with the spotlight on me, surrounded by the darkness of my choosing.

"All will be made clear in due course."

Why now? Why, all of a sudden? The limp, obsidian corpses, soul corpses? in the street were set upon by the ones that walked like crabs. They rolled them into piles. What were they doing? Then came a group that looked much different. They were smooth like polished stone and marbled. Red and white. The red streaks in their flesh like flowing bolts of lightning rippling across their flesh. They almost looked like Turkish onyx. They were adorned in the clothes of a heavily armed SWAT squad. They were very organized and had some sort of tool set which included nets. They flung the nets over the obsidian souls trying to run from them. So, that's the cause of all the commotion. They were like an American ICE squad rounding up foreigners and anyone that seemed like they may not belong. This accounted for everyone on the sidewalk. Fish in a barrel, souls in a ring. I saw a net land on its intended target and light up electric blue in large arc streamers from one cross rope to another. Instantly the creature convulsed twisting and contorting. Smoke rose off its already charred flesh and it split and peeled. It was worse than those that were hit or run over and the smell clawed its way into the bus. It was sickly sweet and cloying. I gagged and retched. The nets were electrified and extinguishing these poor souls.

The bus continued to glide by the mess outside. The buildings started getting taller and the creatures outside more and more frantic. As they were slammed into the sides of them, thrown onto the ground before their limbs were bound. More teams showed up and began subduing the poor schmucks. They would shackle them in what looked like police zip ties, but they must have been electrified too, as the militant figures had little remotes and would press a button on them and laugh as they creatures on the ground convulsed.

What was the point? Why the carnage?

I looked up trying to avoid the violence and was once again disoriented. They sky had broken apart, like an old DOS computer background. It was various shades of black and green and pixelated. Little jagged edged square pieces sliding up and down, left and right as if the landscape was shifting and rearranging. I wondered how long that had been going on for and if I was so consumed in the things around me that I'd been missing it all along.

The tallest of the buildings put us into shadow and took some of the brunt away from my eyes and reeling mind trying to make sense of the images it was receiving. Down the sides of the buildings ran the obsidian spider creatures. Leaping and skittering to the writhing masses below. As they moved they navigated the shifting bricks which like the sky seemed to be pixels creating the reality of the buildings. Bricks slid left and right like those sliding tile puzzles. I followed the spider things down and the movements of the bricks.

The military people are shoving the obsidian souls into the gaps made by the moving bricks and then they seal up around them absorbing their bodies into the structure of the building. Their faces and appendages protrude from the walls of all the buildings around us. It is Dantescan. There are faces in the trees. Limbs in the branches. How have I not noticed all of this before?

The Wood of Suicides. The ICE team are like the Harpies, torturing the souls by breaking off branches and pieces of bricks, stuffing them into the buildings in the first place and then breaking them apart again, rearranging them. I have to be dreaming. This is a nightmare.

"That is not your fate."

But I can't get it out of my head.