Since I couldn't sleep last night I got up and wrote, here is my midnight rambling:
The theatre is opulent, despite the ramshackle door which allows me access from the street. The walls are covered in a periodic French wallpaper, somewhere between turquoise and light blue. The carpets are crimson, interspersed with flecks of white, which upon closer inspection become fleur de lis and the white dado rails are met by tarnished cupric-bronze clasps which retain the attractive voluptuous flow of the heavy curtains.
I have been here before. I know the truth of this. I have felt the spring of the floor and the smell of antiquity in the furniture. I know the polished moistness of the beeswax on the side tables and the tobacco stained glass through which the light of the blubell shaped wall lamps strives. To my left and right are curtains which hang in a nauseous series of folds enticing vertigo from any who regard them. They suggest that the foyer is above the level of the rest of the building, perhaps the world. A middle space between floors at which both down and up are possible courses of action, certainly no extended amount of time can be considered here. I am literally urged to continue my journey by the room's impatience.
Ahead of me is a shadowed staircase which leads up and away to the further reaches of life. I choose not to exhibit a request for the satisfaction of mortal curiosity, instead choosing to confront my fear of heights by battling the curtains. The left hand side is somehow more appealing and I draw back the curtain tentatively, down into the belly of the whale.
"Come and sit down Liam," she says, eyes turned to her piano as if somehow attempting to understand it for the first time. The carpet from the foyer continues into the room, flowing its whoreish branding over the furniture as if it were upholstery. Nothing in the room is left uncovered, not the steps, nor seats, nor skirting board. Everything is coated in, suggesting it was once unbridled and liquid in its desire. The steps of the auditorium stretch away from me, four times as long as they are deep. I wander awkwardly down them like a spaceman; the distance across them is too far for one step, too demanding for more. It leaves me lumbering with extended gait.
She begins to play a simple melody with a percussive roll, like a series of drum fills. She pauses to look at me and for the first time smiles.
"Something I'm working on."
"I know this place, " I reply as if that is a justification for her.
She begins to play again and I find a carpetted seat just below the level of the stage. Her red hair whips like a flag in the wind as she moves in and out of the keyboard with each phrase. Her voice is a practiced enunciation of perfection, the mouthpiece of angels. And yet she looks so sad, so lost, as if the complexity of her music traces a path between her and the rest of the world; to err in playing would break any chance she has of returning afterwards. The fragility of her trade becomes the very bridge to which she must apply the greatest strain. She pauses and it is like standing on the edge of a cliff, knowing that one way means death.
"Write me a poem Liam, I want to fill her with poems, with all of them. I want each and every word you have given for your life to lay on her strings and rest upon her vibrations. I want to play into your lyrics, infuse them with the resonance of understanding and when it is done I will set a fire in her and music and words will swirl and spiral into the sky to kiss the stars, to f*ck the night till she screams!"
She turns back to her piano and says a last goodbye. A quiet piece which promises a better world but begs forgiveness for the transition between there and here. It rolls into a flood to quench the oncoming fire, but resides like melting snow on Christmas Eve; dissappointing and ineffectual.
I write her a poem for the loss of innocence and the bitter taste of knowledge and culpability and it fills a hundred pages. I lay it on the strings of her piano and kiss the wood. She lights a match and with one last stroke of the keys, she lays it gently upon my pages and even her tears cannot quench the flames. We stand and watch the word and the song and the fire of all humanity, and we cry and we listen and the sky swallows it all up until the cessation of night brings a fresh breeze and a cold dawn and the theatre dulls in the dour light of mourning.
I look to where she stands, but she is gone and the theatre is closing.
I went through a stage of keeping a book for each type of inebriant. Each time I took a specific one, I'd write only in that book. That was until, whilst on acid, I decided it would be a good idea to write the same thing in all of them to confuse myself. After that it didn't seem quite so effectual.
Originally posted by StarrmanInteresting, a touch melodramatic, but I like how you've suffused your rambling with powerful detail. Have you published anything?
Since I couldn't sleep last night I got up and wrote, here is my midnight rambling:
The theatre is opulent, despite the ramshackle door which allows me access from the street. The walls are covered in a periodic French wallpaper, somewhere between turquoise and light blue. The carpets are crimson, interspersed with flecks of white, which upon closer i ...[text shortened]... light of mourning.
I look to where she stands, but she is gone and the theatre is closing.
🙁 i posted some inebriated ramblings of my own but they must have been deemed too explicit for the innocent 'have never seen an 'f' and 3 stars before' eyes of the rhp community, so it got modded back to whichever depths-of-somewhere it came from.
mayhaps i shall find a more mod-friendly example and post that