Mordor in Rain
I still fear the coming of an acid rain, the drenching that burns away the outlines of who I am. It’s not really a contemporary fear any more, the chemical soup we spill out into the world from our cities has changed in composition: the sulphurous fumes have been replaced and we are no longer going to dissolve but instead we will bake. I can fear the baking, but only on an abstract level, a pervading dread. I can feel the acid leach definition from my skin. It was the statues that did it, because they look like people in a way that brutalist concrete blocks never could. I would have welcomed the erosion of the serrated concrete slab of council-owned decay I was born and grown in, but then that was probably why no-one ever used that death of habitation to illustrate what the rain was doing. But the statues: their chiselled, immortal faces becoming pulpy and worn, turning from history to nothing; they were everything I feared and wanted to be. They were the purifying death of a species.
I fear the acid, but I welcome it too. I want it. I yearn for its caress, to unify the inside and the outside of the brutalist physical form that houses me. My blood flows with acid, a by-product of being the me that cannot stand to be in the same body as me. A by-product of being the me that erodes the presence of the other me that is the real me. Except that there is no real me, only a version iterated through history, a snapshot in the minds of those who view it. A series of frames, running sixty to the second.
The rain pours across broken monuments that reappear, full-featured in the eye of my mind. I can remember, and therefore traverse, that which life has destroyed. And yet, even as I seek revenge for the death of my one true love, my dick twitches in my pants at the merest sight of female flesh, at a hint of even friendly interest. I am not real, I am not someone who was born and lived but someone who was built, piecemeal and back to front. That which I want changed so many times that I cannot know who I am. I am only a reversion to type, an ill-fitting jigsaw that, if you stand far enough back still makes a passable picture. Too many minds in one place and time. Too many ideas for anything but paralysis and the line of safest traversal. Too many side quests to even count.
The only thing that makes sense, that isn’t a disjointed mess, is other people. Those around me grow and change and have loves and rivalries and friendships. And then they die, because of me. I am their nemesis. I am the thing that ends their stories, even as I give them meaning. It is the worst form of solipsism, to know that you are what is ruining the lives of those around you. I am a broken record, destined and true and with a full potentiality of music in my future, but every skip and every scratch is another ending. Every restart is a lack of meaning that further degrades who I am, that brings the pulpy mess of stone closer to being.
There is no history in the constancy of now, though. If the past can be accessed verbatim, if it can be atoned for directly, then it is no longer the past, but instead a present smeared out beyond all recognisable definition; a nothing consuming the future as well as itself. A history that erases itself, that denies the lives of those who live for its own selfish purposes. I fear the coming rain because it is the rain of my self upon the world.
