He fell into flippancy as one falls off of a cliff. He would walk down corridors with his anger tightly knit under his skin in a small place where no one saw, or no one looked to see. The pain of loss, its reverberations, its darkness and its silence; he was surrounded by oceans of cold.
He wanted a dark room, with concrete walls and a door that would shed flakes of dried paint. He wanted a brush, and red, and he wanted to allow his rage to dance out of him for uncounted hours until the room was crimson and he was sated and resigned. He wanted to be resigned.
He walks now, down the street, the barren cold of Chicago in February, the slush and the drab seeping into his shoes and his soul. He notices them with an unconscious sideward glance, and then he wraps them around himself. He wants the tiny miseries, he wants the pain and the nuisance and anything that makes life harder. He wants so desperately to be forced to fight for his existence. A fight gives him purpose and purpose is logical and he wants to be logical.
He passively stares at icicles on the banister as he walks up the stairs, and he feels as if the world is all encompassed in the flaking paint of the outer and inner doors of his dilapidated apartment. He wanted no better for himself, he likes that his inner life is falling apart while his external being appears so successful and calm. He likes that no one knows, and yet… And yet he wishes some one did.
The heat greets him angrily, and he keeps the lights off. He sits at his desk, a whisper of a thought, one that does not require the effort to finish; he knows it already.
"I should have been there"