the lines on the wall look like a peregrine falcon diving after its prey (II)

A continuation of Messy Room, re-titled and growing. Writing free of pressure, writing because writing is what I do. Most of this has been composed by hand late in the evening.

Lying in bed he felt the pain in his back. A stiff shot of hurt that originated in the middle of his spine and rose to encompass all the space beneath his shoulders, like a painting of a phoenix rising. It never hurt during the day, when he was upright. Sitting was fine, standing was fine. Lying down was what flicked the pain switch from Off to On. Maybe he stretched too hard at the office when he leaned back in his chair and raised his hands over his head, a practice he did multiple times a day unconsciously. Maybe his bones were rotting. When it hurt like this he imagined steel replacing his bones. Like a Giger creation but minus the interlocking vaginas and penises. The steel would be cold. Not even the muscle, blood and viscera surrounding could warm it. The cold would replace the back pain with a deeper ache. His movements would stiffen, not that they were fluid now. Unlike bone, steel was unyielding. If he strained hard enough his skin would stretch and tear apart, like tight plastic wrap penetrated and dragged by a fork. Envisioning this helped him go to sleep before his wife came to bed, though he of course knew the pain was originating in muscle, not bone. Most mornings when he awoke he could barely move and tears mixed with the sleep in his eyes and made it impossible to see. A hot shower erased the pain and cleared his eyes. Paying the water bill was never a problem.

The boxes, now those scared him. There were so many cluttering his living room now. Mostly from Amazon or other online retailers, though there were a few from the local grocery store as well. All of the boxes were empty. When they arrived they had contained things he thought he needed. Sometimes this remained true but often he found he didn’t need anything in the boxes after all. He threw these unneeded things away or donated them to friends and charities. The boxes remained. He couldn’t bring himself to recycle them or even break them down so they’d lay flat and he’d have more room. They were all over the place, in front of the windows, blocking out the sun. They were a fire hazard. They scared him, yes, but he took no action. It wasn’t actually the boxes that scared him. It was their emptiness. A container that no longer contained anything. He thought of putting something in them, utilizing them for storage. This solution would not work, however, as he owned nothing that needed storing. So they remained, neatly stacked, waiting. He largely abandoned his living room, choosing to spend most of his time in the bedroom, bathroom or kitchen, which remained free of boxes for the time being. He was also waiting.

In the breakroom at work there are paper cups with inspirational quotes and poorly drawn portraits of the person to whom the quote is attributed, clearly done on a computer by someone with minimal design skills. These cups are supposed to inspire he and his co-workers to innovate and change their mindset and other buzzword topics which ultimately translate to a directive to make the shareholders more money. One of his coworkers defaces a cup every day by adding to the quotation or crossing it out and changing it altogether. The most popular of these defaced cups features Gandhi. His quote is crossed out and replaced with a quote from Conan the Barbarian who, when asked what is best in life, replies “To crush your enemies -- See them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women!” It was marginally more inspiring than the Gandhi quote but he still did his job the same way every day and collected a paycheck every two weeks as the cups choked up landfills even though they were supposedly compostable. The night janitorial staff threw them all into the same bag which went into the trash dumpster. Except for the defaced cups, which sat in a line on the breakroom counter for almost a month before disappearing. It was thought that a SLT (Senior Leadership Team) member saw them and ordered their removal, but no one knew for sure. The poorly drawn quotation cups remained, and it was gradually realized they would never go away.