FICTIONAL LINES: DIRGE OF A DEVELOPING CITY
FICTIONAL LINES are a set of short stories that blur between fiction and reality, based on the city of Phnom Penh, Cambodia where I currently reside.
This is a mad city, billowing dust and gargled shouts in maddening hours. Grim streetlights flicker only to die amongst the efflorescent neon signs of disreputable establishments selling company to the lonely, lost and strung-out strangers of the night.
The night air is pervasive with cigarette smoke intertwining with exhaust, a curse embraced by the disillusioned. I am caught between these trails of evanescent carbon and the thought of something tangible; something that can be buried with the remnants of my heart. It breaks me to my knees in the quietest moments, eyes like mouths of endless rivers carving crevices into the flesh. This ashen silence is a mocking solemnity to the indifference of time, the mortal inability to acquiesce with transience.
Thoughts become razors that cut deep within, bloodletting the old scars. Pain is a powerful master, a constant reminder of how fragile human beings are: composites of melodrama and emotional juxtapositions. Gut the insides, spill the blood. See your engine parts made of flesh, sinew and bone sprawled before the cameras and everyone's taking pictures and videos. They want to watch you fail. They want to watch you squirm as they whisper deadly things into your ear, slithering hexes that tunnel into your bones. They are the ones that remind you of frailty and regret before cutting off the wicks that used to light up your eyes.
You feel the poison coursing through your veins as time lost all essential meaning. You get sick to your stomach. The cheap vodka and stale cigarettes, the endless nights of streamlining sanity and reality, heaving unto asphalt then into the gleaning cavity of the porcelain god. The mirror reflects a Nietzschean abyss; the endless stare into the depths of your sunken eyes. You see the feral beasts of self-loathing within and you wanted out but the excuses and procrastinations start to emerge, prolonging a mindless revelry to the death of life.
They plot against you, tearing away at your sensibilities and unsung aspirations. In this mad city, there is conspiracy afoot; paranoia grows from a lingering moment as the loneliness slowly eats into your soul, yet the bar is crowded. You look around and see the talking mannequins and the frivolous marionettes as they danced into the humid streets high on wanderlust, running about on the wet streets laden with vendors selling hot food for the hungry and tuktuk drivers touting the weary.
Blinding headlights of four-wheel drives, horns blaring and babies crying. Garbage piles and the scurrying rats and street urchins gathering for a sting. Dubious characters adorn the entrance of my building, doing their shady little deals in the moonlight. This is the time when the ghouls come out to play: the party-goers, prostitutes and perverts, the meth addicts, murderers and thieves. I see them from the windows of my own asylum.
This is the abyss, the mad city, the place where I belong.