a chair

(I set myself a fiction challenge to write about fears)

My bones creak under the weight of my abandoned dreams
I sit in a chair in my kitchen.
it stinks of leather and a heady fragrance of fear.
we are stoic companions
when I lower myself into its arms, it sighs and sags.
It was always meant to do this, to be this. It was created for this moment. To envelop my apathy. To cradle me into endless evenings and endless bottles of wine, endless operas, and the stale and bitter taste of loneliness that I impose on myself.
I fulfill the purpose of the chair.

But for me, it is a symbol of my withering purpose. Long ago turned to embers, to crumbling charcoal. Drained with the bottles of wine, scratched and jumpy like my records. Bitter and dormant like my dreams.

I cant even remember what frightened me so. What paralysed me. How it had such power over me.
how when they called to me softly and fervently in the night, I stayed there in that chair. I furrowed my brow, and tapped my pen and stayed there and dreamt of dreaming.

I created a house around me, bricks and mortar of limitations. I shut people out. People who should have inspired me, I shut out because they represented all I could not be. I even avoided anyone else because they represented the mediocrity I was so afraid of turning into. Now I long for the comfort of ignorant mediocrity. My mediocrity raves and rots inside of me. as I rave and rot in this life, in this chair.
I could not even find their perspective, that comfortable acceptance of a notion of average. I could not impose it on myself or build it within myself if I tried.
If my life depended on it.
And it does.

I became bitter. Secluded.

I used to drink in bars. A silent figure, both familiar and stray. I would catch the eye of someone nascent and dreamy and dark around the edges. I could see them take a deep, staggered breath with anticipation and a deep lust for what i know I exuded. Me with my artistic nonchalance. I would walk up to them and take them silently by the hand and we would leave. I could hear their hearts beating out their chest for the thrill. They were always happy to talk about themselves in cloying excess. Their boyfriends, their girlfriends, their fucking creative desires. I would sit silently, with watching eyes.  People lusted me, people wanted to love me and engage with me. They strangely sought my burdening passion, my desperate self imposed seclusion. We would search eachothers bodies with desperate hands. They would search me for whatever they were mislead to believe I had inherent in me, I would search them for what they saw in me. We would fuck silently, communicating solemnly with our eyes, our hands, our bodies. And then late into the night, even they slept fervently, I would sit furiously, brooding, sucking deep on a cigarette watching the rise and fall of their ribs.
Inside that chest was something alive. Something fresh and fierce.

And then even fucking became too much of a creative burden. I could no longer communicate even desperation to my lovers. Because I was not even sure if that was real anymore. I turned them away.

I laugh to myself. Bitterly. I empty the bottle of wine. It stains my lips, it stings my teeth. I turn over my record and I capitulate into my chair.