Origin

| ARRIVAL | DEPARTURE | JOURNEY | ORIGIN | DESTINATION |

Her mind had broken quickly; her spirit took a little longer.

Each day, the minutes ground into her, though she gained neither refinement nor utility. She was pressed, drowned, in the quiet expanse of deprivation, gasps of panic the only incision into the muted depths. Life was at a distance, above the uncertain tide: warped in the ripples of fear, or hidden behind the silver of her own distorted reflection.

But, despite these grand images, her reality was cruelly anodyne. Another day, another coffee, a train, a cry, work, eat, scream, sleep, wake, another fucking day, another fucking coffee… all colour and spark reduced to splintered, stinging mundanity.

Surely banality was inhospitable to the wiles and whims of insanity?

Ever present was the cyclical syllogism of domestic denial: justice meted out suffering, and suffering was just. Suffering was diffuse, distant: the logic comfortingly unfalsifiable. Any instance that was worryingly acute, close at hand, could be dissected and diagnosed, removed from the etheric world of karma and sin and sectioned off as a clinical exception to the natural order.

She had become inured to it: what was suffering to a vacancy?

And so it had grown.

Her mind drifted ever more skyward to escape the earthly churn of hopelessness. Annexed into the reality of others, she poured her brokenness into the mill with renewed fervour, smiling, laughing, until it was indistinguishable from ragged sobs.

She had been making a coffee (another fucking coffee) when her spirit had given up the fight. Her mind had snapped back to earth, then been absorbed by the enormity of the vacancy.

How ordinary a moment: the prey realises the shape in their periphery is upon them; that they have been staring at the one place it was not; that all is lost.

And yet.. the vacancy spoke in a calm and quiet voice. While her mind had careened into chaos and her body had smeared into waste, it had been planning. It held her, and stroked her hair, and whispered:

It is possible to die; and, it is possible to live.

It was all that made sense; it was all she could do to survive.

The grinding stopped.