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There is a man I carry inside me.
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He is in a cell. I watch him sometimes like he is someone else, like I am standing outside looking in at a stranger. But his thoughts are mine. Every one of them.
Inside the cell he has visions. Saturated. Vivid. The colors turned up past what is real. He stands at the edge of a lake so still and glassy it looks like the sky fell and hardened. The mountain range behind it is so close he bends down to touch it — and the ground ripples. Clean water. The whole earth a mirror. He pulls his hand back and watches the rings spread out and disappear into the green.
The greenery on all sides is lush and thick and deep. Brilliant thunderclouds building at the edge of the sky. He can smell the rain coming, carried in the cool breeze that makes the grass around him bend. He can hear it. The grass rustling like music. Like something gentle trying to tell him something.
And then the restlessness rises. Even here. Even in this. Because somewhere beyond the lake and the mountains and the rain there is a small apartment on a cold street in a city that has never heard of him. A window. A chair. Silence that belongs to no one. And he must get to it. He must get to it or he will never be whole.
His mind is a storm. He fights against the bars but never raises a hand. He struggles against invisible bindings yet never moves. Tears fill his eyes. I feel his every desperate thought.
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Age is stopping him. Marriage is stopping him. Health is stopping him. Not as villains. Just as walls. And none of it stops the pressure. He is a geyser that never goes off. All that force, all that velocity from a life lived at full volume. Nowhere for it to go.
Nobody locked the cell. Nobody put him there. He just woke up one day and the walls were there and the visions were there and Poland was there. Completely out of reach.
Disappearing is happiness. Disappearing is love.
His mind screams run.
His body never moves.
-Neon