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As habit, I must smoke. Not because of an addiction but because it is my ritual. My lamp adorns my walls with yellow light and I open my window to meet a gentle breeze. Children's laughter rises and I peer out below. They’re coughing and giggling, a faint orange glow on their faces. I suppose this is their ritual too.
I wonder if their parents’ know they smoke? I suppose not, otherwise there wouldn’t such hushed humour. Looking down upon them I think of my own childhood – the curfews I had broken and cigarettes I had stolen. I raise my eyes to look at the night sky but caught between the children and the stars, I see an old woman across the way. She leans out her own window, smoking her own cigarette and looking at the night. We all have our rituals: the young, the old, and me. The woman joins the chorus of coughing children, but her cough is almost wicked. It sounds as if gravel is caught in her lungs. The children frighten at the sound and scamper off into the night.
I light my own cigarette. As I inhale I can't help but sour at the taste. The wind changes direction and as I exhale, the smoke blows back in my face. I close my eyes tight as they water. Perhaps a ritual can be broken for a day. I look down at my sleeping pills on my desk. Perhaps two.

The most insidious killer of them all is distance
Distance from your loved ones, your body, your passion
Distance to walk a very long trek, distance of time keeping you in pain
The further things stray from you, the worse it gets.

We all desire closeness, its merely human nature
But to walk those distances, kills many before they start
Simply just running there often makes it worse, you need to pace yourself.
Its a tightrope with no balancing act, yet still so easy to fall into the abyss.

800 miles, 900 miles, 1000 miles
You wont stop getting further away, but walking hurts so much
I'm trying my best to keep up, I'm so sorry
please dont go... you're getting so quiet... please... im forgetting your silhouette...

Wonderful idea, thank you for pairing it.

>>25482850
*Posting

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134 hours remain.
Thank-you to our two first submitters.

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There is a sort of devilish satisfaction when a man realizes his suffering is not unique to him. That what twists and turns inside him at his loneliest is a curse that stains someone else at that very hour only a few blocks away. The shape of the paths that led them may be different but the destination is the same. That's the burning that precedes the ash, I guess. A cruel mimicry of the common end of all.
I wonder if he—or she, it doesn't matter—I wonder if the human being at this hour ungraced by the pleasure of rest is aware of the same. That their cognate is magnetized by the same tragedy only a few blocks away and the ur-word of both spoken by creator or nature or chance lay by a smoldering fire in the mouth of a cave gazing into the heavens and wondered if the stars that danced above him would see his toil end.

>>25480729
i don't give a fuck... but the picture is awesome

Buy a 3090 and generate your own slop you filthy grifter.

Green, the colour of anything worth anything in this world. Jungles, seaweed, money... Smell-clouds on cartoon figures. All green. But theres a retard across the street, a sky fan, a water enjoyer, a gloomy guy. Mr Blue. I have never met Mr Blue, but I know he is a clown. A clown retard. Satan's most retarded jester. I am going to kill him. Maybe im going to kidnap him first, torture him a little. But I know im going to kill him.

Shit, my head is killing me, I havent slept for days. Between the flashbacks and the worm-dance in my ass, I cant get a wink of sleep. I know Mr Blue is awake too. Sitting there. Waiting to greet the dawn. His eyes fixed on the East. Waiting for the sun to turn his gay sky blue again and to hurt my eyes. Im going to kill him, I know that. He probably has a beard, a 90s beard. Like the psychiatrist guy from Analyse that. The type of guy whos got a snub-nose revolver. A whore's gun. A whore's gun in an ankle holster. I need to watch out for that. Thats the last thing I need. But forewarned is forearmed.

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I had taken off my nonprescription glasses, lit a cigarette, and popped a generic Viagra before peeping over at my neighbor when the ground began to rumble.

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He lay there with his head split open. The migraines were striking more and more frequently, seemingly exponential, some spectre playing Cat’s Cradle in the strings of his meninges.
A burden of bile wrenched him upright, one hand fumbling for the bin while the other, in unthinking assistance, found the lamp switch and aided with a flash-bang. He buried his face from the sight of it.
His veins plumped to painful capacity with every heave, heart pummelling an internal assault from which his very blood sought escape. A brutalising run of dry retches produced nothing for the onslaught, contractions of a sadistic gestation, before finally extruding a thin trickle of sour sludge, sliding over the back of his tongue in no hurry and hitting the bottom of the bin with a blunt, echoing patter, painkillers refunded, half sunk in the stinking swill.
When the seizing relented, he collapsed back and broiled under the lamp’s sick glow, a swirl of a similar colour. The light demanded more. Probed into his eyelids with its sharp fingers. Scoured and scraped at his skull. A lobotomy. Excerebration.
He dug his thumbs into the keystone of his forehead where hammer and chisel did their work, the phantom wound compressed lest his blood abandon him to it, third eye throttled in equilibrium with the other two. He couldn’t move. To fumble for the switch in the dizzying abyss between bed and bedside table was an expedition beyond his fortitude.

As his civil war rerouted neural resources to a perfunctory production of pain, his groggy thoughts rationed themselves to short, ephemeral bursts under the pulsating blanket of fire.
Work. Call. Pain. Phone. Sound. Pain. Time. Alarm. Pain.
But he hadn’t worked in some time. He couldn’t. He couldn’t do much of anything anymore. Trapped in a loop of writhing in delirium and wallowing in the exhaustion of its retreat. Each loop getting tighter and tighter. A slowly twisting garrotte.
Work. Pain. Sleep. Pain. Dizzy. Pulsing. Nausea. Pain.

The meagre remains of his life were a muddle of postdrome fog, and with every passing day he could feel his brain curdling into something resembling swiss cheese.
It was as if a parasite had burrowed its way into him, using him as a puppet, making its best guess of how to act human from within the cavernous veil it had eaten away for itself behind his eyes.
Throb. Beat. Thump. Pulse.

He couldn’t remember the last time he felt like he was even in there. Couldn’t remember the last time he felt like things were going to get better. The last time he felt anything else at all. Felt like his life was worth seeing through.

Pulse. Pulse. Pulse. Pulse.

No comfort in respite, just draining repetition. Every scant abatement only promising worse to follow. Veins, nerves, cochlea, macula, wardens of his torture chamber, and one method of mutiny remained.

Pulse. Pulse.. Pulse… Pulse….

When his captors’ attention waned, this time he didn’t hesitate.

He opened the window

and jumped.

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