The Haunting


"Don't leave me, even for an hour, because then the little drops of anguish will all run together, the smoke that roams looking for a home will drift into me, choking my lost heart."
- Pablo Neruda, Don't Go Far Off

Fear, in my experience, is as powerful a motivator as love. The pair are but two sides of a single coin. Intertwined and interchangeable. There cannot be one without the other. That thing, that despairingly soul-crushing angst that what you have is nothing more than a fugacious moment in time, dissipating into the ether. That loss is inescapable and ineluctable. It is a suffocating realization. A haunting inevitability that chokes you, weighs you down, torments you through every moment of happiness, every ephemeral juncture of elation or euphoria.

The unavoidable terror of the thought of losing the person, or people, that mean the most, are closest to you can smother you, snatch your breath away. Razor-edged, piercing agony rips through your entire body, and you are paralyzed. Adrift in a sea of despair, self-loathing and deep-running, soul-destroying terror. Paranoia that plagues your every waking moment. An unwelcome nightmarish visitor in the fits of restless sleep. Taunting your subconscious, always there, just under the surface, jeering, teasing, mocking you endlessly, relentlessly.

Until you are nothing more than a shell of the person you once were, left contemplating who this person is that you have become. Utterly impotent in the face of heart-wrenching despair. An unconditionally terrifying and overwhelming experience.

- M xx

Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas



“In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.”
- Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

These people's lives are dull and repetitive. Cyclical, really. Repeating the same thing day in and day out, ad nauseam, expecting varying conclusions. The definition of insanity. It was unequivocally depressing. It had the innate ability to suck the life right out of you. Leave you empty, a shell of your former self. These dreary individual's joyless existences inexorably intertwined within the fabric of your own life. Leaving you to question your own mortality and the sheer transience of it all. The impermanency of jouissance, as it were. Any former glory they once might have possessed reduced to little more than a fading memory, recaptured fleetingly through the obscure haze of whiskey-coloured glasses. Their sadness dripping off the bar counter, hanging about in the air like stale cigarette smoke.

Fake laughter and feigned interest. Sickeningly saccharine honeysuckle little more than a cloying veil for antipathy and despair.

This place.

The air is feverish, thick and suffocating. The hum of the fridges, their garish neon lights taunting me, drilling through my skull. Jeering smirks, off-colour comments flung like knives. The cool, moist bottles forgiving against my sweaty palms. The throb in my ankle, the knot in my stomach. The desperation for my imminent escape palpable. Lurid, twisted faces like reflections in a fun house mirror. Contorted, deformed, terrifyingly human.

M xx