Knowing Nothing.

KNOWING NOTHING.
sneak tech

Slumped in the back of a putrid green people carrier, forehead pressed
against the window and walkman set to stun. Strands of fair hair
pressed between skin and glass give the outside world the shattered
illusion of perfection. The pouring rain only adds tears to her frame.
Inside she breaks. Angst ridden lyrics bombard her head, she stares at
her alien parents in the front seats and feels a sense of loathing that
she knows is wrong. The slug-like mouth of her mother stops only for
the shortest of breaths. Her father takes the verbal blows with the
default setting of a broken man. He drives, she navigates and no one
gets anywhere - fast. Through the rear view mirror she catches her
fathers tormented eye. His usual calm resolve seemingly close to limits
as yet unexplored. Oblivious to the war of words, she absorbs harsh
lyrics that hold close the feelings of her teenage heart. She cannot
speak with broken experience, for she has yet to love with the passions
required for such emotional carnage. She dares not mention boys or sex
or feelings. To them, the prehistoric wrecks that claim to be her
parents, such subjects are out of bounds. She will find answers
elsewhere, just as she found escape in the reflected surfaces of
moonlit blades.
A gap between tracks on her walkman allows vocal seepage from raised
voices to enter her ears in a short audio snapshot of dread. 'Don't
drive so fast. Take a left here. Close your window' - Once again she
senses her fathers frustration in bulging eyes that flit from
windshield to rear-view mirror. The next track on her disc thankfully
betrays reality with shrill vocals and anthemic base lines. She knows
every chord and every syllable like the back of her freshly scarred
hand. Every word provokes her to feel 'something', something more than
nothing. And just for now, something more than nothing is as close to
heaven as she can get. The car pulls up with a satisfying calm to an
angry red traffic light that glares in the diminishing glow of the day.
Clouds boil in anger on tempered horizons. Her heart jumps as a
battered car pulls up in their shadow. A familiar expression on an
unfamiliar face mirrors her feelings. The resulting connection causes a
reddening of features that her parents put down to heat and tiredness.
Her verbally bullet-riddled father flicks the air conditioning switch.
She trembles as the piercing eyes of her male counterpart scorches
messages on to her retinas. One fleeting chemical reaction between two
in a lifetime of otherwise compound stagnation. She smiles and prays
that the lights will never change. She curses her god beneath spearmint
breath as green glares denote 'go'. Wheels that, once set in motion
would signify endings far too extreme to contemplate, gather speed at
the control of her irate father. But contemplate she will, in the
vicious seconds when the sky becomes a highway and the highway a
sky.
Clinically precise daily routines are broken only by the sorrowful
looks of pitiful strangers, all of them expert in the field of knowing
nothing. Catatonic gleaming white wards serve only to imprison. Her
'lucky' dysfunctional parents and her malfunctioning-self separated by
the thinnest of membranes. She fights for the life that she never had
control over. Machines regulate breathing just as parents had regulated
climates. And they play her favourite music and they read aloud her
favourite books. And they discover scars and written thoughts, and for
the first time in her short existence, they understand. It took a
mangled wreck to realise her pains. And as medics rush in like
sanitised angles, and as life support machines conduct the symphony of
death to the constant whine of a flat-line, they know - They know in
their spared selfish hearts that sometimes realisation, like apologies
and declarations of love, come far too late.