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Jonas Guigonnat Prose THE BODY AS A PRISON - November 2018

The Failed Human’s Burden

Written by Jonas Guigonnat

What is this noise? Why is it torturing my ears like a constant beeping from inside my head? The light coming from outside is exacerbating the pain. My eyes are water drops ready to explode under the pressure of the air. My head, oh my head. It doesn’t hurt, it shreds my existence into pieces. Am I sick? Am I going crazy? What time is it? Two in the afternoon already. My day has not begun yet, but my whole being refuses to make something out of it.

The pain I woke up with is disappearing as if it didn’t happen, but my heart is still beating and the sweat hasn’t completely quit my forehead. I need something and it is already clear to my mind what it is. A cigaret, rolling paper, the little bag. Let’s try to forget the body for the rest of the day. As long as the narcotic flows through my mind, pain feels almost like an illusion. It’s this game I have to play with THC in my blood and a blown mind. What time is it by the way? Four already? That’s the problem with doing nothing to forget my own existence – it makes time fly.

Take a shower, then a joint, eat something and get out of this house where the ghosts of my failures keep hanging around. I need the city to feel alive, even if its grey depressing atmosphere may intoxicate my mind even more. And the ghosts are there too. Still, outside seems safer than inside. It is quite cold, but I don’t mind, I even enjoy it. Paris becomes almost respirable when it is freezing.

Walking makes my body exist, but the view of those concrete giants all around me is oppressing my mind. I need space, as much as I can have. I know where I need to go. Why do I always seem to avoid this place already? Oh yes, now I remember. That’s not far from where he lies. Gone for 16 years already but it feels like yesterday still. Am I an orphan if I lost only one parent? What an inappropriate thought. Too stoned already.

My head is burning again. My vision is tortured by the highway on the right, with its interminable flow of immobility, and the railway on the left, where painted letters on the walls are the only things giving a faint semblance of life. The beeping is teasing my ears again and the cold feels very real now. Melancholia reigns my mind, heaviness – my body. Regrets? As far as the eye can see. The nearer I get to the place, the stronger the feeling of emptiness. Not total emptiness. Only the present and the future feel empty. The past is where things have substance, where life means more than a monotonous repetition of nothingness.

But here I am, in the vain reality of the present, trying to endure the idea of a future I don’t trust. My stomach is burning. A growing feeling of weakness is seizing my legs. Now it is the time to smoke the joint I prepared at home. I need an escape route, an alternative for the cage of reality. The trees are appearing on the horizon. No green, but a hypnotic orange-yellow color that my eyes understand. Still walking in the civilized world, but I already belong to the loneliness of that fake piece of urban nature. Lonely I am anyway. Lonely I can only be, that’s the only way.

Almost there, just a few meters and the dream will begin. Not for long, just a few hours. Walking without any goal, just keep forgetting reality. Once tired, I’ll go back to the prison that my body always brings me back to. The place where nothing can be done, where tears cannot be shed anymore. Ghosts of lost pasts and of impossible futures are the worst watchmen you can imagine. They follow you almost everywhere. But wait, is the prison in the physical or in the abstract world? Which one of the body and the mind is the prison? Let’s hope it is not both, but I am afraid it is.