Ever-decreasing circles, and the ever-more rapid return to the same pin-prick which lies on the circumference of each one.
This time it took three months for me to come back on myself. If there's a next time, it'll be two months. The time after that - a fortnight.
The pin-prick is a tiny flesh-wound, the historical marker of a single afternoon 10 summers ago where I was bitten half to death, and my bloodstream poisoned irreversibly. The sun had sent me mad, anyway, causing my senses to at once heighten terrifically and sharply bottom out, the superficial conversation which I'd got into the habit of dispensing had collapsed into a singularity. The little red mark on my consciouness is the only evidence of the major surgery I performed on myself as I cried so hard that the shit flowed out of me like a river.
The moths of my vanity gather around the light of the wound and congregate there, spreading discord and misery. The beating of their papery, ragged wings accords with the beating of my own heart. I've come back to myself, pulling the suit of pale skin over my own head, sliding my arms through its arms, the unpleasant clamminess, the night-sweats, their ugly perfection the way things always were.
Ever-decreasing circles, back where I was before, rubbing my eyes in painful astonishment. How on earth did it happen this time, I wonder, as I expertly pick apart whatever masculinity, talent and assuredness remains, burning it promptly.
It's all burnt and all gone, and I, a ghost with painted-on eyes and borrowed clothes and borrowed feelings and borrowed words, pass through everyone I meet. There is no halting or slowing my centripetal motion - I have to go back to myself, ad nauseum.
