The Auditorium of my mind, heavily haunted by its own orchestra of fears.

 

A Solo for SanctifyThySin / formerly SanctifyThySins, written by Ashing.

Fictional character 'Thomas Shelby' from 'Peaky Blinders', portrayed alternatively and set in my Alternate Universe. Mature Content. Trigger-warnings included.



-------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Auditorium of my mind,
heavily haunted by its own orchestra of fears.

Ceaselessly aiming for the right words, I found myself silenced by the pointless crusade. The light still tries to break through the shudders, but nothing ever snaps me from the chains of lucid daydreaming.


“Back to hearing the shovels against the wall, is that the kind of call you hear?”

She taps the tab of her cigarette, it was only natural that the tendrils of smoke would keep rising to give her some shelter from the vulnerability in my ocean eyes. It was when I thought I could finally help myself from staring that I learn anew how I was only fooling myself. She reluctantly redirects the tide of my gaze to the window, that inevitable clash with the brightness of another day makes me face the light that was bound to become my focal point of view.

“Assuming I ever stopped, sweetheart?”

I’ve attempted to make my peace with her death every day since it happened, but it remains one I cannot come to terms with.

“I’ve been gone a long time, Tommy.”

The raw nakedness of her words drawn from memory undress my soul when I least expect them to.

When her voice gives me rest, I conjure her with whatever the doc prescribed, prone to haunting what had haunted me instead. I chose to walk the thin line of sanity and insanity alone, against all my mother’s common sense that broke in the face of my father’s devilment running through my veins; When the clash of the nature of two opposing things happens, you turn into someone words fail to depict.

“Not that long, Grace. Not that long.”

The smile was on the house, though it was empty without her.

I presume this is where the voice in the back of everyone’s mind kicks in.

'Talk to someone, you cannot endure the struggles of life alone.'

Whoever had gone there seeing me, trust, sweetheart, that I’ve ventured every sunrise avenue and crossed the dark side of the Moon, and no person had been a better conversationalist than my inner voice.

Or, should I say that of many? The voices?

“You could walk away, you know.”

I’m often far too tempted to do what the voices tell me to do, and who better to understand me than Grace.

“You could be free from all of this. We could be together.”

I take another heavy drag of the cigarette, my lungs filled to their full capacity, yet I always wind up all the emptier upon the reluctant exhale. Refraining from speaking about my pain, the way I had when I left a part of my sanity somewhere within the tunnels of France, hadn’t changed with the triviality that time was. Yes, it passes, but it does not necessarily make things better, you simply learn to build around the void in your heart and mind.

“There’s business to be done yet, Grace. One last business to be done before I rest.”

People acted as though they had a remote idea of what it was exactly that I had lost. The matter of the fact was that they had no idea what it took to carry on as though there had been no crippling fear of losing more of the people I loved, especially to my own ambition and vanity because I knew no limitations after the w*r ended.

Everything since those tunnels was but extra time, and there was a certain type of freedom in the afterlife from the death of who we once were when we were innocent and arguably unbroken, call it ‘sane’.

In this 'extra time', you find out that common sense is not so common at all. People are prone to judging based on the rumors they gathered, or what little they have seen of me, what little I had allowed them to see.

“So you always say, Tommy, but the business never ends and the voices persist.”

But Grace had seen the worst of me after the w*r, in Damon’s and Katherine’s sudden absence.

She’d tell me she could not judge the book by its cover, but the reality of our world was that the majority of people won’t be interested in the content if the cover fails to attract them. Scalding tea was what everyone wanted, insisting on exchanging the latest rumors, while I prefer drinking mine alone, never eager to trade the sanctuary of my solitude and what little I held sacred, not for the likes of the masses.

The bittersweet irony, given my line of work.

Her soft nature hid the determination behind a tender smile, adamant on getting the answers while she fixed her gaze on the g** in my hand. The b**rel which people prayed not to end up on the other side of, I have known like my dearest friend and grown to think of as close to me as the leather glove on my hand.

With a sharp inhale, I kissed the filter of the cigarette with the kind of passion I believe only galaxies held for their expansion, still hopelessly in love with all of my ghosts that I would have shaken hands with the Devil to live in another grand illusion of my opium-intoxicated brain should it conjure Damon instead.

Perhaps this was a part of our human condition, running away to whatever had made the epilogue of the story a bit softer on our already broken hearts.

Though I embrace Grace, my late wife, I am no fool that this familiar pain demands to be felt, everything but confrontation is just avoidance of the inevitable.

“Everything is personal, Grace, else it would not be blood or signature on the papers. Should the business get sorted, I suppose I may come to dream of some rest for a change.”

Living in this One Minute of everything at once with her was safe, I knew how the narrative goes. The misfortune was that I always ran out of the said One Minute, the next one thereafter brought upon unimaginable anguish of loss.

Running away to a comfort of a zone that no longer existed made me feel heavier in the end, it was but another world of lies that I sell myself to sedate this brain that gives me no rest. Deep behind the mask I wore nowadays, that of a politician, I was still a product of w*r who could not sleep without a hint of light from the flickering candle, the medication which “eases” the troubled mind and soul, cigarettes, excessive whiskey, and a g** beneath the pillow.

I was still terrified of falling asleep, and waking up came with the aftermath of reliving the torture. The loss of her had crippled me, that one delusional hope I allowed myself at moving on, gone before the first light.

The fact I speak now, alone in a room, attests to the years of torment brought by an inner turmoil that assured I would question whether the finger on the tr**ger had been mine or my trauma’s response to everything.

“Even if you got all of the signatures, favor of the parties you choose to impress, none of them can sign off on peace when that, Tommy, is in your power. No matter how many deals are done, they will not get you there, my love.”

I slave to the emotions I have made the world believe I do not possess. I miss her in every breath drawn, and the comfort she provided from an endless longing which I feel over him. The softness of a smile claiming my lips threatened to redefine their rough nature.

The truth is that I’ve been here before, back in France. I may have successfully made it out of the w*r physically, but my head has become an entirely different story upon having survived. Moments like these, I remember him, the comrade whose name I keep close to my heart, but never utter to the world. Damon Salvatore... Serpent.

I live to wonder if even God knew where he was.

He’d understand that there were some deaths you cannot come back from, some losses that you never make peace with.

Wherever he was in this life, I hope he is doing far better than I am, perhaps at least this one thing we needn’t reflect on in the void of our chest.

I rarely pray, but I do hope.

“I am in your mind, love, and I see it in your eyes. Why do you refuse to say his name, the one that reminds you of how far you have yet to go?”

This noise she’s made in my heart and mind is but an echo I cannot keep getting lost in, yet I entertain the thought immediately.

Was there an antidote for the heart that could not let go of its utopia?

I’ve gone from a hero of w*r, to a Brummie gangster, to a legitimate businessman, and finally to the snake in the parliament, that of the titans with self-serving justice and their own agendas. If you cannot beat them, change the game from within, but I fear I may have gotten caught up in the power the position had brought me.

The way I’m plagued runs deeper than being Thomas Shelby, the gypsy that took care of those he could not charm.

It was not death which I feared, rather what humanity had gone within me while I still live and breathe.

I shook hands with the vessels of the Devil on the daily, not too eager to accept I’ve become one.

I’ve made deals many had considered a death wish, Peaky Blinders had so assured going by the codex I’ve established gave us power that only grew with my entanglement in politics.

I was my own revolution, and paradoxically the enemy I could not defeat.

No price is too high, no gamble a risk I would not take to win. The question is, win what? For I knew not how to stop.

Loved or hated, it made no difference to me, as long as it was for who I was and not just an image they had constructed in their minds.

“Contrary to the popular belief, I do hold some things sacred. And then some others that they haven’t yet invented the words for, I strive to cope with.”

Brief pause.

“You still don’t let anyone in, do you?”

Anything had hurt less than the impending silence when incriminating personal questions took place, I wish she would go as she so boldly continues.

“If I recall correctly, you had once cared for the man who always got you the horses on your birthday, Tommy, and the whiskey? And those letters you never let anyone read.”

The pang in my chest, no choir of angels could reach such heights, nor could demons scream as loudly when she had called me out on the truth.

“What does Serpent have to do with anything, Grace?”

Genuine laughter spills within the confines of my office, making my secretary implore why was I laughing, as it was an uncommon thing in the London offices, rumored not to have origins even in Birmingham itself.

I owe the employee no answers.

I owe no one a thing.

There was no follow-up question. Much like with my family, and about every other living soul, no one asks anymore. No one cares. Eventually, everyone moves on, apart from the person who is left alive to forever grieve.

“We are in the living hell of your mind, going full half-hour. The Devil shall begin to wonder are you to come join me in “sleeping at last”. I suppose I only wish to remind you why it is you still wake up every morning instead of joining me.”

Names were a matter of personal nature to me. I was glad I could save his from the world that tainted it the way it had done with all the heroes who’ve suffered the aftermaths of w*rs in silence, never given the proper recognition they had deserved, never giving a fucking thing but the medals to throw in the damn cut.

Serpent was the chapter that had given meaning to the whole book, threaded through every page thereafter, and with his presence lingering even in the footnotes. The essence of my heart that I go back to when I’m not left slow-dancing with the usual plaguing of my own mind.

“He is not coming back. There is no point speaking it into existence.”

Some nights, I wish my own name had not been as widespread as the Great Depression that had taken place, an apocalypse of the times as we knew them. I had become too recognizable to be caught having an episode.

She turns her back to me, to meet the Sun.

I would not find it hard to believe she walked on air, just to show me that leaving the solid ground was a whole other world of emptiness I should not wish to know as badly as I wanted to.

There was no b**od on her shirt this time around, no clutching to the cursed sapphire, no reminder that it had been my fault, no begging me to unlock the door and come home to her, no encouraging me to use “the key” still in my hand.

It comes and goes in waves, the light outside, but I could not see her shadow on the floor, yet another reminder that I am alone in the room, how it was the longest time since we were in the same realm of reality.

The tiny bottle in my pocket threatens to burn a hole through the refined material in an attempt to get more poison inside of my system. Doctor’s orders, yet all they’ve done is made things worse. I was no longer hoping the fragility of my pale skin will soak it in, the bitter taste they left in my mouth was hardly washed away by whiskey. The prescription to the bullshit I needed to get by was no longer necessary, yet I took it to see those that I missed.

I cannot keep poisoning myself in hopes to get better, when I had promised Serpent once we would make art of our lives even in the case fate parts us. I feel as though I cleverly found a way to avoid making such promise to Grace, perhaps I felt it in me when I began losing faith that I could keep it.

There has got to be more to living than remaining hung up on what could never be again.

“Your life will continue, minute by minute, day by day, one brick at a time to get to where you long to be. Everyone will have something to say when you choose to live according to your own expectations, but do not let that stop you from living again, from looking for Damon, my love.”

Am I simply hearing what I want to hear?

When our cigarettes had burned halfway past the point of no return, I realized I must snap out of this.

“If only life was that simple for him and I, Grace.”

Her golden locks cascade down her angelic face, but it was in the blues of her eyes that I had once floated in better than the poison of my choice which had been “distilled for the eradication of seemingly incurable sadness” that I think of Damon again.

“Or so you say, thinking it is easier to stay where you are, loyal to mourning, than to go after the one you love.”

Tender as the night in which I often implored whether to be or not to be, she helps me realize that it was no longer a question.

I linger in the limitless skies of her eyes a while longer, aware that she has become a frequency I lost, no matter which transmission I had turned to, no matter how hard I tried to bring her back to life.

But the one I still wish to find, I had trouble even contemplating to look for.

A reflection in the Void that had preserved my sanity when all Hell had broken loose, I must look for him, my Northern Star, and stay the course set to the tune of his voice that will help me dive back into reality. I cannot allow this sinking into the worst of myself again, where all I do is catch myself talking to my own voices about myself, without considering whether there is more to this life for a man like me.

I go back to gazing through the blinds to take in the light that was an afterglow of the truth, knowing deep down that Grace is watching over me, reminding me that the Sun also rises where it sets and gives me another chance to begin again in my search for Damon.

P. S. 

Dear Reader.

To the ones who have loved and lost, I'm bringing you back to the horizon where I had taken the last midnight dip into my inception and survived the worst of my mind. I'll be damned to ever let myself fall, even if it means fighting the same demons, every day anew. I'll drag my night shades into broad daylight instead. Where there was Sun, there was always hope, even when it often evaded us. The revolution is coming, sweethearts. If you desire inner peace, refuse to surrender.