Feast of the Melancholics

Prose Poem by Cher Alex

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I.

     She used to be a glutton for a good-looking man, but that got her everywhere other than where she truly wanted to be.

     Still, she persisted in preserving her right to fall heart over head into the sweaty quagmire of desire—knowing that the sketchy digs would invariably descend into a rabbit hole of regret.

     It seemed too hard, yet too easy, for her to get lost in these familiar thorny places—trapped in a whirlpool of recession, somehow insensible to the smacking lips of a greedy depression.

     I hated watching her lackadaisical eyes loosely scanning dislocated surroundings for random, paltry pieces of indifferent driftwood, and I despised—even more— listening to the scratched, dusty record she seemed to enjoy playing over and over again. Nostalgia is the feast of melancholics.

II.

     In the eye of my mind, I observe the rot in her mind ooze and stretch as it percolates through the aroma of yesteryear, where life—as she knows it—hangs in coy suspension.

     Sometimes, she would complain about “too many ugly and beautiful faces” flashing by in a taunting and tantalizing fashion. Unharnessed, the pursuit of passion can be a dangerous pastime—you know?

     If I could, I would warn her against lingering too long in the Past. He never, if ever, yielded the peaceful existence or resolution she craved for her unrestful mind, preferring instead, to force her hand until her palms were eventually punctured plucking away at an illusion. And when she drew blood, he would laugh and tell her it was of her own doing. Nostalgia is the feast of melancholics.

III.

     Closer to her time, she had been sitting with herself in the uncandid darkness, stuffed full to the brim: her comatose form slumped across a periwinkle purple chaise lounge—a sleeping child in fairyland waiting for the sandman to never come. “The curtains were drawn together so tightly it was a wonder she had been able to breathe for as long as she did,” the medics had said.

     I prefer to imagine the allure of the natural world drawing her in like an alchemist…pulling her…closer and closer to the benevolent trees, the gentle creak of boughs and branches assisting her to breathe in concert with the ethereal flutter of silky leaves, and to believe that staring into the inscrutably piercing eyes of the tawny owl from her dreams became a never-ending peer into an interminable tunnel stretching thousands of years in every direction towards the wisdom I had fervently hoped she would find. Nostalgia is the feast of melancholics.

IV.

     Somehow, I have remained attached to a dewy thread adorning the brown house spider webs lurking in her home—where life still hangs in delicate suspension—reeling from the remnants of her codependent niceties, syrupy sweet and entwined with stealthy toxins.

     Change was the vexatious stranger she had been unwilling to host. Oh—but would I have found some wholesome rapture hiding within her all-encompassing sorrow. I swear, I had turned to her again and again, searching for a light deemed unseeable by most sane humans—but she had been hellbent on keeping her closeted skeletons close to her chest. Now, there are no more interventions to ponder.

     Somewhere in the ether, I hear the Archangel of Acceptance assuring me the death of regret in letting go. Perhaps the blind, moist earthworms boring in might succeed in finding some fitting relation where I could not. Nostalgia was her feast.

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Cheryl Atim Alexander (she/her) is an Afro-Greek woman currently located in the US. She is a multi-genre writer and has been published in Decolonial Passage, Wilderness House Literary Review, Written Tales Magazine, Moon Shadow Sanctuary Press and Kalahari Review. She was also recently nominated for Best of the Net 2024.