helle hound.

you said, so go.

[melisica]

Andrew Catellier

[rucaruca-blog]

new year.

“this isn’t the kind of place i’d go if i didn’t have to.”

i could make a list of all the cities i passed through this year, i could count on both hands the amount of mental breakdowns i’ve had. 

i have filled pages with nightmares and out of context conversations from berlin to los angeles. i’ve been high as hell driving through the rocky mountains, hungover hanging out the window in the alps. 

to anyone who’s ever enjoyed my writing, i’ve relocated.

i’ve set up camp at wordpress to post a collection of short essay style posts, to be able to share what i have been creating, in hopes that i can peak anyone’s interest. i have set myself a goal to have a book completed by the end of 2016, so please, if you’re interested in anything i have ever written, i’ve been feverishly refining my craft. there is a prologue to my final project, completed and posted. i will be constantly updating with dreams, playlists, artwork, photos, notes, and possibly poetry. 

please and thank you

hellehound.wordpress.com

[hellehound]

relocating

hellehound.wordpress.com

[takesamuscle-deactivated2018012]

[hellehound]

daisies.

i was sitting on a cliff, watching the leaves twist and turn up in the wind, hanging my legs over the edge discussing the effects of marijuana on the brain when she yelled my name. 

“how many nights do you dream about her?”

“every night.”

[wordsnquotes]

I’m just pain covered with skin.

John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath  (via h-o-r-n-g-r-y)

[wordsnquotes]

Human relationships were strange. I mean, you were with one person a while, eating and sleeping and living with them, loving them, talking to them, going places together, and then it stopped.

Charles Bukowski, Women (via h-o-r-n-g-r-y)

[hellehound]

wildflower.

i didn’t respond so he started knocking on my forehead. 

knock, knock, knock. 

harder and harder. 

i wake up and someone’s at the door.

[hellehound]

purgatory.

collected thoughts i’ve drowned in my sleep. i’ve forgotten so many things. 

the details of my face crept up on me. lines where lines never were before. 

dried paint caked to horse hair brushes sitting on the floor of an unused bedroom in a half empty apartment. 

i can feel myself wilting and alcohol is so dehydrating. 

[hellehound]

bleach

“why don’t you want to dream?”

there’s a static in the room, but in the haze of the afternoon, it doesn’t have that same malevolent impact. 

my therapist, she leans forward and says, “that’s really messed up.” and i sat there, slowly getting annoyed without knowing why. 

walking into traffic she’ll tell me that it’s okay. 

she says, “the spirits are guiding me.”

she says not to worry about the demons behind you. 

[hellehound]

introduction.

“these clients of mine, they write me letters, leave me voicemails. flood my inbox with inquiries and requests. they write these elaborate explanations, talk about the images that haunt them. 

the dreams.

so i stay with them; get to know them. spend hours with their photo albums, listening to their life stories. they take me through their towns, introduce me to ways of life i’ve never known to exist. the longer i stay, the more accurate the work i do for them is. being apart of their lives, apart of their dreams, it all starts to bleed into mine. 

and they pay whatever. they just need that visual. and i get it. 

but you wouldn’t believe the things i’ve seen. some of these stories i’ve heard. they haunt you, stick to your insides. 

they get in your head. 

when someone shares their nightmares with you, they become yours just the same. and now, i have thousands. 

and there are no drugs that’ll kill them.”

[hellehound]

replicas.

one hundred notebooks and a bit of whiskey to get me through this season. it’s strange, i was only underwater once this year. running along the shoreline trying to catch up to the sun. trying to outrun the shadows. 

“you’ll never make it,” he said. “the light is already gone.”

blurred lights through a camera lens. i lit his cigarette as he leaned against my shoulder in the back of a thai restaurant. “i told you, when it says bangkok on the sign, that’s when you know it’s good.”

without a thank you, he starts reminding everyone that he’s a person too. 

i imagine the conversation i’d like us to have if i ever see you again, at night, on route 41. you’re too stupid to get it, i just like to pretend. 

hitting every green light, a straight shot through times square. i can’t help but think of tom cruise horrified as he plucks out a gray hair in the mirror. 

he refuses to tell anyone her name so we all start to wonder if she’s real or imagined. i start to imagine him in person. what do you look like up close?

driving passed a church i never took a good look at, it becomes clear to me that i never really worried about god’s existence. he said something about being in our sixties and i realized i can’t stay like this forever. 

it’s not that i don’t want to change, it’s that i have completely forgotten to. 

“i never want to leave when i come here.”

eating breakfast at the diner i worked at when i was eighteen, looking around i ask, 

“what are they all still doing here?”

she remembers things i don’t. sometimes i think she confuses me for someone else.

walking in the door at 6 am she smiles through the screen, “good morning, get some sleep.”

i keep feeling like a thief without stealing anything. 

i lost a quarter on a wizard who didn’t tell me shit about the future or who i am. thrift store flannels and stained family reunion t-shirts. someone else’s memory can be yours for 17.99 (plus tax)

“i wonder how many people go there, just because of the billboards.”

we discussed our options at a booth in a burger king over a rodeo cheeseburger because i had to use the bathroom that was for customers only. i pulled out my credit card and we ended up in room 3502 on the 35th floor. 

i am the only one drinking. what does that tell you about me.

[hellehound]

learning.

You don’t know how to make an apology sound sincere. out of frustration you want to skip town, but you can’t because you already have. you’re in Cleveland Ohio. 

I spit out half the chicken onto my paper plate. smoking in the parking lot to realign my perspective. “try this, it really works.”

“it’s alright, i believe you.”

an 80$ room at a Raddison. Room 511

they never rinsed out the tub. he was lying in the water for five seconds until the smell of bleach had him on his feet and tense all over again. 

i got off on the wrong floor again. the housekeeper had a coffee in her hand, green hair and bad skin.

we ate fast food in the bed. 

“their relish looks like toxic waste.” thirty minutes later i threw it all up.

caught in the kentucky rain. ten dollars for a burnt pepperoni pizza.

“i really need a beer.”

“yea, i’m gonna go hunt some down.”

stoned and staring at the sky in a hot tub at 2 in the morning.

“look, everything is pink. that’s odd don’t you think?”

“it’s the lights in the water. they’re playing tricks on you.”

we drove to Nashville and sat in the back of the car drinking the beers they gave us. 

we ate tacos at an irish pub in a country town. our waitress complained about everything.

“do you realize how easy it is to make gravy? it’s so easy.”

in the comfort of someone else’s home, what you learn is, you can be anywhere, as long as you don’t get stuck there.

[hellehound]

september.

i had a dream that i was stabbing my new pillow with a knife. just pulling all the cotton out of it. 

she always has a flower in her hair. making up things to call me, unable to pronounce my name, she smiles and gently reaches for my hand. we’re jumping on a mattress in the living room laughing. imagining ourselves to be dinosaurs. 

building bridges until midnight. 

she thanked god for us in her bedtime prayers. 

chocolate chip pancakes and black coffee at 5:30 in the morning. 

a sorry excuse for a basketball hoop under the L train. rattling the puddles in the parking lot. 

“this isn’t the kind of place i’d go if i didn’t have to.”

her tits up in her throat.

“i’ve never heard the word awkward used so much in my life.”

free beer. 

a drunk older woman in flower heels violently throwing up in the bathroom. 

“did you hear that? she was like, scream puking.”

“must’ve just missed it.”

a gray steak and eggs over easy on her plate. 

“i don’t want it.”

“why not?”

“i guess life just caught up with me.”

leaning over my shoulder from the booth behind us, trying to get a better look at the food on our plates.

“how are your nachos? are they good? they look good.”

metallic flavored tap water.

[hellehound]

grim, he says.

by accident, i’m addicted to heroin. starving without an appetite, watching the river blur passed me from a white adirondak chair.

“this was never here before.”

my mother, she’s seventeen and standing beside me. her makeup, it’s the way i remember from the photos. “they changed it’s path. moved the current,” she says, dying daisies in her hair. 

he kept pulling the trigger but nothing would happen. kept trying to die, forced to live. i stood and watched, waiting for his gun to go off but it never did. 

dark wood floors, flooded roads. 

i watched it all happen. i told him i could imagine what a car crash looked like, but he said no. he said, wait and you’ll see. it’ll go by in a flash. 

the color of the road is all you’ll ever remember. just street lights and glass. gray and deep violet. 

[hellehound]

this place, heavy with nightmares. 

monsters under beds and traumas gone sour as expired milk. standing barefoot in the dirt i suddenly realize where i am. 

arizona. smoking weed, looking at the world through a fisheye lens. it sounds so simple, so obvious. why is it so hard to allow yourself happiness?

[hellehound]

needles / wait / michelle

don’t insult the friendship we had with a friend’s request over the internet. downplaying the hurricane of our youth. what we did and didn’t say. all that devastation.

what would you say to me if i was standing in front of you?

it’s not that i don’t want to forgive you, or that i have forgotten you. 

there are nights where i am standing beside you at the tree line, watching the rain out by the river, back where we had left off. dreaming about it all going away, all that loss. i dream about you the way you were the day we abandoned each other. 

were you ever really there for me? was i ever there for you?

it isn’t repairable. we aren’t. don’t insult me by referencing the years gone by. 

don’t you get it? 

time cannot heal everything. the mountains won’t cure us, not of this. i should never have taken you north. i want to be sorry, if you had ever known me, you would know that. 

don’t you see it? this is where we are different; i don’t ever want to go back.