<\/a><\/p>\nAnd in this nocturnal climate, the man changed. He refused to sleep, choosing instead to sit in a chair at the end of his bed, breathing heavily and staring hard. Frightened of dying, of the darkness of night, he talked to himself until dawn, his unknowable interiors made briefly audible, cryptic fragments shaken loose from his speeding mind:<\/p>\n
That dirty slut is going to end up in jail.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ll be back in the mud again.<\/p>\n
There are only four directions in this world.<\/p>\n
The meadows will never get greener.<\/p>\n
And sometimes he\u2019d move about. Bent like a terrifying hieroglyph or a primitive cave painting, he’d tilt into view, looming prophetically, and existing between worlds he’d stare furiously through me, holding fast to the small things that remained to him before eternity swallowed him whole.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One of my roommates at the Montfort Hospital in Ottawa was an older man who looked a little bit like a Civil War veteran.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":4240,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[945,381,177,662,2294,2295,569,399,2292,1188,215,2123,167,489,2291,151,1241,204,333,612,55,2293,1172,922],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4239"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4239"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4239\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4245,"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4239\/revisions\/4245"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4240"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}