Blind Faith

He said I was liminal. I assured him he misspoke. 

But he didn't, I understood his inflection, disregarded his semantics, made my own conjecture. I was transitory, I wasn't steady, I wasn't solid, I wasn't real. Each day I was whoever I wanted to be, and yet I was still miserable--this was consistent. 

A long time ago, I used to make him laugh. I used to make them all laugh, I thought I could make the world laugh and laugh and remember. But they forgot. 

Some nights I wake up and scream, but I don't. I think about it, I do it in my head, but I don't. I turn on the T.V. and sit in cold sweat and look behind myself periodically. It's 4 a.m, now 5 a.m, and the dawn is bludgeoning my window, begging for me to except the new day, and yet I turn away, towards the silver sliver of light pouring out of my television. It's a clip, a replay, of an award show. A woman stands, having won, and pleads with the crowd. 

"You like me, right now, you like me."

And that's true. Some mornings, I'll like me, I'll like me so wholeheartedly, on my way to start my day, so proud of this ambition, this ambiguous accomplishment, this forecasted fair, fathomable significance of a brand new day. Right then, I like me. I am whole. I am solid. 

But at night, I fade away. I'm a spirit drifting, drifting, along with the breeze, dragging by boots upon the snow leaden pavement. I'm in a grocery store, it's 11 p.m., and the clinically white tile and complementary florescent lighting is giving me a migraine. I see reds and pinks, tainted lighting that's not really there. Signs that read funny the later and later you go. People who don't seem real, people who drift, drift just like me. Where are we going, where are we, where are, where. Where?

It's so bright in these stores, glaringly, jarringly, but I can feel the darkness seeping in under the cracks and rips and tears of the solid concrete. I feel these things in my bones, under my ribs--the darkness, the mighty darkness. 

Coupons, I slice them up, I cut them from the page, I feel them slide over my fingertips and cascade down a bloody pant leg. I can't stand it some days, I can't stand to be anywhere. I'm safest in the future, I'm resolved in the past, I'm lost, lost, lost it in the present. 

I'm always waiting, waiting in line, waiting for the mail, waiting for the day, that day, those days, any day now. What am I waiting for? What? What? Have I not lived? When will I live? Am I living right now? Do I ever know how? How can I, how can we, even live when any day now, we might not?

I knew so many people once, and now they're gone. They're not dead, but that's the worst part. They're just gone. Soon their memory will fade so wholly that it'll be as if they were dead. But they'll still be living. Living is a relative thing. Dying is a figurative thing. Thinking is a insinuative thing. Feeling is a diminutive thing. 

We're all goners in the end. In the quiet, quiet end, this dusky, hushed villa of the meandering wanderers, we're all seeking something more easily sought by the living.