Ragged claws

Forty-eight years old and you are no one. In a world made of money, your only value is to work, consume and die without troubling anyone too much.

Sometimes you feel as though you are entirely separate from the world and cannot touch it. Sometimes you feel as though if you were gone, scarcely anyone would notice. They would just say, oh him, and go back to wondering what to have for tea. Sometimes you feel as though you do not consist in anything.

Sometimes you feel as though you swam out from shore on a sunny spring day and never were able to return. Sometimes you feel as though there will never be a way to put your feet back down on solid ground.

No one is coming to rescue you.

***

I fall in love between the end of the first date and arriving home. I fall in love because I need it not because I have anything to give you. Sometimes I feel as though I have only ever loved one woman. Sometimes I feel as though I doubt even that. When you make a story and try with everything you have to make it feel as though it is real, you have to rely on your imagination.

And I am not an imaginative man. If I was, I would write about worlds that do not exist and not the one that does.

Sometimes I feel as though I have loved many women. Sometimes I feel as though I have tried. Sometimes I feel as though that should count for something.

But I never gave anything. How could I? I have nothing to give.

Sometimes I feel as though all I want is forgiveness.

Sometimes I feel as though I have loved you for 20 years and sometimes I think I dreamed it up just to never have to love anyone at all.

No one is coming to rescue me. I'm going to have to find a way to drown.

***

It is like there is no way to mesh these gears. Sometimes it feels as though I want to be worth something. Sometimes it feels as though I want to give.

You can fool yourself for a short while but you know that you only want to take. You do not know how to be anything other than ragged claws, scuttling across the floors of silent seas, wishing you were not alone in the dark.

***

Sometimes I wake in the dawn and for a moment I do not understand the noise of the birds. Then I realise, they are no different from us. They feel free but they will also die. They are also restless.

They are not unknowable. They are not mysterious. They have a beginning and an end. They do not care about their limits.

posted by Dr Zen @ 6:25 pm