Untitled Documents

There was an episode of one of the later seasons of the Gilmore Girls where the younger of the two Gilmore Girls goes and meets with her old boyfriend who had, after a childhood of neglect, turned his life around and become something of himself. In this meeting she says to him (who has now become a writer), “You know I like your writing because it doesn’t remind me of anyone. It’s just you.” I ponder this now, as the sleet pounds down on my roof, as the trees droop under the ponderous weight of the water, as the grayness like a corporeal fog seeps in through my window and dashes the light from every corner. Or maybe I’m going colorblind. The eyes fail to see so much.

This place is a hell. My chair is too soft, too forgiving. The light waves of music from another room remind me too much of a home. I can feel the syrupy tongue of sleep lapping at my eyelids. It’s like the keyboard beneath my fingers sinks down, down, down into an abyss. I shiver: for other reasons I do things to keep this body alive and functioning. I do this to keep the soul revolving around me. It’s a purpose: that most cruel and immaterial of things that lacks the common courtesy to stay pinned down on one thing. I married a wife; I got a house; I got a job. These things help, of course, but as for the real thing…?

I am reminded of that quote; it bothers me. My wife watches the show and I watch it with her. She tumbles through it all not unlike me; different paths to a same destination. It’s hard to tell anymore. I was a child who Knew What To Do. I am now a child who doesn’t. These things I put out: now they sink into a ever-expanding quagmire of Untitled Documents and two sentence fragments of ideas that never quite make it to being another line in my runestone. The computer’s fan stops now, as I’ve since moved my hands (they feel so much like weightless gloves now) behind my head. The screen goes black; I see a face in the darkness. For a moment I ponder if I could just stream out the loose morass in my head and call it a day (because do things ever really happen anyways?) and then I see it: my reflection no longer is on the screen.

Touch the cold face; it’s still there. But the walls around me are definitely paler; tighter, maybe. If I stand, will they snatch me like a bear trap? I stand uncomfortably and walk out of the room. The music I heard from earlier is quieter now, down a hallway that is always one door away from me even as I walk towards it. I know my wife is in the other room, right? She’s here. She tells me when she leaves; but now the house is empty and cold and darkening. The music is still there though. Always still there, always one door away. I don’t run though. No matter how more terrified I get by the second, no matter how many breaths lay caught in my throat to never fly free past my lips to see the sky and earth, I never run. It may be due to my insanity, but to call me insane would imply everyone else isn’t. I wouldn’t be so sure.

The house feels upside-down. I can’t explain it. Everything looks right side up, but I feel like it is upside-down. There is a phenomenon in flying when you fly in the weather where you feel as if you are leaning more and more in one direction. Your sinuses and inner ear lie to you. They stutter and tell you things that worry you to right yourself again. The plane tips ever so slightly--imperceptibly--to right or left as you spiral down, down, down and then it all--but in any event the house feels crooked. I have to way to level it, though. I walk slower, despite feeling far more afraid.

My mom once said “This sounds like Hemingway!” when she read something I forced out--like vomit. Interesting implication, I’m sure. This needs little explanation. Twofold horror wrapped around me from then on: do I end it, gorged in misery, alone, after doing so, so very much with myself? And not only that, do I do it with out an original bone in my body? Feel the uneasiness now: it smells like heat. I hate being hot. The cold you can escape from. There are always more blankets, more things to turn on, more wood to burn. There is no way to peel the skin from your body. The endless friction, the constant entropy: there is no way to break even. It gets only hotter from here because of how the Great One created the universe: a ticking clock that will only ever be wound up once.

I hear the clock now! At least I think I do. It’s hard. I am walking so slowly now it’s almost as if I’m not moving at all. This is the curse of the truly lost. In a video game called Grim Fandango you find a soul of the underworld trying to find his way using the sun, his method naturally being to keep the sun always on his right. Do the lost keep moving or do they remain stock still? I never quite could tell. 

There’s a crack in my sole. Every time I take a step my shoe sticks to the floor and I can feel a flap of the rubber peel off. I would go and get new shoes but that is a little bit of a waste because I have so many shoes, all well walked, all more or less unusable now. I believe my life is a an ever-growing pile of used shoes and miles walked; a number that goes up for an unspecified amount of time. The number now appears above me in a flash of golden light. I am startled to realize the ground has fallen from beneath my feet and I’m walking on nothing but air. The gravity that held me down now sends me careening into the sky; a ghastly, empty sky.

This day is finished and tomorrow is now today and in a blink tomorrow is yesterday and today is the day after. A clock spins lazily on the wall as I pass by, telling the correct time perhaps even though each revolution feels like a second. I smell a purple breeze; I pray for a five o’clock and when I see four, I shrug icicle shoulders and pour myself a signature: booze from a plastic bottle and one of the nine hundred variations of cranberry juice. It tastes loud and brassy. I hear the rattling in between my ears, try to make sense of it and give up.

There is a square of light in my pocket; it rolls like a ball down a hill in my hand. So many, many, many, many thoughts in fractions, infinitesimals of a second. Billions of miles go by under my coarse, cranberry-stained thumb. But good to see: the thing drifts away (lost in a corner somewhere, this room of endless corners for things to get lost in). Turning the cup over my lips, it is empty and at once filled once more. I am angry at something and in an instant I forget who I even consider my friends. Am I still married…? This is all a little much. I thought I was walking through my house but now I’m sitting again back in the room even though I was walking forward the whole time. I think it’s time to go to bed so I don’t for quite a while then do it out of obligation and it’s okay. I forget to kiss my starry-haired wife good night.

To summarize: in a cold, gray room I get more or less nothing done.