A single breath

A single breath, one little smell, and I've relived a lifetimes worth of youth in a few seconds.

Something about the night. When it's quiet, and still, and the moon reveals something, a form with a silvery blue lining... the edge of that something reveals a distinct lack of substance. A pure blackness, an anti-tree which, through the trick of not even existing at all, brutally cuts the sky to pieces. Something about it is very compelling. The shape of the wounded sky; the presence of a chaotic, fractal nothing, implies a suggestion. I think about it for a while, off and on, and at the end of the night, after I'm back home and safely tucked into bed, I get it. Eternal sadness? An intentional thing, purposeful and created? That's it. And by qualifying the suggestion, I've just given it form. The sudden realization of the reality of this universal practical joke - played on suckers like me by the devil, apparently - to which I'd just supplied the punchline, threatens to overwhelm me.

After a while I've had enough of that piece of tree-shaped hole in the sky. I start walking again, into the wind, and the breath of the world shoots up my nose. The world does little things like this to me sometimes, usually without warning. I'll never understand it. The smell of the beautiful sadness of memory tries to carry me away into a comfortable oblivion. With some effort, and somewhat reluctantly, I turn away from this feeling, and it feels like I've amputated a part of myself. It hurts terribly for a moment, and then, suddenly and without even meaning to, I put myself back together and I can't even remember feeling anything at all. Sometimes I really worry about the absurdity of everything.

I finally decide to do something about the splinter in my right foot that has been worrying away at me all day, just sitting there at the limit of perception, wreaking havoc somewhere down there just above the cellular level. I realize that it's just a tiny piece of whatnot, and that it's state of awareness - if it even has any at all - lies somewhere between that of a grain of sand and the thermostat on the air conditioner. However, even as stupidly unaware as it might be, it's still a guilty little freeloading bastard that's been getting a free ride all day, and I've passed judgement on it and sentenced it to the same oblivion from which I'd just recently emerged. After the sentence is carried out and it's over and done with, I don't feel bad about it at all... well, maybe a little. As simple as it was, it was a thing with a purpose - to aggravate the heck out of me - and it was fulfilling that purpose completely. I ended that brief purpose, forever. Empathy for a splinter. Isn't that retarded?

It's late. I'm home. I'm tired. I've been running a fever all night.

I'm sad. I'm afraid. I don't belong.

I'm alone.

Everything is going to be all right.