The Chair

I will say, I had a conversation with a man who manages to speak to me through the dreams of a life I would never have imagined for myself. Certainly, no one predicted or promised me this. He says, I followed no manual. He says, I have forgotten how others live.

True loneliness seeks no recourse. It is aloneness. The state of being oneself being alone. If I am lonely I know what I miss. I am alone and cannot put a name to happiness. I have withdrawn from anger, pleasure, and pain. My writings are telegraph posts to a world that returns its messages to an abandoned outpost. Every day I steer an uncertain course; whether I will take my next step or collapse, I wake uncertain, fearful.

It is, I am certain, the life I have chosen for myself. Obligations and sin have a similar look and feel. But I am so worn by conflict I act by avoidance rather than acceptance. I negotiate a nightmare ocean littered with natural and human wreckage and never put into port. I am a lesson to my son, to be sure, but of what I can't imagine.

When I was lonely, I was sad, but I was alive. What I feel now is not living. I think of death as a kind of graduation ceremony. A new beginning. Something pure which cannot fail and which I cannot dilute. I coax myself to sleep with thoughts of knives and water. I am like a planet made suddenly aware of itself in infinite cold. Or better yet, a chair. A thing you pass by every day, which prompts no thought of what might happen next. I am best myself when prone and drifting.