Farewell

I find myself scanning the bland tile floors, moving in a forward motion towards an unknown destination. I look up and glimpse your familiar sneakers approaching me. I follow the worn black suede up to your legs, but before I reach your face, you are gone. I pursue you across the desolate aisles, attempting to capture you, but I can only see the tail of your shirt fading away. The fluorescent bulbs flicker incessantly, the lighting takes on the quality of the calm shift of clouds before a storm's wrath. I cannot call out, for I have no voice. You cannot look back, for you have no face. My heart beats rhythmically and hard as I forge on faster; as abruptly as you appeared, you are gone once again.

.. ..

I awake.

.. ..

The soft evening light floods through the slats of my blinds and renders me unable to move as I attempt to remember what day it is and where I am. My head rests half under the pillow on the wrong end of the bed and the blood pulsates violently against my temples. Swinging my feet out of bed onto the cool wooden floor, I stumble forward still contending with reality. I feel my way across the room and grab a t-shirt from the endless mess, pulling it over my head and torso. I sit cross-legged, staring at the wall in front of me, trying to reconstruct the dream from the hazed confines of my subconscious. All that remains is the unwavering feeling of futility and I drop my head into my hands, waiting for the immediate grief to subside. I become exhausted and increasingly dejected as time passes and the sunlight is completely lost. I ascend and find my way back into the twisted sheets. This is the only place I am mildly safe, and I fix my thoughts upon the ceiling once more. The white expanse surrounded by hundreds of tiny white lights assuages my loneliness, even if only for a brief time.

.. ..

If by abandoning me you did yourself a great service, then I no longer hold you accountable. We do not only physically desert one another, but rather become detached and despondent, isolating ourselves from the one person who might have been able to save us. I once wished to travel alone, to experience the entire world as a broken object without purpose or need. I believed that all I knew how to do was hurt and cause hurt and, in turn, I fulfilled this prophecy. I fear most the unknown. I now know that it is possible to deceive yourself in order to hide from the horror that is existence. My irreverence was my sharpest knife and the blade now rests in my side, just below the ribs and it was I who cried traitor. I believed I knew everything but it was all senseless and insignificant. I see now that I knew nothing at all. I know nothing at all.

.. ..

For the first time I saw you, there was no epiphany. There was no great moment of understanding or truth. There was only curiosity and sympathy.

.. ..

Reclined in the seat of my car, I waited for a friend to come outside from his house. It was a painfully warm summer day, no different than the others before it. You stepped out first, a face I did not recognize, someone I had never seen before in this small town. You were dressed in a white shirt, black jeans, and the black and white sneakers that I can still visualize effortlessly. You did not once look my way, instead your face was turned against the high sun; one hand shielded your eyes as you stood in the middle of the melting asphalt waiting for someone else. I watched you and I wondered about you, but I never thought I would see you again. I didn't even know your name.

.. ..

You continually fight for the sole purpose of seeing through to your decisions, but your life will ultimately become a frayed string of memories caused by your inability to persist through your fear and the harrowing reality that this is our subsistence. Beneath it all, surely you must see. Surely you must know. But that is only half of this war.