Solitary Confinement

I sometimes wonder if any of it was real. When was it? A lifetime ago? A hundred lifetimes ago? What difference does it make. All I have is this now, far from you, stretching in front of me for as far as my eyes could see. The past is just a clotted lump that forms in my chest, only to disappear a short while later, leaving me empty and hollow. The future, just a narcotic that makes me think things will work out, that they have to work out. I know they won't, but I make myself believe that, "maybe, maybe around the next corner it will be different". But there is only this now, a prison with bars of silence. I'm guilty, serving a life sentence for a crime I was born to commit.

The clock ticks away on the wall, the days of the year fall past me, one after the other, and I'm still here, waiting for life to begin, waiting for that voice to reach out to me across time and space. I meet friends who feel the same, we talk a while, discuss things. We feel the same way, that life is on hold. We're away from harm, but we're condemned to exist, like lifeless hulks floating aimlessly over the ocean. Nobody takes pity on us enough to sink us along with our delusions. That seems so cruel and perverse.

I sit and wait for that divine spark that I was sure guided all things, but He's not there. He's not taking calls right now. Prayers are a mechanical motion, empty, without meaning. It's like sending emails to a mailbox that nobody will ever check. You know that, but you keep sending them anyway. How could I have been so certain about things when I was younger? That I knew certain things absolutely and felt as much with every fibre of my being. Now I'm just exhausted, too indifferent to be angry, too jaded to think that life can mean anything, that there is somehow some purpose that animates us all and draws us to it. There is only this pile of dirt, and millions upon millions of ants fighting and dying over it every day. Still the now surrounds me, clinging like the scent of cheap perfume and the guilt from a dirty tryst.

You leave home for so long that when you come back nobody knows you. We're strangers from each other, we speak different tongues, and when we see each other in the street we cross to the other side, as if yesterday never happened, and we had never met, and never spoken together or laughed. We just pop our collars up as protection from the wind and the rain, and carry on walking, wrestling our demons.