Im not wise
Im not wise. Ive lived long enough to take a piece of everything I saw that wasnt mine and build something up out of it. When I see it from a distance, when I wake up to it, Im not able to discern anything about it. It isnt my body or my life. It surrounds me. It is where I put myself, in my apartment, in my visions when I close my eyes. I know that other people are made of those bits that I can remember, not human bits, still bits of immaculate garbage. There is nowhere to put all of this that it wont come back to me, or where it wont be replaced while I sleep or stare. I dont want the sunlight to fall on any of it. That day is over. It was a mistake to think that there was a route that bypassed the pitfalls of disintegration. I have left things in too many places, too many traces on walls and sidewalks, finger tracks in dust. I havent lived long. I dont know where things come from. With everything closed out I am in and out of the company of things. When I am not it is because I am one of them. I dont even notice. Without the light most of the apartment falls into shade. The sun sets for hours. It is too protracted. I dont want to know when the day is drowning. I dont want it to collapse on my floor. I dont want it to take me with it. I dont want to dry out and flake away. A corona of brown light rings the curtains. It is hot. I need to be alone, as my self, lightless, colourless, trapped. I dont want it to come flooding in here gasping, wet, pulling me down with it. I trap myself away from her. She takes things. She takes their place. The light that makes things join the others is finite. There are things without it. She would step into it.
There are three lamps in the room. Each is flat against a wall, far from the corners. The corners disappear. They are dark. They arent in shadow, there is just nothing there. That is where I put everything until I am alone in the room, in my chair, looking away from the chair and out over my legs, just into the lamplight on the wall. I dont see her face, or folded stacks of paper, or the bleak light shining directly into my eyes. I slowly move forward, creeping out of the stillness. There is a texture to the air. I feel my hand stopping in it as I reach out. The light stops my hand. It is velvet liquid. It is vaporous sweat. I feel it against my body. I feel where my body ends. It ends in here, in the almost all dark. Back and forth I drift. As my eyes adjust everything rises back out of the corners in tumbledown stacks and dullness.
