A Day in the Life
So it starts, so he thinks. A new day, he drinks in the cold air and the red sun. He must wake. He must stand. And yet he lies there as if he is in shackles, with the key thrown into the wind and into a stream and swept away with the fallen leaves. Stuck in stasis. The thing is, the key remains in his numb palms.
He slept, to be sure. A page turned in the calendar but not a single page in his story. He cannot remember the last time that has happened.
He suffers from a stagnancy of his own making. And he’s all too aware of it, which makes it all that much painful for him. It is his own medicine that makes him sick and the tragedy is that he cannot recognize. He knows that it is not his body, but his mind. Perhaps it is his soul. Perhaps it is trapped in the in-between. In the twilight of the seasons of a man’s life. Clear that he is an imposter to his place. He does not belong.
So he scrolls and scrolls. Ideas flood his mind about what he must do, fleeting moments where he acts without any sort of hesitancy, but that is as far as he takes it. One idea is to write down his dreams and have it be analyzed with those well-versed into such matters.
“Do I dare?” He mutters to the blue jay staring at him through his cabin window. The bird waits on the man to feed his lone companion. A dog named Bishop. A lumbering dog meant to protect sheep from bears. “Do I dare?”
The jay squawks. And he sits up. He grabs a notebook from the nightstand with the last entry dated from last year. Lament and suppressed rage escapes him. “What have I done? Nothing. Nothing whatsoever.”
He looks for the a pencil. Found one, blunt. Another, broken. A third, sharp but breaks the moment he puts it to the page. A a deep sigh indicating he is moments from surrender and succumbing to the comforts of his heavy comforter. The fourth is what rescues him. So he starts writing.
“Tell me, tell me your name. I don’t want to be haunted by your ghost,” he says with tell-tale resignation. They sit across from each other besides campfire underneath the cosmos, the clarity of those celestial bodies such that it reveals their apparitions.
“But you know I can’t,” she says with a morose smile, a smile that contradicts all meaning of what a smile is. “You would know who I am.”
“You’re scared.”
“Yes, I am,” she says. The strength and defiance in her voice betrays the admittance of fear. He can’t quite tell the direction of the defiance, but it is not towards him, that is for certain. “Why wouldn’t I be? Aren’t you?”
A laugh escapes him, and it is a laugh almost inaudible, almost imperceptible. Almost could be mistaken for a deep breath. And yet she knows it wasn’t and she knows it was a laugh not mocking. He says, “I get the impression that you’re not asking about me and if I’m afraid to be known. Seen. No. It’s something else you’re after.”
And it is her turn to laugh. A short, embarrassed laugh. “What can I say, I’m a dancer. You caught me, but can you keep me?”
He doesn’t quite catch the last line, he fixates on the category in which she dropped him. “If you are a dancer, then what am I?”
“A… hunter. A drifter. But a dreamer. You wouldn’t know what to do with yourself if you ever caught your prey. Kept. She’d drift through your fingers as if you were trying to catch the northern winds.”
“A drifter and a dancer walk into a bar.”
“Go on.”
“Don’t have a punchline. Never thought it’d get that far.”
“You never said where you were going.”
And from his reverie he exits. His recollection hits a standstill. A twist far from ironic, but he finds humor in it. He would not have had the dream if he knew where he was going. This quality of lost listlessness transcends reality and fantasy. A struggle that must be wrestled down with full-consciousness.
End writing: ~3am, ~733 words