Day 11
Loneliness isn’t a violent occurrence. It creeps and embeds itself into the fiber of one’s soul with soft subtlety, leaking its toxic stain into the veins until your blood is its blood. Your breath feeds it, and every passing moment of solitude strengthens your parasitic marriage until it becomes a skin over all that is, or was you. All separation is lost, and it wonders absently under the badge of your name.
You become the host to one that never promised you anything, yet intended for nothing less than stealing every thing. Even memories once held away in protective cocoons become coarse and sharp as they tear their way through once hallowed corridors of nostalgia, now the shredded and dying halls of bruised skies.
With these talons clutching my insides, I happened upon another artifact of lives past. And, though my experience from only days before had been less than ideal, to say the least, my new, worn point of view whispered no warning, spawned no fear at all.
This was not the same store I’d been to, and the surroundings were not of those being faded in my memory, like photographs bleeding to a solid and faceless gray. I’d wondered into a place I’d not been before.
Though this was a Wal-Mart, set up almost precisely as the last, it was new to me. Head down, I approached through the paved prairie parking lot, remaining in the unpainted lanes between rows of vacant yellow lines as my mind’s muscle memory clung to habit, and came to the front doors, which again slid casually open. They glided apart like nothing had changed and the world was still thriving with life.
Today I had no set course and no defined need within the store, but once I lifted my head and perused the available scenery I found a point of interest and headed in that direction. It was the small cubicle that housed both the new memory card or disc based photo developing terminals, and the rows of colorful envelopes holding developed photographs behind a counter awaiting customers to arrive and carry them home.
These rows are what drove my curiosity. With only a slight hesitation, again old habits die hard, I moved behind the counter and began to flip through the envelopes before removing a random pack of pictures.
My mind was like a sock in the dryer, tossed from thought to thought. It had been so long since I’d seen another’s face, or heard a stranger’s voice. I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d caught my reflection. Did the past exist, or was all simply born to this moment? Am I a forgotten notion wandering the abyss of nothingness in a purgatory of my own design?
Now, as a voyeuristic alien exploring a foreign world, I removed a small stack of glossy photos and began to study the tracings of lives I had never known in the faces of people I had and would never meet.
My heart sank into my stomach, stirring the butterflies sleeping there. My mind climbed over itself with sudden violent attention, clamoring to fill the front row behind my eyes. My breath hesitated and then sped in anticipation. In my hands came the proof of a past that had been slipping further and further away from any tangible reality.
The photos were of a couple who appeared to be blatantly in love. Perhaps in awareness of the camera’s eye, they seemed unable to discard their shared smiles. They appeared to have a firm grasp on something I can only vaguely remember, happiness, companionship.
I have no fact based notion of their names, but in my own head I called them by name none-the-less. The woman was Miriam, and the man held within her embrace was Max.
Miriam and Max were the world I could not find. They were the past and future which had fled this place, leaving me as an orphan at the doorstep of a tenantless building. They were what I chased and never caught up to. They were the dream sleep couldn’t track down.
Fearing something worse than death, I slowly sat and then lay on the ground behind the counter of the photo booth with the pictures in my hand.
I feared I would live here forever, alone.
Gradually my thoughts mixed all the colors they could catch into an edgeless chasm of swirling black and sleep did it’s best to comfort me by removing this place, and allowing the serenity of complete emptiness, void of thought and memory and…of anything.
I slept….when suddenly….
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