This is my (parenthetical) life. A life of multiple-choice questions. I don't get to write an essay, explain entertain my intersections don't fork, they bifurcate.
I saw a billboard, an advertisement. "It could happen faster than you think." I couldn't see the meaningful text. What could happen faster than I think? Death? Opportunity? AIDS? The young man looked unhappy. It must have been AIDS. Or unemployment. Not a natural disaster. A personal disaster. All disasters are personal. We get lost in them, like a pebble in the tide, swallowed up disgorged upon a foreign shore.
That's where I walk, along the edge of oblivion. Oblivious. The land depressives know best. The place where you're always drowning, but never drown. Forever in that moment when you can't breathe, but never fall all the way in, because that's where peace is, where neither breath nor life matter. A suspended moment free from the internal scoring etched by relentless thoughts of tragedy. As if one person could contain all that. As if I'm important enough. As if I matter. As if I'm not just one more pebble in the maelstrom.
Life as a series of multiple-choice questions. What would I choose? It's not the answers that matter, it's the question. I never see the right question. I'm always one page off, working on something that won't even be on the test. Even when I'm right, I'm wrong.
I lie alone at night trying to solve the puzzle of the past trying to see the picture. I always assume there's a picture. Maybe there isn't. Maybe I'm making it up. I see color and shape where there's only gray. I make a story. I have to make a story. I'm a human being, that's what we do. We tell ourselves the story of ourselves. That's how we remember who we are.
Otherwise
we become nebulous unanchored free floating motes of dust suspended in a beam of sunlight powered by some external engine unable any longer to assume the right of flight part of the conglomerate of dirt anonymous a non entity compacted into what feeds the indifferent multitude above.
Life is not a series of multiple-choice questions.
2015
