An obligation…

… to open my eyes again, start working and get up; to do this.

And when I dream, I dream about water and boats, my boat that moves and horror: moorings snapping — casts us away at dangerous angles, parasitic shellfish whose little arms squirm about inside their calcium casings, live worms that will feed under my skin if I let them.

Nightmares interrupted, sometimes forgotten so that I don’t have to suffer them and other times remembered, leaving me with a conundrum: why Shakespeare’s complete works? Such delicate sheets with tips laced in silver, their broad bodies bound firm in hard, blue cloth.

The days fold under each other, the week closing up in my palm, a fan printed with the reminders of non-achievements, static appointments, traces of waiting and wanting and … those moments where I felt happy, moments that I reflect on later and see that yes, I was happy but still not part of it. Perhaps that is the happiest I’ll ever be.

Resume, continue, play on… I pick up the thread and twist it tight into a sheer line hanging as a cobweb through the dirty light of an early morning, into the garden maze, into a blackness hedged with dark green; how do you find yourself in the middle of that grey heart?

If it’s the only thing I do today, I have to get up. I want to share my labyrinth with you.

I was watching …

… a young girl walk down the street earlier today as the side of my face throbbed from where the doctor had shoved one of those instruments you use to look at your ear, snugly into the opening of the canal and discovered a ‘dull drum’; with the piercing radio off and the reading I should have done weeks ago becoming a bunch of moist, flaccid pages in my grip I watched this girl carry a prescription home and wondered if when she went home, she’d have anything to say to her parents about her journey or if she’d go upstairs and do her homework.

I wondered what it felt like for her to walk back home in the sharp afternoon air with no coat – just a hoodie – and experience nothing remarkable, nothing important.

I want to know when I can become anonymous again and move past the giant oval obelisk that follows me, stands before me; a great grey rock all weathered around the fine sand-texture edges with veins of green mineral just visible in the surface; and the face, the 2-D face that is solemn, outlined in gold and black and red. Which ever way I turn, the obelisk is there delivering me a message.