Locked in syndrome

Purpose...

A word for the distance between one moment and the next, as though something must be pulling us across.

Intentions.

Good or bad, but there are no such things.

The question: “Does purpose exist beyond the moment, past the autonomic chores of simply being?” The lungs opening. The heart contracting. The body feeding itself back into another morning without ever asking whether morning was requested.

The answer: "No." At least, I thought it was the answer. Thought it was also the solution. Now I think this answer is the problem. And there is no solution to be had.

There is no little light left burning under the door. No buried self pounding from inside the walls, begging to be excavated.

I have checked (out).

The call is not coming from inside the house.

It is not coming at all.

But my skeletal hand, as if driven by atavistic impulse, persists in hovering over the receiver.

Coming down from artificial propulsion feels like my soul is separating from my body.

As if I had a soul.

As if I would want it to stay.

No wanting here.

Why open the door to disappointment, usher it hurriedly inside?

I brought this on myself, yes. Some, not all. I welcomed the wanting being gone. I did not understand how much of a person is built around reaching.

Satisfaction is not, in fact, the death of desire. Satisfaction merely walks it across the bridge to the next yearning. Another mouth opens. Another absence announces itself. Another future leans over the present and begins demanding payment.

So I stopped answering the collection calls.

Or something in me did.

Apathy, it was apathy in the library with the candlestick.

I have been struck over the head.

My desires lie as dead as the gray matter oozing from my skull, and the strange part is not that they are absent. The strange part is that the cadaver still acts alive, has outlived its essential components.

It goes to work. It answers questions. It buys groceries. It washes its hair. It laughs when laughter belongs in the appropriate conversational opening.

An extremely high functioning corpse.

I am a fucking ghoul, can you not see?

Perhaps not.

Ghouls are expected to look hungry.

This one eats because the clock says six.

There were things within me once, some near the surface and some buried so deeply I mistook them for structural support. Keepsakes, trinkets. Tiny private assumptions about what would still be standing when I arrived wherever I went.

They were tethered, somehow, to a being far too fragile to stay.

I never saw the ropes. Only felt them pull taut when she left.

For a moment there was resistance. Then meat gives.

Whatever had been fastened to her tore loose and followed.

Not everything. That would have been cleaner.

Enough remained to keep the shape recognizable. Enough to continue introducing itself by my name.

And this is not so far a departure as you might at first assume. It all starts this way, no? The reason to stain another page. To press something internal hard enough against the surface that it leaves a mark.

Only this time there blatantly is none.

No lesson struggling toward articulation.

No revelation waiting patiently beneath the language.

No plea disguised as prose.

I am not writing my way toward anything.

I am staring blankly at my remains.

Apparently, put enough mirrors around them, call it a kaleidoscope, and this becomes “the beauty.”

Everyone admires the pattern and forgets what is required to make one.

Fragments.

Loose pieces confined inside a tube, made briefly symmetrical by mirrors and distance.

Turn it and there is a flower.

Turn it and there is a star.

Turn it and there is something intricate enough that, for one careless second, you might mistake arrangement for intent.

Then shake it again.

Nothing mourns the last pattern.

Nothing remembers what it was.

There is some mercy in that, I suppose.

No.

Not mercy.

There are no such things.

Only a loosely assorted collection of abstract concepts ambushes.