He stared up at the ceiling fan. I half expected someone to walk into the room and ask him what he was looking at; I assume he'd tell the truth: "a ceiling fan". But nobody entered, and he lay, oblivious to the world around him.
He began to mumble, and each thought took him in that direction as far as it could before the next thought consumed him. He was consumed; over and over he was consumed. I guess he had a lot on his mind.
He heard soft whispers that slowly brought him back. And slowly he did return, and forget, the thoughts that had only a minute ago consumed him. But not before he was consumed.
He drove, carefully avoiding potholes or anything that looked like a pothole including shadows and small bumps. Hitting potholes made a bang he felt in his spine. The sound made him itch.
Home: soup, television, phone calls, internet, music, bed. None of it satisfied him. And as he struggled to figure out why, staying awake until he hadn't the strength left in his face to keep his eyelids up, I was the one who answered the question:
He wasn't even there; he didn't realize it, and of course I'm speaking figuratively. He was there physically. (Why the physical and the figurative seem like opposites is beyond me; it seems to me the physical shouldn't be confused for the literal, which is the opposite of the figurative, but they are anyway I suppose.) Anyway, he was there physically, but he'd been consumed, and so regretfully was not a potentially satiated entity.
Because he wasn't even there.
Where was he? Here's my guess:
He was in the belly of a great beast. The lives and loves of many greater men than he had been consumed by it; and now he joined the ranks of the best and the worst, and the in-between.
On second thought, nobody's here, or there, or anywhere; They're all in there. Welcome to the belly of the greatest beast ever to have existed. Welcome to humanity. Have a happy life.
When the world is ending, and everything they know is coming down around them, will they stop to ask for directions to the gates of heaven?
No comments:
Post a Comment