The Day has Slipped By

 Pit in my chest. 

Three and a half hours left on the clock. Sitting at my desk in a beige office under yellowed fluorescents. My director in a cube near by, speaking loudly, forcefully, cheerfully to someone on the phone. I've finished all of the work that I can handle for the day, finished it a few hours ago, and now I pretend. Click the mouse and type at random intervals. Hear footsteps and adjust my posture, stare intently at the screen.

They don't stop. They walk out of the office and into the lobby. First carpet, then tile. I watch it happen in my head and I relax again.

The window next to my desk has a large steel grate covering its lower half. I can see the wall of a slowly dying row house next door. Disembodied and dead branches creeping from out of view. And grey sky. 

Grey sky mumbling some intention of permanence. Shambling through the so-far snowless winter. Soaking into me.

A pit in my chest.

I wrote and deleted a number of paragraphs here, each highlighting some fucking cloud in my brain or poison in my blood or crack in my bones. Heartache and disappointment. Failure and loss. But, it doesn't matter. None of this does. No one needs to hear it, no one wants to read it. The rot in me grows and spreads.

Pit in my chest.

Grey sky mumbling, shambling. The minutes pass as hours and years from now, 4:30, I leave my desk and I pull my coat over my sweater, leave the building, and walk to my car. Turn it over. The mechanic says I'll need a battery soon. I could buy it. I don't. Buckle in. Turn music on. I don't hear it as I drive the interstate traffic for seventeen minutes. I taste blood in my mouth and I realize I've been clenching my jaw, who knows for how long. 

Unlock the front door, climb the stairs to my apartment. Throw my things on the couch and stand. Stand in the dark living room and inhale. Close my eyes and exhale. Again. Walk to the kitchen and sit in a chair at the table. Stare at a grey spot on my left hand where in seventh grade I was stabbed with a pencil by Dan Rice. 

Minutes pass, moving as seconds now that this is my own time, and now it is dark outside and my house is dark. I forgot to turn lights on.

Pit in my chest. 

I don't turn the lights on. I don't stand. I've only noticed. My apartment is getting smaller. When I moved in nearly two years back it was so large and beautiful and open and now it had become cramped and collapsing. Stale and suffocating. No moments of peace until sleep. Hopefully there is sleep.

I look at the clock on the stove and it is almost nine somehow. 

The day has slipped by me. The evening. My time. And tomorrow it will happen again. The day after, again. And so on. You know, I know.

Can't die. Waste of life, of possibility for something else. Would make my family sad. So day in, day out. Like all of us. You know, I know. So I go.

I brush my teeth. I take my meds. I make tea and sit on my bed and read for a while while my tea cools and then read for a while while I drink tea. Some nights I meditate. Some nights I try to meditate and can't turn off the noise, the screaming, the static, the choir, but I try.

Tonight I only read and drink tea.

Ignore the pit in my chest. Pretend it's worth going on.