Spinning Alone In Space

It’s a strange world I inhabit.

In my head, I mean. My mind does not seem to function as it did before. It may be just that, seeming, but it may be a shift. I don’t know. I don’t care.

I used to be a little filing cabinet. Annoying or delighting adults to taste. I imagine my mother way back when, with her back pressed firmly on the bathroom door, eyes closed for a long moment, while my little chrysalis paced the tiny hall of our equally tiny house and waited to launch into it again. Everything I knew, all at once, in a row.

Things are different now. I don’t see things. My head is full, or empty, I’m not sure which. I am passing into a world of metaphor and ghosts and stories, and nothing else.

I took my little boy to the Farmington Fair. It was as close to fun as we could muster, for him and for us. There is no fun for me, but his. I stood there, slackjawed like the stranger I am. The locals perhaps mistook me for a stranger because I am not yet, and will likely never be, from here. I’m not sure I’m from anywhere. That wasn’t what made me a stranger there. I was a stranger to them, and all mankind. There was nothing factual and real there for me. Only metaphor.

If there was a purpose to the steady disassembling of this world, with nothing to replace it, I do not see it. And the vision of the last child spinning alone on a shabby carnival ride haunts me still. A creature that does not wish to replicate itself doesn’t deserve to live.