Sea of Humanity

Here

"How strange it is to be anything at all"

Beautiful day out. Sitting in my office looking through tinted windows at the blue sky streaked with lacy white clouds. The city laid out thirty four floors below bursting north and bounded by the East River. The river, littered with barge pulling tugs, is as dirty as the tide that pushes it. I breathe deeply imagining the feel of cool spring air entering my lungs and the warm sun on my face. Feeling Alive. Forgetting. Forgetting the stale tepid air of my air box and the life sucking fluorescent rays beating down upon me. Maybe it was not my office at all that I sat in, maybe it was some other office or maybe just a room at some other time on a day not quite as bright or blue. Have I embellished?

It may not have been a cushy red leather chair that I sat in and on many occasions would spin around in watching the world rotate around me with a child-like glee or perhaps it was I who rotated? No. Not at all. I am. I remember. It may have been an old rough hewn wooden fruit crate on which I sat, the grapefruit stamp still barely visible on the grey and dirty wood slats. Dried mud caked my boots and the base of the crate. I remember a landscape of rocks and dust jumbled and everywhere. The foreign booze, cheap and acidic, a poor elixir of life, lifted from some surely empty hideout (or was it home?), slopped in a makeshift tin cup. My coarse fingers, extensions of trembling hands, drifted around the lip of the cup. The drink a straight razor lancing through greasy and unsettled guts, the city, a flood freed coffin, jutting up behind me, bombed out, gutted, hollow. The dusty air filling my lungs with a fine gray soot tasteless or perhaps bitter, I cannot remember. Rumbling explosions or, perhaps, the sounds of trucks bouncing away from the town and gunfire or ,perhaps, the pop of firecrackers (was it that time already?) echo in the distance punctuated by the yelps of some stray dog all gray but for the red of its eyes. Surely it was not a real dog. Maybe it was some harbinger, some portend of a not so wise future or a poorly lived past.

Was there music as well? A cello lonely and wailing in the distance or am I merely tricking myself and replacing the sounds of another broken stringed instrument with that of a cello? The tin cup dangles from a now limp finger as the souls of men much younger than I, ripped up from blood red dust moistened with their longings, fill the air and spin and swirl around me. Not Dead. Not Yet. Too soon. They do not, I think, see me as I see them or perhaps I blind them from within this my mortal coil. No. Not me. Not me at all. Too soon. I float as well. No. Not at all. I am. The sky it was blue. I am sure of that. A dog ( a Pomeranian?) perhaps a stray, all hackles, startled by something looked up from its ragged bed and growled at me or I think it was me. Faceless here under a blue sky cloudless. I laughed or I remember laughter. A child's? Perhaps I am. I must be or not at all. The fire crackled from under the mantelpiece as a wine glass, half full, shatters on a slate gray floor.