Linoleum

i remember.

in the waiting time, you can think or you can imagine. thinking is better. thinking is concrete. you can think logically. you can argue with yourself, put yourself on the stand, slap down new evidence, yell out "objection!" when your mind offers proof of something you wish you hadn't thought.

when you imagine, your mind wanders around conjuring possibilities and follows those possibilities to their conclusions. often a myriad of conclusions - like a "choose your own adventure" novel where scenes unfold next to one another in real time, rather like a nightmare only worse, because you're more than aware your mind is betraying you. it's acting immature and imagining things that might or might not happen and may or may not frighten you.

but if you don't think and you don't imagine, all that's left is breathing, and then you remember the ragged sound as she came apart. she was no longer there, but her chest was heaving and she was rattling as she continued to breathe, and god help you you wished she would just stop, simply end, and you watched the clock for hours, from day into night into day into night, and you held her hand and thought about how during one car ride you had once wanted to crush the very bones in that hand to powder for the dry and nervous noise they made. you held the keening inside until afterwards. it always comes rushing out afterwards. you've learned that it always swells up and out, like a rushing tide, and it chokes you and you hear the rattling in your own chest and you burst, you burst, you burst, and you cannot hold it in.

hold it, grip it, but it's wet and slippery and it slides away, and now you don't remember having had it, but you remember the letting go.

some things cannot be held, and maybe that has less to do with the person than the thing, but doesn't that sound like a cliche? and cliches are deplorable, embarrassing, really, a person like yourself doesn't spout cliches without good reason. what's your reason? and you begin clicking along the hallways of your mind, which you pretend to know but really remain dimly lit because what lives in the recesses is sometimes so awful and large and monstrous that it simply can't be had, it can't be allowed, and you click along quite rapidly because the faster you go the less you see and the less you see the less you can be accused of knowing, but you once said the more you learn the less you know, and the clicking gets faster and faster until it's the clattering of a set of bones dancing and grinning, a skull clacking madly along and grinning and twisting and leering, but you keep moving and avert your eyes and put a pencil through your hair, you've got things to think about and lists to make and opinions to form and dish out like facts, you've no time for sets of bones wreaking havoc in your mind, and what's a mind anyway but a distortion of a perception of a reality that relies on the mind and mind matters the means, and you've tripped! but the bones aren't there, the bones aren't real [as you feel along your collarbone and think, there. and there. and there.].

you're skilled at looking away.

you may sit and stare but see it's a choice, a choice not to sit and stare with these convictions, side by side with logic, with your chosen shroud, and you've made it a choice between shrouds in the end, and you chose the one that's not wet or weeping or seeping or needing. you chose the shroud that's stiff, it's so stiff it stands all by itself, it needs no support, no hangers here! and you stand stiffly inside it so no one knows but it doesn't touch your skin anyway, and that's ten points there, because you have to keep score, even at time like these. you've no malleability and people sigh and hold your hand and they remember and you stay in your shroud and nod and murmur and console and you do not need, you never need, and the old photos play and you are not moved. you do not eat, for what is eating but weakness? mints will do, mints are good enough, in this shroud your body requires nothing but your own mind as it navigates the line that snakes down the room and points so sharply  and it suddenly swoops and it's there and you're there and it's there and it will all come out. and you inhale -

but it hasn't, not yet, and so you distract yourself. but you're smart; you would know if you distracted yourself, and that would be a new shroud, the reeking shroud, and you reject it, so you notice instead and what you notice is how people act. how flawed they are, how their well-meaningness is meaningless and grates at your teeth, and you grit your teeth and accidentally split your mint and smile too hard; it's too brittle, too bright for this room, and they take steps back before they sidle back in. you catalogue. you note every detail, you document every minute, you watch every body, and you file the facts as though you will remember these people next time you're part of this line, and you do not flinch.

you fool yourself. see, i do not flinch. i do not need. i do not imagine. i think; therefore i am, therefore i be, therefore -----