I am going to talk about comfort.

I’ve been thinking about comfort a lot, recently. It bubbles over this old man’s wormy mind.

And it squirms, it squirms. Lord, does it squirm. Maybe I don’t talk so much, these days, I don’t know. Maybe I’m mostly thinking.

Just who would I talk to, anyway? I don’t know! If I’m not in my tucked away in my fortress in the forest by the highway, I am in another place. And in that place, there isn’t a soul to talk to. Sometimes I talk to myself. It’s riveting!

But–

There are souls in this other place, this realm of education, sure, but none of them approachable. Running around doing things of self-important necessity.

When I’m in this place, it’s comforting in a mildly electrocuting sort of way. I blame the season. When I see my own reflection in the glasswork of a door I am about to open, it’s startling. It’s comforting, yes! — but in a different way than the place I inhabit. I see a person that I looked like, have always looked like. So much has been ripped and pulled from, rewired and flushed and worn down, built up again as a new creature. And to think! It has all taken place under the flesh and bones of one single individual, one that doesn’t mean anything in the grand scheme of anything . . . the creature that is myself. (And you as well, friend.)

What an unnerving series of events!

I haven’t been “home” in a while. I say this because this may the reason I am so devastatingly starved for comfort as of late. Or maybe it’s the season.

And it is Autumn, isn’t it?

It’s comforting.

But like so much of this curse that sticks to my brain like chewing gum, I see only the raincloud over all of it.

The leaves look beautiful, all red and yellow and orange — but this means the temporary death of the tree.

I am in my grandmother’s house, and I think, sadly, How much longer will this place exist as it has always existed?

I am running out of time.

I question the utterance of such a thing, but if I am to be honest with myself (and thank you for that, Ryan (no problem, Ryan)), I will say here in this place that on more than one occasion my car has found itself parked in the middle of my high school parking lot with all of the windows down, no matter the crispness of the air of cruelty of the wind, Perfect Music slithering out of decade-old sound system. In this place I am shell shocked and spooky-minded. It’s feels so subtly perverse.

I do this because I can see everything.

A word on my memory, before we continue: I am, to some degree, obsessive compulsive. It’s a lovely curse. Sometimes I am angry at it. I am, sometimes, obsessively angry at it. I am obsessively ironic about it!

I catalog everything. It’s all up there. I have an incredible memory. It is not a gift! As I have said, it is a curse more than anything . . .

I have a deep-dark mind. It’s full of sounds and pictures and shapes. When I am in a place where these sounds and pictures and shapes were first cataloged, I can replay them like stop-motion nightmares. I can watch events take place in that parking lot, envision memories in that building.

And so I park my car in this place, sometimes. I let the films play out until the reel catches on fire, and I collapse into a fever dream.

This fever dream occurs roughly three-hundred-and-sixty-five times a year.

Just the other night, in fact, I found that my abilities had been strengthened to a godlike, intrusively intimate degree. It was disastrous. I lay there in my winter bed, piled under a two-ton load of cotton and feathers, picturing kaleidoscope details layered upon lollipop details. Disgustingly specific days popped into my mind like bacteria. I was in-between-sleeping for two hours! Lord Almighty, what a night. I woke up and wondered where I was, and why I felt sluggish and full of saw dust and bad feelings.

I felt goop-y and yarn-y. I unraveled into adult sleep. I woke up and did what every human being does every single day: nothing. Or, if that makes you feel bad about the false sense of accomplishment that you have perhaps endowed yourself with because That’s What You’re Supposed To Do: I woke up and did a lot of things that ultimately do not mean anything at all.

I felt very little of anything!

I thought of everything.

Today I was sitting in my oversize windowsill, thinking of things that I had been thinking about in the weeks before. I simply haven’t had any time to spend a good hour pondering nonsense.

It was the perfect opportunity to do so: It was Friday.

It had been a perfect Friday, too, because I wasn’t required to do anything with my mind or body that I didn’t want to happen.

A moving truck had backed into a space next to the vehicle that I have driven tens of thousands of miles in. I thought of some of those miles. They had been good ones, those miles.

My neighbor was moving. I have seen his face only twice. The first time was when he came to my door and asked me, of all people, why there weren’t any parking spaces. I pointed to my then-neighbors across the street, a loathsome pack of stinking corpses who were able to speak and walk around, as if they were human beings with identities and lives. It was miraculous. I hated every single one of them.

The second time, I saw him standing half-naked in his living room watching cartoons. The blinds were open. I shrugged and read my mail.

He’s in his mid-thirties, drives a Mercedes. He’s a nice enough man, maybe.

Anyway: The movers were doing things of little surprise to me; they moved things that had been accumulated by just one human being.

It boggles the mind, how much shit we can afford.

One of the movers, a jack-toothed man in a paint-smeared hooded sweatshirt, he held in his hand a stand that one would presumably holster a Christmas tree in.

My neighbor, the underwear-wearing cartoon-watching Mercedes owner, is a mid-thirties professional who hates not having a parking space. He never brings women home, doesn’t have any chocolate-bar-munching little creatures imparted with half of his genetic makeup living with him. He’s all alone in this big black world, content to barely clothe himself for the benefit of his owl-eyed neighbors. And he has a Christmas tree stand.

I pictured him buying a Christmas tree for himself, pictured him decorating it with lights and singing bells. He must of known, just as I do now, that gifts weren’t going to materialized under that tree at the end of December, yet he put up a tree nevertheless. It felt good to him. It felt comforting and nice and warm.

Something about that made sense to me. I felt like hugging him, if he were fully clothed when this happened. It was such a human thing to have that Christmas tree stand. And here I trumpet the inevitable doom of my species, yet so weighted and breezy am I with the idea of a piece of plastic that keeps a tree upright.

I’m going to write something this week about how every person and every event in human history has been completely pointless in the grand scheme of everything. Yet so very few feel this way! I’m digging into the core of the planet on this one. You may end up feeling worthless. Please anticipate it! I say this because maybe the Christmas tree isn’t comfort to him (we must guess alternative motives, after all, if were are to be true sociologist wizards). Maybe this Christmas tree is something he feels like he has to have, in which case I do not relate to him at all. I have spent many tens of months removing all of the dog shit from the life. Why do I celebrate this inane holiday? Why am not drinking everything out of the carton? What can I do to reduce the percentage of my life that is made to be miserable over the circumstances of stupid people whom I used to be well acquainted with?

When I had answered all of these questions, I was two-hundred-and-sixteen pounds lighter, so to speak, and living under reasonable circumstances. I also ended up friendless, though best of all, retired in my twenties. So, it all worked out in the end.

Though I am fascinated still with this idea of comfort.

The tower at the top of my palace is a museum of happy events that have been scarred by black vines, though I appreciate the feeling of the place. It reminds me, constantly, that I used to exist before the moment I inhabit now. I need this reminder, no kidding. Sometimes I hallucinate, and I’ll swear that I passed my mom at the gas station. Three days ago I nearly crashed the mobile bomb that I pilot to this place of education that I attend, because I thought that Death was walking across a field toward me. It ended up being a woman wrapped in black rags and cloth, and maybe that was a hallucination, too, I don’t know. She ended up not being interested in my activities, anyway, so there’s that.

The thing is, if I don’t have anything to comfort me, I literally begin to lose my mind, and my face becomes a swirling snowy plane with two dripping black smears for eyes. As I have said, I’ll see it in a reflection, and it’s downright scary when I can’t identify with the boyish face staring back at me, eyes dripping and dropping with big black streaks.

Maybe I should see a doctor!

For now I will sleep under cotton and feathers . . . Should my new-found time-traveling abilities comfort me in my sleep again, you’ll be the second to know.

And in these nighttime thoughts I will consider whether or not I feel comfortable with a tree in my living room. Am I doing this because I’ve always done this, or do I anticipate any real pleasure being derived from the presence of a needle-bearing evergreen coniferous in the ballroom of my starlit palace?

One season at a time, old man. There are still trees outside the palace, I am sure, and they cling still to their variegated leaves like sweaty lottery tickets.

. . . hm.

It’s starting to get frightening.

I hear things sometimes that I don’t want to hear. And maybe I shouldn’t be hearing them, but they come to me anyway, beggars looking for a place to stay, a bit of spare change, a touch of representation they could only have through these tired fingers.

He lit another cigarette as he listened to her answering machine. He hung up as the tone sounded. He needed to hear the voice. He had nothing to say back.

They come out of the air. Off the streets, too. They’re hidden in the hum of power lines, in the swishing of leaves, in the billowing waves on beaches, the smooth rotation of tires. They wink at me from the cold outlines of clouds, the stillness of the moon and flares that link the traffic lights and the stars in arcs of light.

The saxophone shook as the last note took its exit through invisible cracks in the ceiling.

Smoke and fire. Something beautiful. I don’t know what I’m looking for, or even if I’m looking at all. It’s just sensitivity really. Something everyone has. And like anyone else, sometimes I ignore it. And sometimes, I can’t.

Rolling barrels down

Stop. Stop writing lines. Go to sleep, for once in your life.

Skies crawling with

Stop.

Her blanket was

Damn it all, no. Damn it all.

The

Place

Falling

Apart

I

walk

walk away

Don’t…

I turn around.

Not much short fiction recently. A novella in the works. Should be done by December. In the meantime, here is my first painting, started and completed yesterday.

I’m not going to apologize if I end up sounding like a child.

Or sad.

Both are probable, I reckon. And anyway: This website — this thick slab of granite and rubble, this thing – is a never-ending public conversation with myself. I only ever write anything because I feel compelled to do so. Otherwise I’d pop like a latex glove filled with jellybeans, no kidding. What I mean is, I’m not writing for anyone. I’m not even writing for myself.

I am simply talking to myself.

So, if it helps to satisfy your aggression and disbelief, you (that is, me, Ryan Litton, the person typing this) can liken this sprawling labyrinth of garbage to a homeless person having an argument with himself at the bus stop.

It may help!

Look: For first, I will discuss a wound on my arm. It was not an accident. I paid good money for this wound.

It cost me twenty-five U.S. dollars, don’t you know. That’s the going rate for wounds this nice.

I think I’ll look at it now.

Still marvelous! Still an exceptional wound. Though it grows smaller and smaller all the while. I think that soon it won’t be a wound anymore. It will be fleshy pink skin, brand new. I absolutely cannot wait.

I eat between two and three apples a day, so my immune system is a force to meddle with, no kidding. A wound on my body doesn’t stand a chance. Which is why I’m sad to see this little one go. So long, little one. So long forever.

This thing sprang up on my arm around July. I’m not sure what it was. I had thought, at one time, that it was a stubborn bug bite. There were three more like it, all up and down this right arm of mine. I love my right arm. I’d give my left arm to keep it. Hah!

Really: I love my right arm.

The other three red dots vanished and became small little pink fleshy marks, brand new. They looked terrific. I was happy to have new skin, it didn’t even bother me that it was pink for a while. (If it were up to me, I’d be pink all over.)

So, this other son of a bitch stuck around for months and months. It would begin to heal, wither, look angry, swear at me, insult my mother (and my cooking!), and then begin to heal again. This process went on for a good long while. Occasionally we’d bicker, and sometimes it looked unsightly (to me! — I could care fuck all about anything other than my own opinions (hah!!)), but I didn’t mind my new roommate so much. It was a parasitic relationship and sometimes I felt used, but we got along all right.

Later, I flew to Texas. I wrote about this adventure in an obscene number of words and sentences. I met a terrific human being there, and he asked me, “Have you had that thing checked out?” I said, “No, sir.” He said, “You might think about doing that.”

“I might,” said I.

Two weeks ago, I thought about the mark on my arm again. It looked downright ferocious. It glared at me and bubbled over with liquids I hadn’t realized I could create.

I called some skin doctors. Their receptionists told me, “We won’t have openings until January.”

Well!

“I want this thing off my arm!” I told them. They told me simply, “January, January.”

One woman asked me, eventually, “Would you like to be put on the wait-list for cancellations?”

God damn, woman! Yes, of course!

Two days later, I saw a skin doctor. He was a nice man.

He was tall and kooky and zany and clownish. He wasn’t scary at all. He said soft little sentences with big flashy smiles. He adjusted his glasses and straightened his tie.

He said, “Let’s have a look at this thing on your arm.”

Fifteen seconds later, he sliced it off of my arm.

Ten seconds earlier, he placed a small needle in a patch of skin he wished to lob off. He asked me if that bothered me. I shook my head, told him I was a pro.

A dime-size chunk of dermis and blood and gore was lobbed off of my favorite appendage. The spot where it had once lived bubbled over with pain-dulling syrup. It turned yellow and foamed like a wild dog.

He held a razor blade up to my face. He seemed downright delighted, said, “Here it is!”

Had my arm been in a non-bubbling, friendly mood, I would have clapped for him. I would have sang him songs.

I knew about as much of this guy as I ever would, knew he would have bowed and done a back-flip for me.

Instead, he smiled a big flashy smile and dunked that fleshy hunk in a little bottle of effervescent science. He huffed like a cartoon buffalo and wiped his brow with a free claw, said his work was done. Here is where I would have clapped, too.

“If it’s all the same to you,” he said, smacking his rubber gloves together like hot sexy sex, “I’m going to send this off to the lab for a biopsy.”

“But,” he scrunched his nose up like an accordion, “I think it’s safe to say that this little ol’ thing didn’t do you any harm.”

He shook my hand and commended me on my field of studies. “I have a daughter in Boston who is just like you.” I sincerely doubted that she was a black-bitter, friendless old mule like me, but I smiled a real smile and shook his massive hands. He gave me a half-squeeze palm-pump and winked so powerfully that I expected nearby birds to drop from the sky from the shock waves. I half-wished for him to put a lollipop in my pocket and pat me on the head. He didn’t. He zipped out of the room on wiry legs, off to save the day for someone else.

A nurse with a permanent frown applied some sort of greasy gel to the moon crater on the most important part of my body. “Keep it greasy,” she said. I didn’t understand what that meant. I didn’t want to do that, anyway. I decided I wouldn’t. A small, circular bandage was placed on top of the wound I’d paid top dollar for.

Since then, I have eaten approximately thirty apples. The healing is even and beautiful.

And–

Let me just say something, because I’m both frightened and delighted at the truth in this:

The healing of a wound is the most exciting thing that’s ever happened on this planet. It is really, truly the most exciting thing I’ve ever seen.

A scab quickly forms over a massive, gaping wound, effectively creating a tarp-like surface. It’s not permanent, but it “tents” the wound until the new skin has formed beneath it. Hot damn!

It reminds me, a little, of the way polite construction workers go about their business. In Japan, a construction site is blocked from public view, and covered in paintings and plastic banners that say nice little things. When the construction is done, the paintings and the plastic banners go. We don’t need them anymore; we can look at the completed building.

They do this in Baltimore too, but the ambiance is usually blistered by the fact that you are guaranteed to have a construction worker burp in your face if you’re within one-hundred-yards of the site.

So, thirty apples later, and it’s not so much a wound anymore. It’s really quite a pleasant little thing.

Which is all very exciting in itself, but of course, there is context we must adhere to!

* *

The context is this: I am gut-quakingly soupy-silly, right now.

I am melted plastic.

I made the mistake recently, of allowing my brain one second of free range.

It went wild.

Before I knew what was going on, I was listening to a video on YouTube that may as well have stapled me to a graham cracker and held me over a fire. The sound of the thing literally choked me.

I have written about Legend of Mana before. There was this guy that I used to care about a lot, and we played Legend of Mana all the time.

He blew his brains out last Thanksgiving over something that was frankly very stupid. I miss him a lot.

His over-powered, purple-hatted hero is still saved on my memory card. I last loaded it the day before Thanksgiving, last year. It felt wrong to play it alone. It felt like being electrocuted.

The other person related to Legend of Mana is alive, but– I don’t know. That guy is somewhere else, now. He’ll be somewhere else for the rest of his life.

I got Secret of Mana for my fourteenth birthday. It arrived in a big brown box. I opened it and felt excited. The earlier versions of human beings I now sometimes and never talk to were with me. They felt excited.

We all felt excited.

We played Secret of Mana until there was nothing left to do in Secret of Mana. We talked about Secret of Mana. We loved Secret of Mana.

I went to the mall one day with this guy I used to know, the early version of this human being I never talk to. We found Legend of Mana in a discount bin. It was twenty U.S. dollars, which is five dollars cheaper than getting the top-layer of your skin skillfully sawed off by a skin doctor.

It had Mana in the title. It had a nice colorful cover. We bought it.

We took it home and lit incense and played it like it were Secret of Mana. It wasn’t Secret of Mana, but then, it never claimed to be.

It had some of the most pleasant music I’d ever heard.

Of all of this music, I remember the song called “Home”.

When I foolishly relinquished power to my brain, gave it freedom to do whatever it would like to do, it chose to listen to a nice guy named Caleb Elijah play “Home” on his acoustic guitar, which he’d been nice enough to upload to YouTube.

As I have said, it nearly choked me. There were vivid movies playing out in my mind. I felt like dying, if dying meant I could time-travel.

Thirty apples later, on-purpose-wound healing up on my favorite appendage, I am listening to “Home” as I type this in black and white and inverted colors. I miss the earlier versions of human beings I now sometimes and never talk to. I miss the old RB, and the old EL. Hell, I miss the old RL. I miss my dad. I miss Phoebe.

I miss Phoebe.

Jesus Christ, how long has it been, old man?

Poor Phoebe.

That won’t heal.

That’s around for the long-and-never-ending.

“Home.”

I miss that, too.

When the rain let up, there was color again.

And now it is deep-dark-dead-black.

No more color.

Maybe we’ll try again tomorrow.

Maybe the day after that.

I think I’ll sleep until it’s time.

A Halloween party at work on October thirty-first. Masks and foamy beer and little scraps of food you can hold in one hand. Fat people laughing and blowing fat air out of their red cheeks, spinning and effervescent and sad.

I can watch Federal Hill from the balcony, and the harbor from the window in the dining room, there at the top of the museum.

I can listen to people and look at people and talk to people and think about people. But I’ll probably just look at Federal Hill under ghoulish lights, and the harbor under dense fog.

There at the top of the museum.

And the sides are all made of glass, and there are enormous machines whose only function is to inspire and look beautiful. They exist to furnish our minds with colorful little thoughts we can put in our pockets and hold up to the sun.

And I will look down on the garden full of wooden animals and stone faces, there at the top of the museum.

Later there will be laughing and singing and the drinking of more and more and more beer. And my face will be behind a mask to commemorate a useless holiday, and to uphold a ludicrous tradition.

*

A brief sojourn to the mountains of Virginia on November twenty-sixth. I will be alive, then, for maybe two or three days, alive with my dear Cousins, and awake in their thoughts. And we will feel spirited and electrified for a basketful of hours, and a handful of days. We’ll talk about the cold air and the trees and the animals. We’ll point out just how much of a God damned genius Shigesato Itoi is, there at the top of a mountain.

We’ll hike and eat lung-bursting food.

*

A winter voyage to Japan on December twenty-ninth. I’ll fly away in the early morning and zip through timezones like solar systems. I will read books and drink hot tea and listen to music without words. I’ll watch the sun rise over Alaska, and the snows of Russia, there at the top of the world.

When I land, I’ll take a train into an enormous city lit up by yellow and green and red and blue. And I won’t say a word about the weight of my pack, and the cold at my ears and nose. I will dip my body into volcanic hellbroth and eat vegetables cooked in sesame oil. I will stare at the peak of Fuji at dusk, and say my nighttime prayers at the foot of friendly Buddhas.

The earth will spin on December thirty-first. And I will spin at the top of skyscrapers, and in the underground tunnels of trains. I will peel away the old year, and a new one will unceremoniously roar to life in one of the biggest cities in the world–

There in the last month of my childhood.

And I am here in my winter bed–
When darksome days loom like beetles overhead–
No frozen lakes of glass, or animals crawling on the forest floor
And I am here in my winter bed.

It is quite a bed, isn’t it? There was a night that took place recently, if I can recall correctly in my nighttime thoughts, when I decided that my bed had become a wintry place. I made quick to furnish this place with a thick comforter. It is gray and five inches thick. I am reluctantly born again every morning. And every night I die happily again under the weight of warmth and waning thoughts. It is quite a bed. And I am here in my winter bed.

Today was a day, again. I caught the tears of somber rainclouds with my hat and jacket. They sizzled into warm cotton and were remembered faintly never again. It was a day to wear a hat.

I wore a gray hat.

At noon I thought of lovers loving, and of selfish lovers loving. It was the very same thought twice.

And when I thought this, I glanced out of the window from my winter bed, and watched the rain swirl in the gray sky like gold-tipped psychosis. And again I thought of lovers loving, and of selfish lovers loving. I shuddered and considered a hot bath and the reading of books. And then this happened: Two deer appeared out of the red and the yellow and the dying green. Where they had materialized from, I had no idea. They walked across the slope of green grass and chewed on the offspring of sleepy branches. I wrapped my body in a brown blanket — the first thing I bought when I moved back to Virginia years and happy years ago. I sipped my green tea and let it burn the whole way down. It didn’t bother me. The deer snipped and snapped at sleepy branches. They walked slowly and then not at all. At that moment, I couldn’t envision a more defenseless animal to kill, couldn’t think of a less emasculating creature to carve into a trophy to be hung on a living room wall like a pus-bubbling boil.

I thought of older, deader human beings, and of their diets, and how their diets were now “sport”.

I thought of home.

Home, too, would have been gray. For reasons including the weather and not.

And it rained on the grass behind my winter bed, watery tumors dropping downward like the tears of little children.

And the two unselfish lovers ate what they would, and I watched them behind glass and waning thoughts.

The darksome day boomed and cracked and faltered; it left a gray paste in the darksome sky, like the dead-pale skin of a long-gone octopus.

I thought of home.

And of people and places.

Today was a day, again. It wasn’t a particularly good day. It wasn’t a bad day. Just gray paste and raindrops and silent-stepping animals with grumbling stomachs who meant me no harm.

The trees are being sapped of life, and sent to temporary graves.

And the deer will eat their offspring with little black mouths.

They are out there now, I’m sure. They will eat and run and run and run and go and go and go.

But tonight I will be still. I will sleep and sleep and sleep.

I write this now:

And I am here in my winter bed.

The thesis to be proven: I am an immortal bastard.

I crawl across the brick sidewalks of this slanted city and strange mumblings escape my lips that are absorbed by the fallen leaves as they grind themselves into oblivion. You will catch me laughing, at the moments when I let my guard down, or on the occasions when my guard is most vigilant. My city walls are made of fly paper, my moat filled with ice. The gates are tired and flimsy, and the locksmith has been long dead, his trade forgotten. I live to see what fiends wander towards me to say hello, and I live to hear them speak of their own kingdoms, decorated, so they say, in purple fur and silver tassels, the colors of deep sea oysters and the shades of condensed stone. I listen and I catch glimpses of their worlds, so far apart from mine, their words emissaries of a land they seek to ignore with every provision at their disposal. But the skip in their step, the blinking of their eyelids, the loose strands of hair dangling from their pretty little balloons of emotion; I’ve seen these before. But I never quite give up. That is why I will not die. Cannot die.

The kingdoms never touch, or merge, or split apart, and when their advisors abandon those vain homes of gilded jail bars still the city will stay, javelins thrusting their silent heads above the ramparts. Only trickery. There is no defense. But the spikes will stand their ground as the intangible ideal they guard sinks further into the mire on which it was built. In time those kingdoms will be forgotten, but I will find, inexplicably, the remnants of those lonesome swaying towers rotting in the sun within my own doors. A single wooden beam turning to soil, coated with moss and smelling of summer jungles, or a rock from a church sinking into the pavement of my streets, or the shards of a lightbulb summoning blood from my bare feet that tread the empty pathways. And riding the waves of feeling all the way down I find new sewers and alleyways I did not build, flower boxes left in windowsills I did not seed or water, whole buildings inverted into the sand by their shame and sickness, trapdoors calling for a visitor.

And on the warmest of nights, I answer, and descend the stairwells to find lost paintings, their colors dusted over with age and neglect, hanging square and true on the concrete walls. And when I find an empty canvas, I am no longer so eager to shed my broken dreams over its silk and white. So I hold it close, speak to it, and carry it up the stairs and into the moonlight, under which it melts and seeps across my skin, and becomes itself skin of my fingers and palms, making them clumsy, calloused. Then I turn my restless eyes upward at the stars that hide their shivering forms beneath the grey blanket of somnambulant clouds, and fight the urge to pray.

Alone. Tired. Broken. Tell me something I haven’t been. Show me someone who hasn’t seen it all. Show me someone who hasn’t seen at all. And then I will give you my treasure. Then I will open my chest to your prodding, unhinge my locks and melt my chains, and all of it will be yours for the taking. And take it you will, but only to throw away. When your finest moments are the strangest to others, when your finest moments are silence and warmth, who can know? Show me a man who has slept enough to rise quick and easy when morning crests, and I will show you a corpse. Along with a few of my skeletons that knock the undersides of the floorboards as I pass you by without a word. You thought they were footsteps and maybe you were always right, and I was only walking. But forward. That is my direction.

Backward. Whose direction is that? Tell me and I will show you a pearl. Condensed silt, why so valuable? Density. And if my density is your silt, how will we ever learn to speak, and value our little songs and keepsakes?

One man’s trash is another man’s fertilizer, and up spring the flowers of gold transparency. This is the hope I cling to. And if I do not live to see them bloom, place no plaques, build no memorials. The flowers are beautiful; I never was.

Until that day I will continue to do the same thing I have always done since the day I was born. Die, and slowly.

And so this is retirement, huh.

It’s not so bad.

I have been cooking and moving my legs in outdoor settings. I have meandered about at book fairs and worked wine-tasting banquets.

I have eyed red leaves in hopes of making them mine. But they blow away before I can snatch them up.

I sometimes wave to the neighbors when I collect my mail, or take my garbage to the curb for collection.

It’s all coming together nicely in nice ways and all that.

However: I have not played a single game of Yahtzee or Solitaire, and have not been overly excited about any impressive bowel movements in recent memory.

I have done some more things, now that I remember: I print (not clip!) coupons, because retail is for suckers. And sometimes I find myself driving my car, and sometimes I find myself driving my car on Sundays, which of course is the day when the old drive their automobiles like blind rats.

However: I do not drive on Sundays with the intention of eating the same meal at the same restaurant and leaving the same paltry tip for the same bubble-gum-smacking server who hates my guts and talks to me like I’m three-day-old baby.

As far as I can tell, I’m dangling over madness; I am yet submerged in it. We can say, perhaps correctly, that I have lost only half of my mind. The other half is safe and sound, dry and alone, smelling of dead leaves and Tibetan incense.

And what a wonderful smell that is.

Here I am urged to say something like this: “Recently, a friend of mine told me that . . .” even if I would be lying in saying so. But: nothing has happened recently with anyone, and I can’t think of a single Goddamned thing that any friend of mine has said that permits itself to be repeated here, in text, in this “narrative”, which shivers calmly as though it is something that is perhaps important.

Not a single word!

And so there will be none of that . . .

No stories, nothing. I don’t feel anything about it, good or bad. I am indifferent as the tumbling red leaves on my doorstep.

Though, something did happen recently. Recently, I visited my father. I did not choke him. This is something that we, who are retired, do — we visit our parents. We share meals with them and tell them all about the big bullet points in our lives when they ask. Only now, as a retired man in his twenties, I can say this, when asked what I’m up to in that godless state of Maryland: “Just the same as you, Dad.”

Dear old Dad says: “All the same, huh.”

No kidding, I had almost forgotten what it felt like to be in that state with those people. Two and a half months doesn’t sound like such a long amount of time to be away from something, but hell, it really is. If I stay away from the source for more than just a few weeks, something in me cracks and rapidly it does this, and I just maybe lose my mind.

Half of it, at least.

Don’t know where the other half ran off to. Might be gone for good. Hell.

What do old people do when this happens?

Maybe they shrug, I don’t know. They probably put up posters with pictures and a reward.

Anyway: I sat in a rocking chair for four hours, and we said some things to each other. We watched a two-hour special called “National Parks”, maybe, I think, and it just about moved this old man to tears.

Real ones, too. At first I thought something in me had cracked again, and the other half of my brain was making a break for it, leaving my upstairs a vacuous dome full of used matchsticks and homeless brain cells. But no, my eyes bubbled like warm marshmallows and, a rare feeling was felt in that big empty place inside of my chest, right there in between where my mother used to pick me up with both hands and say happy little words to me.

There were numerous interviews with conservationists and park rangers and the children and nieces and nephews of important dead people whom I now find myself harboring tremendous respect for. Everyone who spoke had eyes like my eyes: circular and dark and far-reaching for another place that is not accessible in any other plane of existence other than the warm pockets of a humming mind. They would say things about their childhoods, and of their childhoods spent in the tens of thousands of acres long-gone governments protected because they ought to have been protected, and God bless them for it.

One man spoke of the wolves. He said that wolves had not been in this particular national park for almost seventy years, because they’d been labeled nuisances by long-gone peoples and slaughtered for existing in a place that was their home, and acting in a way that was normal to them.

Through time and money and effort and respect, the indigenous wolves were bred in captivity, and released into their home again to act like wolves act, and do what it is that wolves do.

Shaking, his eyes in that far-off place that I vaguely understand but do not know personally, he said that he heard the wolves cry out in unison. He said that this was the first time any human being had heard the crying of those wolves in seventy years.

Some wolves were shown standing on a rock, the six of them howling together at a Mars-red sky. The camera cut back to the man telling the story, and he began to cry.

Man.

My father and I said nothing to each other, which gave weight to the air. It had a nice heft to it. I knew that we were both thinking the very same thoughts, and if we had been inclined to make those thoughts into conversation, it would have been the first thing we’d have agreed on in a very long time: Goddamn. What a thing we just experienced. And from a television set. What a world, what a world. Goddamn, what a world.

Ten minutes later I was tying my laces and looking out at the big blackness. I was preparing myself to drive in that big blackness. My father, he said: Please stay, don’t go. If you head off, well, I just don’t know. Stay here with me, sleep in my home. When you wake up, you can go.

I said, no, I’m going to go. It’s late and I’d rather be driving.

It had been two and a half months since I was presented with the opportunity to drive on the highway at night. My leg itched and my eyes bubbled some more.

When I hugged him — and I did hug him — I didn’t even think about choking him in an alternate reality where I put a stop to my own birth. I was happy, at that moment, to have been created to live for two decades and a little more so that I might hug that man, and scratch at my leg with my opposite foot, and drive at night when all is deep and black-dead-silent. When the sounds could tumble through the half of my mind that stayed behind. When I could drive on empty highways and dream the things that little boys dream.

I won’t even pretend that I didn’t think about wolves.

When I last heard a wolf howl, I don’t know. I have never heard wolves crying in unison.

And presently I find that I don’t mind if I never do end up hearing that sound. I know that the sound exists, I don’t need to hear it. Its existence is enough. It is more important than me.

I sit tonight at my black wooden desk in the corner of my room — my mind, the half of it that still exists, whirring and sparking with kernels of static electricity and indifferent feelings. The nighttime air creeps into my space through poorly-insulated windows. I’ll fix the windows before the snow settles in. It’s all I can do, these days. I’ll do it on a Sunday.

It has been a year since I have worn this gray sweater. I wear it to ward off the cold. And now I think I will sip my tea and settle in to the sleep of a retired man in his twenties. I will sleep under the weight of three blankets. It is cold, but I don’t mind. I’ve lost my mind, maybe, but I don’t mind.

And now I think I hear music . . .