The rain falls both in droplets and in great sheets from clouds which might be dark blue or grey, depending. The people in the windows high above the street at which I stare through my hired porthole onto the world, mine for the price of a pint of brown ale and a look at my dog-eared passport, hustle and bustle, unaware of my existence, or so they believe. Only I am the wiser as to their true possession of the knowledge of all things relating myself to them.

What shocks me, apart from the still ringing, screeching memories of the drill bit between my teeth, and the Hollywood nightmare of looking up at the masks and lights and instruments that hide the face of institutionally sanctioned, magnanimous agony from my complicit self, is that it all just seems to work from where I’m sitting.

As the poison passes my lips, and I renew the yellow flavour of decay in me without a second thought for what has just occurred, I see only a tiny antechamber within the great mechanism, a room without a view. What takes place inside is both the symptom and the diagnosis, the sentence and the crime. Every single point is the centre of the universe as the lungs of the world continue to expand, no start and no end in sight.

Who is to say we haven’t always been right here? Never moving, never changing; an incomprehensible fabric onto which all our stories, for that’s all we really have, are not woven, but projected, temporary as anything.

As I look over my shoulder to catch the previous moment off guard, it is I who is humiliated. I see only now, in a different form. And yet I insist, without my control, that it is not I that is changed, but the world, my God. What am I?

Written – 2015

Published – August 2017

Photo by Nhia Moua on Unsplash