DAY 5 – I Am Gone

I Am Gone

I am drowning in a sea of yesterdays. Maybe drowning isn’t the right word – that implies a quick, all-consuming, wave sweeping through me. This is more like a slow suffocation. I have been completely aware of each and every moment lost; fallen between the cracks in the darkest recesses of my mind.

Saturated in a pool of sorrows and regrets. My mind had always served me so completely, I had not considered that its well would become bone-dry, filled with the dust of a thousand lost thoughts. I try to remember how I arrived at this place – but my mind plays tricks on me, and I can’t seem to lift my thoughts above the fog of vague consciousness within which they are trapped.

You sat suspended in the slowness of time and permeated the depths of my imagination. Tendrils, reaching, squirming, squeezing into the darkest depressions – my synapses hypnotised by memories of another life.

In a world full of decadent tomorrows, I sit wading through a never ending, unsatisfying past. Punctuated with promises – battered and burned and decomposed, dead upon the floor. Only ever in a time long past could I have been foolish enough to believe in hope. Sideways glances, second chances, were never enough. The air was thick around you and the pieces of you that were left strewn throughout my life, are all that I have left.

Dour, dark, eclipses of my mind. Posturing, petulant, hopeless, hopeful, lost, dangerous, permutations.

I see myself, every now and then. Everyone else seems so happy about it. All it makes me feel is inadequate when I lose my tenuous grasp on my lucidity. Sunday morning, tea-cup in one hand, shot-gun in the other. I forget why I walked into the room, and I leave, empty-handed.

I don’t exist anymore. Someone else – less capable – has taken my place. I am trapped in here; a front row seat to their ineptitude and loss of competence. I see them – with a smile on their façade, but I know. You are but a slave to the insentience of the fleeting moment.

My mind is no longer full of ideas – it is their absence that I feel the most. You are the woman I once loved. You are the light that my soul once answered to – now I don’t even know who you are. My mind is shrouded – how can I explain it, when even words are rolling away from me, just as quickly as my marbles are? My memories float away, into the distance, swimming, bobbing up and down in an ocean of nothingness – never within my grasp. I am swept up in unfamiliarity. People tell they know me; I nod and I smile at these strangers. Have I landed in some kind of parallel dimension?

Everybody’s face expresses sadness when they see me. I miss the genuine smiles of the world gone by. All I see now is pity – for a man who once thought he knew it all. Why do people come, if I cause them so much misery? Let me be – let me sink into my oblivion, alone. I have nothing to lose and nothing to hold onto anymore.

I am gone, replaced by a shadow of my former self. I am no longer your father, your brother, or your husband. I am a soul who has been lost to the eternity of his own failing mind.