Humor

‘So how do you tolerate

these evenings,’ she wants to know,

‘you know, when your head is full of a

thousand wet leaves, the stench of

this rotten past overlying everything, when

everything is too still to be real?  How do you

just keep on surviving; do you take it

one day at a time, living from hour

to hour? Do you think this game of breathe in-

breathe out is really a solution? What do you do when

everything seems to be stagnating

inside your head? How do you live through

those slit-your-wrists moments of anomie?’

She looks at me, as if I

am going to reveal a magic trick- as if I

am a jack about to leap out

from a box. I have no sharp, witty answer

to her questions, and frivolity

will not do, not for this

fellow traveler. I don’t know

what to tell her, till I hear myself

saying, ‘Oh, in the night, I mock myself

In the morning, everything is lost, anyway.’