In my room, there is no ceiling. When you look up, you see the roof. And before that, wooden beams criss-crossing in a skeletal framework of angles and straight lines, solid and unmoving and blackened by the decades from holding the house together. At a particular spot near the window, I know the wood is strongest. When I look up there, I see a noose, and my limp, lifeless body swaying back and forth just after my final struggling.
Through a stranger's eyes, he would see someone tall, someone with strong legs and long fingers. He would be wearing comfortable house clothes -- a white cotton shirt and pair of shorts, maybe. It would be mid-afternoon and the house would be quiet. The children would be out in school, the adults going about their business downstairs. The stranger would wonder what this person, a young adult male, would be doing at home at this hour, and not be at work.
The possibilities will be too numerous to be able to rule out just one, to be sure. But within the millions of threads would be this: at some point in this person's life, his spirit died, and his mind and body only caught up just now. At some point in this person's life, he began to feel conscious of his inadequacies, perhaps at a very young and fragile age, that this became such an intense, strong singularity -- a black hole -- that pulled everything into its gravity and left only aging, brittle flesh to exist until its cells expire. At some point in this person's life, he stopped radiating strength and meaning and purpose, and began living on what others feed into him, like a doll or a machine. At some point, he died.
It is morning now. 6:00am, Sunday. I have been mostly awake at night recently, getting sleep when the sun is out. It's been a year since I've become unemployed yet again, and still, I haven't figured out which path to take. I don't even see a path. Sometimes I would get a glimpse, like curtains parting or fog clearing, but there would always be something else keeping me from moving. Fear? Maybe. Doesn't matter. I feel like I am back to being 16, life stretching on ahead of me, but always out of reach. I think that was when I died.
I get up and open the windows, and dawn's half-light softens the colors in my room. It is always so cold at this time. I move back to my chair in front of the laptop and look outside, at the wall and the electric wires running across it -- black on grey. A particularly strong breeze blows into my room, and the flesh in my arms shiver as the chill settles on my skin. I look up at the wooden beams as the corpse sways back and forth, back and forth...
