It was maddening almost to the breaking point, the way it was this evening. Life pulsed inside that little corner of the world, like living light trapped in a blackened glass bubble. It was sickening, when you are both light and blackened glass -- pushing and throbbing for escape, at the same time contracting and constricting to imprison.
At one table a young couple was stealing kisses when they think no one was looking. At another, four young professionals discuss business. At the table behind me, a middle-aged woman was quiet with intense concentration, eyes darting left to right as she lets words out onto her laptop screen. Life was singing in that quiet little corner in the city, sonorous like the rush of water in a deep, wide river flowing out into the ocean.
Everything terrified me. Everything, moving at the same time -- singing, flowing, squirming and writhing like the monsters of myth -- bore deep into flesh and bone and drew out a steady trickle of liquid fear, thick and grey and steaming. I wanted to howl from fear and grief. I wanted to howl until my soul came out through my mouth, vanishing into the damp night air.
What I wanted. What I wanted. What I wanted was to die, be forgotten, and never thought of as having ever existed, but -- as I'd always pondered year after year, day after day, second after excruciating second -- some unknown force stays my hand. Nameless it stays, though it has lodged itself in different parts of my body, and I am kept alive.
In the meantime, life keeps pulsing -- a steady, rhythmic beat. A distant, sonorous melody. A call. A call. A call.
