The feeling of being Swallowed..

 

 

 

     They say that when you’re depressed, food loses its taste, colors are less vibrant, and the world in its entirety becomes dull and silent. Every day I walk along the same stretch of road, wondering how it is that I got to this point. Today is no different. Rain falls from dark clouds that cover the earth in eternal shade. Each drop hangs from my clothes, clinging to me, as if I were their last hope, before falling to the ground, lost in the puddles that surround my feet. Chilly fall air crept inside the folds of my jacket, robbing me of what little heat my body had left. I pulled the edges tighter around my body; sighing out cold air from my lungs and watching the white vapors disappear without a cry into the twilight.

      My footsteps are drowned out by the steady stream of cars driving by. To them, I’m nothing more than another sad figure lost in my own little world. I don’t know how long I’ve been walking. An hour? Two? Does it matter anymore? The years that I’ve lived through can no longer be measured in spans of time, but through memories that haunt every part of my body and constantly rack my soul with unbearable pain.

      I had no other reason to go on these long walks other than to get all of my thoughts in perspective. My coat is thin, not because I’ve forgotten to bring a heavier one, but because I want to feel the cold air on my skin, and bowing my head through the rain, I count the drops that hang from my dark hair, again, not because I’ve forgotten a hat, but because I want to feel the cool rain streak down my face. It reminds me that I am still human.

     The pace at which I walk at could best be described as a slow, weary trudge. The memories of my past feel like lead weights strapped to my legs.  My eyes drift lazily from stone to stone on the cobbled sidewalk next to the road. My shoes grind into the tiny pebbles, crunching and scattering them out from underneath the weight of my leather soles. Rain bounces off everything like tiny explosions reaching just centimeters off the ground. Soon, the path leads away from the road, through a winding trail, up to some little town, that even though I had passed through countless times, I had never cared to find out the name of it. Instead, I played the part of the drifter who had lost his way.

    But I liked to pretend that I was going somewhere. Like I had someone to meet up with over in the next town, or I would simply sit at the side of the road, wishing that someone passing by would understand my pain, and take me away from this place.  But after seven years, I’ve started to except that there is nobody coming for me.

    The path begins to wind away from the thruway. Soon, the loud droning sounds of cars are long behind me. Wooden fences streaked with ivy and dark, water-saturated panels give way to lush maples and redwoods that have just begun turning to their vibrant, pre-winter colors. The path also tore away from the crude cobblestones to a dirt path that wound indefinitely through the thick brush. Occasionally I would have to tilt or duck my head to avoid stray branches that threatened to tear at my eyes. The dirt was unspoiled and most of the twigs were intact. The low bushes raked at my legs and caught on my jeans.  Nobody came through this way, at least nobody had in a long time, save for me. It was a small section of a forest that had recently been torn down to make room for a Hotel. It once covered some miles to the mountains on the other side of the valley, but now it sat a rough two acres wedged between the town and the thruway.

    It was days like this where everything just seemed to make sense, at least a little bit. When the air was soggy and dark, and it was almost as if the whole world was holding its breath, waiting for something better to happen, waiting for the sun to break through the clouds and end the sadness. But sadly, life doesn’t play out the way it does in fairytales. You don’t get a happy ending, just because you want one. And most people never get a happy ending at all.

     As I wandered through the thickening trees and deepening pits of mud, I find myself drifting in and out of reality. At times, I would have a hard time discerning what was reality, and what was merely a figment of my imagination. So much so, that I hardly even realized it when I walked into a tree. I didn’t move, or even flinch. My mind was so spaced out at that moment that I could have been robbed and would not have uttered a word, nor would I have made a movement to stop the thief. I just stood there for the longest time, seeing everything as if it were an old movie: in slow motion. Bits and pieces of my life seemed jumbled up in my head, and I couldn’t make heads or tails of half the images I was seeing. Some didn’t even look to me like they were mine. At times, and strange images managed to spring themselves up among family vacations and childhood birthday parties.

     I sighed. Perplexed by my mind’s sudden will to act on its own, I looked up with the same dreary eyed movement that had become a natural reaction to everything in my life. The tree before me appeared to be a maple. It was old and had a good width about it. The branches began high off the ground and stretched up and away into the dense thicket of branches that cascaded over the forest. But what interested me at that moment was not the unusual blood red color of the few leaves that had begun to change, but the message carved roughly into the coarse bark. Memories came flooding back again, not of happy occasions and merry celebrations, but of that girl, who had so long ago stolen me, but then so many things have happened in those seven years. So many painful memories that it became too much to bear to remember them all at once. In a single movement, I collapsed into a puddle at the base of the tree whereon a large amount of bullet holes went deep into the trunk. And admittedly, I began to sob.

   As tears rolled down my cheeks as freely as if they were the only way to relieve this heavy sorrow that I felt in my heart, my vision blurred and colors faded in and out of existence, blending in with the gray sky until there was nothing to truly see. I balanced my shoulder on the side of the tree as it became my one anchor that kept me physically tied to this world.  I curled into a ball, wrapping my arms around my legs and slowly sliding down the side of the tree. I didn’t care what happened to my clothes, but then again, I didn’t really care what happened to me at all at that moment, like reality had nothing to do with me anymore. And the strange thing was, I couldn’t have cared less. Not about how pathetic I looked right then, or even of the infinite complexities of my sadness, and I doubted that anyone could understand how I was feeling.

   Twenty minutes later, I was walking back to my apartment, feeling as heavy hearted as was normal for me. In that expanse of sidewalk that led back into town, I simply couldn’t imagine an emptier feeling, nor a more depressing destination. The rain continued to pelt down upon me, soaking through the fibers of my clothes and clutching its icy hands around my heart.  I hung my head low in order to avoid making eye contact with passing cars, the hair that fell over my eyes felt like a dark cloud that would precede me wherever I went.

      I had a strange moment of weakness at one point while walking along a narrow bridge that crossed over a small expanse of murky water. For a moment, the slow to fast droning of the cars became little more than a whisper in my ear. And what was a fraction of a second seemed like an eternity as my eyes quickly glanced at the steel railing that followed along the bridge, and for that fraction of a second, I had thoughts of losing myself over the edge. Even if it was only for a moment.

    I couldn’t tell you how long it took me to get to my apartment. My mind was so saturated with sorrow that I probably wouldn’t have been able to tell you what floor it was on. Only that it looked out over a wide expanse of broken down houses and abandoned buildings for as far as the eye could see. To me, it seemed as if there were more rundown buildings in this town than there were people.  Looking back, I couldn’t even remember passing anybody along the road.

     The dark clouds consumed the sunlight and refused to give it up. A light flickered feebly over the white-washed door that led into my small, cramped apartment. The entire building was painted the same pale white from floor to ceiling. It lacked any sort of welcome or warm feeling that most people would like to come home to. But this was fine for me. It was like returning to a place that felt just dreary as I did.

    Even though I tried to walk up the flights of stairs leading up to my apartment silently, my footsteps echoed hollowly throughout the building. I slumped my head against the door as I fumbled with the key and stared lifelessly as I fit it into the hole and turned it; pushing open the door with the same enthusiasm as a man being shoved into a jail cell. Closing the door behind me, I removed my soaked jacket and carefully hung it on the brass coat rack by the door. I leaned against the door and slid down until I was sitting with my back straight up against it. To my discomfort, the icy rain had managed to soak through my jacket and into my shirt which now cooled my back in the already cold room.

     I sat there for a long time. Counting the droplets that fell from the jacket onto the linoleum floor. The man who had designed this apartment complex was said to have been an eccentric man who was fascinated by, and studied Japanese architecture. Thus, the building had the same characteristics of any modern apartment building in Japan. The front door opened into a small five by five tiled entryway. The floor then elevated up an inch to a hardwood floor that covered the rest of the one bed, one bath apartment. The doors were the same translucent white, sliding panels that characterized Japanese architecture. However, all of the appliances were thankfully, American.

     I must have sat on that floor for hours. I knew that my legs were probably asleep, and things around the apartment had to be done, but for some reason, I couldn’t bring myself to move off that tiny patch of floor. Almost as if something was holding me to the spot, begging me not to leave. The droplets had stopped falling from my jacket. The air was so still, so silent that, for a second, I truly could have believed that I was the last human being on the planet. The atmosphere was stale, as if someone hadn’t been living there, even though I had spent the better part of four years in this dark apartment. Every day, I asked myself a question that, for other people seemed like a motivation, but in my case, it was the only question that mattered in the whole world.

   What am I waiting for?

    I’ve pondered that question for so long that the image of the words were imprinted in my mind. Hours would go by where all I did was lay on my bed and think about my life. In the silence of a still morning, I could almost pretend that there was someone calling my name. Somewhere, far off in the distance, there was someone who cared about me. But it seemed that every time I looked out my bedroom window, the street outside would be empty.

     With a mass of willpower, I managed to pick myself up off the floor of my apartment. I pried my soggy shoes off and placed them neatly on the space of tile underneath my jacket. I slipped off my socks and carried them across the kitchen. Sliding the open the door panel into the single bedroom, I tossed the wet socks into the wicker basket I used for a laundry hamper.  Inside the apartment, the lack of light was nearing pitch black. I looked over at the digital clock on the microwave to see 8:00 glare back at me in dull green bars. I flicked the switch on the wall to turn on the single light above the stove. The tiny light glowed nobly, but it illuminated only a tiny part of the room, casting long malevolent shadows on the floor from the table in the center of the room. I reached over to a cabinet above the microwave and removed from it, a container of instant soup.

    A few minutes later, I was sitting at the kitchen table with a half empty bowl of soup in front of me. For a while, I just stared at it, hoping that it might posses some answer as to why I had no appetite anymore, because for some reason, food no longer satisfied me. It was almost if nothing could satisfy the empty feeling I had in the pit of my stomach.

   I stood up and walked back over to the sink, my footsteps making low thuds as they stepped lightly across the floor. Dumping the soup into the sink and washing it down the sink with the bitter tap water from the sink, I realized that I wished nothing more than to Whip around and throw the bowl at the wall, shattering it into a million pieces. However, this small, ceramic bowl didn’t deserve to share my fate. I gripped it tightly instead, sighing away the sudden burst of rage.

    I laid on my bed and turned on the T.V. to some game show. I hated television, but I was willing to do anything, If only to stop this eternal silence. I rested my head on the pillow as stiffly as if I were lying on a bed of needles. Rolling on my side and arching my back, I tried to no avail to find a more comfortable position.

    I wasn’t tired, but I had nothing left to do, nothing to fulfill this meaningless existence.

    At some point, I subconsciously turned off the television and started to fall into a deep sleep. I could feel my eyes closing and drifting away, and at that moment, I wished that I wouldn’t wake up. That I could dream forever and merge with my own sorrow, walking with it as friends into the promised land.

    However, I knew what would happen when I closed my eyes. The events of seven years would catch up to me and hold me in it’s terrible grip until morning came.

    I rolled over in my bed to shade my eyes from the brilliant moonlight that was now cascading through my open window. A clear sky and a crisp breeze carried me gently into my quiet slumber. With my last moments of consciousness, I managed to pull the covers around my body and hug them tight. The warm cotton fibers telling me that my sleep would be peaceful.

    But as I finally drifted away from reality, I knew that it wouldn’t.