Have you lost your mind? I mean, felt you lost your-self-when you were right there the last time you checked but now suddenly there is a vacancy that looks like a closed door with the new sanitized tape on hotel room doors as if that made it safe-we still don't take off the pillow tags.
I lost it-Recently.
Like coming out of store late in the day, hungry, tired, half there, hands full, mind elsewhere, where did I park? Suddenly the direction toward the car seems wrong, or maybe not...a panic squeezes in, a moment of helplessness, as vacuous as the entrance to the dark woods you have just moved into-notice the absence of shadow figures in the dark moonless heavy dusk? This carries over...
Recognizing the solitude, nobody sees and this moves me forward because it is all I can do when my eyes have been placed just so in that direction while my head is loosely tethered by thin string tendons to my shell, and I find my car, don't need keys, get in, sit there, and wonder if I will ever feel safe with myself again?
The rain falls hard pounding the moonroof. I cannot feel my extremities. The engine is purring and the gaslit interior is showered in blue light. This dark night my lights, like my eyes, revealed only the most necessary next step, next cat eye, next mile marker, next canto, next ring...
Artwork by Gustave Doré, from 'Paradise Lost (12)' in Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
