Decay

I finish all of my work in this class so quickly. It's easy work and I tell myself that it takes everyone else longer to complete it because they are less efficient workers. This is probably true, but not the whole truth, because there is another slight only partial truth: I work quickly because I do not care about the work. I can write an essay in minutes if its on a topic I care nothing for. It's the things that pique my interest and provoke me on some personal level, those are the things that take time to think about and to write about. Sometimes they take so long to think about that I get lost in the thinking and never get to the writing. I am convinced the writing is an essential compliment to the thinking and that one without the other leaves the mind with an open ended gaping wound on one end which can be filled quickly and quietly without you ever noticing and soon your forget that you were provoked in the first place.

I finished my work and I then I finished my book. I only had a handful of pages left and I didn't finish it last night. I'm not entirely sure why. I could have. The book, The Winter of Our Discontent, was almost finished, as I said, only a handful of pages left. I dog-eared it in the way I have been doing since I was eight years old, in the way that still feels new to me, as if I can't believe how clever I am to save my page without a bookmark, a childish fascination with childish ingenuity. I closed the book and placed it on my nightstand and I closed the blinds on the window and turned off the light in that empty room and it was very dark, like the bedrooms I remember from my youth. I sat in the dark in the cold sheets and I wept.

I woke up this morning and rode my motorcycle to class instead of taking the shuttle bus with the other students. A thunderstorm had rolled in the previous night, although I did not hear it, and when I turned off the main street onto the winding country road, a thick fog hang low in the trees and over the old houses, the remains that the storm had left behind like dying soldiers on a battlefield left by a retreating army. I imagined that there was Spanish moss hanging from the branches of the trees overhead, it was a Spanish moss type of fog.

After I finished my work this morning, I took out my book and finished that. I think I procrastinated the finishing of the book because I was scared of the ending. It was a good book, maybe the best book I've ever read, but I cannot say for sure.  The ending was probably nothing worthy of being scared of, but i was scared of it anyway and as I read it I felt my horror grow and grow and then slightly change and when I read the last line the horror wasn't there anymore and was replaced by the empty but powerful feeling in my stomach that I get whenever I finish a good book. The feeling of looking out over a lifeless immeasurable distance, the feeling of recognizing, with brief clarity, and only for a moment, the scope of my own life and its scale when weighed against the lives of all the people I have met and all the places I have been and yet been.

Here's a picture of the book because why the hell not.