Zeitgeist's Dust

What are you doing? WHat are you doing? WHAt are you doing? WHAT are you doing? WHAT Are you doing? WHAT ARe you doing? WHAT ARE you doing? WHAT ARE You doing? WHAT ARE YOu doing? WHAT ARE YOU doing? WHAT ARE YOU Doing? WHAT ARE YOU DOing? WHAT ARE YOU DOIng? WHAT ARE YOU DOINg? WHAT ARE YOU DOING? WHAT ARE YOU DOING? WHAT ARE YOU DOING? WHAT ARE YOU DOING? WHAT ARE YOU DOING? WHAT ARE YOU DOING? WHAT ARE YOU DOING? WHAT ARE YOU DOING? WHAT ARE YOU DOING? WHAT ARE YOU DOING? What should I do?

I sit in the corner and wait for the darkness to flow in and merge into the shadow that I have come to know so well. My heart beats harder as I feel the chill of your arrival. I freeze as I feel your force slam me to the wall. Taste my blood as my senses bleed shades of red. Drag my body through shards leaving a trail of blood on the floor. I wince at the warm spray that burns my wounds. Your nail slices my scalp as you peel my skin, leave my flesh naked. I feel your fingers curl around my throat, feel my pulse in your hands, hear my breath as you stab into my gut and pull it slowly, twine my entrails around my neck and over the desecrated bough of the forlorn tree. Your foul breath envelops my scream that escaped through sewn lips. I feel myself rise, levitate slowly, my feet failing to find the distant ground. I look into your face in the fading light of life and recognize a face I have known all my life - mine.

It must be somewhere here. I flipped through the pages, watching the words blur. No, not here. Emptied the drawers and the closet. Looked under the bed and in the bed of strangers. Turned my world inside out and emptied it into a backpack and a pair of shoes. I won’t find it here. I faded in those abandoned eyes into a world where it lay hidden. Wake up and search, followed the road into a blind alley. It’s not here. Beyond the mountains in the land whose tongue is alien to my ears, I listen for it. It’s not here. Weary, hungry, and beaten my mind asks my restless heart - what do you seek? What was it that I had in the cradle and will only find in my grave? I no longer know.

This will be our last moment. A moment that will encase all the other moments. Dwarfed by the skyscrapers, my insignificance sinking in, I feel your disdain at another departing lover. I know your streets, better than the lines of fate on my palms. Your secrets hidden in nooks are now mine to keep. Your many sounds, dulcet and loud. I am your lover, yet a stranger to your people. I look up at the sky searching for the stars that would someday guide me back to you. Stars that I could not see in clear skies, now cloaked in fog. I press the button and hear the metal scrape as the elevator rises behind the glass doors. Its open doors urging me to enter the nether world. I drag my bags in, things that I couldn’t let go while letting go of things that I did not want to let go. The doors close behind me. A promise of love, life, or death that will remain unfulfilled until the day I return, to never leave again. Goodbye San Francisco.