Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here

A dark day, canopy of clouds lacking contrast, dull gray swatch laid fully on the horizon.  October hums in the distance.  A threat or feint of hardship; I have a wool sweater and a hatchet on the floor behind me.  Cedar, having exhausted the excitement of the car-trip gawking at Romney demonstrators disabling traffic, is curled in a ball in the backseat.

On days like this I thread each moment onto time like a dull pearl onto string.  Each is separated by a knot, laboriously tied in my mind, dismantled and redone as though an incorrect hitch will let the whole cargo go sliding off in transit to tumble furtively in pursuit with diminishing velocity and an increasingly scuffed and tarnished hide.

I try to concentrate on the road unfurling before me.  But my consciousness is shoved under water.  I am a thing of a certain buoyancy that preys upon and is preyed upon by other things.

I live within a realm inundated by a certain amount of light.  At a layer of specific translucency.  Other sentient creatures at this depth are of a form alien to me; I falter at the identification of an out thrust limb or a glance moored by a tenuous optic nerve to whatever murky sediment swirls below.

Suddenly, a great sucking like some final breath, or the fish-flopping sand-puckering ebb of tide before a tsunami, or the back pressure in the expanded maw of a ravenous and non-discerning marine harvester pulls a spent and floundering humanity past me.

And I am unmoved.  I wonder if I am of a form bound forever to stone, waving to and fro in the current, fed on whatever happens to pass by.  Or possibly of substance greater than the span of the leviathan’s jaws, and unconsumed.  Either circumstance describes a loneliness of greater depth than this ether I inhabit.

I am pulled gasping from the hi-fi wash of salt and surf and depth by a honk and a bark.  Cedar has his paws on the console and is barking at the darkened windshield.  I am being apprised of my failing to follow a tenet of Philadelphia traphic by a gaudy lifephorm.