Window

“Don’t touch me,” he whispered with his eyes closed, speaking to no one in particular. “Can’t you see? I am free—I am God…”

And he opened his eyes on a world that had fundamentally changed to be something he saw between the lines of; no vision of the world had ever been so clear yet fractured. Only the sea of solitude was solid for him, for the Collective was a fluid he could no longer stomach…

He watched out of the window as children screamed with happiness along the side of the road, running with their parents calling out for them to come back don’t go too far watch for cars… And for a moment he thought they flickered, those children, in and out of existence—maybe it was just a blink of his eyes like when the lights seem to flicker in a bright room that only you notice, and as you look around to see if anyone else saw the same thing, you feel outside of yourself, no longer a part of that Collective being that constitutes humanity…

Whatever is that? he felt hours later when he was finally ready to leave his apartment—whatever was that break in conscience, that cloud of calamity? And for whatever reason, he felt like the heart of his holy humanity was broken by it…that he was no longer the same person he was then…a dual soul now…dueling with the world, only how could he win against the world?

He went to work and came home, ate his dinner only to find that it didn’t taste the same, didn’t feel like it normally did. Yes, he ate the same thing for dinner each night so one day it must just catch up to him and become old news, right?

Well, he finished it because what else could he do? Feeling upset by the events of earlier, he felt a disconnect, and a strange sort of jealousy at how the children he saw earlier could run so joyfully through the street, uncaring of the wishes of whatever the universe determined would be right for them. (Right?)

He felt that he didn’t belong anymore. Here, there, anywhere he went he was a guest whose actions were held if not in contempt, pure damned diffidence…only to find one instance that counteracted his feeling, and subsequently seemed to course-correct his detour through the world…

He slept and dreamt that he was a bird flying through the sky, only his wings disappeared out of nowhere and he crashed to the ground, caught in the branches of a pine tree and stickied his bird body with sap, a feathered figure that would be better off closed between the pages of a book…and the next thing he knew he was being stared at by a hat-donning woman with binoculars around her neck…and he was nothing more than a photo on the page, a wingless bird that was a rarity to them, and was the woman his mother? or his sister? or his wife? in another world…in another world…the next or the last, future mingles with the past…

He awoke and tried to bring the dream back as we do, but it was gone. Indeed, he became flushed and red-faced in his discontent with how things ended…he a photo? or was he still the bird that fell, and walked around wingless? Was he the bird or the photo? or both? Or was he the dark indifferent man that other people saw behind the wheel of his car, bird shit spattered on his passenger door, unknown to him because no one ever rode in his passenger seat to tell him?

As he lay in his bed he heard the children again, the children running and playing and being children, and then there was a screeching sound that pierced his ears and truly woke him from his bird-reverie—a screech and a thump that resulted in him jumping awake, clad only in gym shorts, to see one of the children laying on the ground and the driver out of the car, hands on his head, screaming for help…calling for someone to explain himself perhaps, or to turn himself over to the fact that he had just killed a child…

No there was no reason for him to feel relief at this moment but there was a sense of an exhale, a deep letting go of his soul that aligned with the moment that had passed yesterday and the one today. Was he left by God to live the same moment forever?

No, he didn’t think so, for the child-killer had an empty can of beer that fell out of the car, and he had another feeling of disconnect. Another feeling that he didn’t belong here, or that the child-killer was somehow himself…or the child herself was him…na-na-na-boo-boo, you can’t catch me…ready or not, here I come…

The surface of his mind was lava and he had to walk above it, not daring to touch the power that built up over the years, for he knew now that these feelings were building up like liquid in the microwave, that bubbles above the line, and no one opened the door of the microwave to stop him from overflowing, and the cycle of confusion and relief was like flicking a lightswitch on and off constantly, and now the lightbulb was dying, blowing in a sparking singularity that would soon annhilate his heart…

Is this what God felt like? A spirit to feel the deference of every outcome, a parallel multidimensional sense of [un]becoming and cyclic [mis]understanding?

“Don’t touch me,” he whispered, his eyes open to the sky, only his hand was holding an object in it, an object he didn’t remember lifting out of its lockbox under his bed… “Can’t you see? I am free—I am God…” And he pulled the trigger of the gun to end the cycle that would only continue for the rest of his life, whatever that meant for him, for he could not experience the world twice, or three times, or infinity. He could only survive one time, and the idea of a permanent multitudinal murderous mental state where he never knew who (or what) he was was too much for him to handle…

As the gunshot went off, a wingless bird collapsed in the ditch outside of his house, and only when its soul had passed to the beyond, where the Collective resided, the purgatory of the unknown, did its wings return to its body, never to fly again…