City fog

I’ve been in the city a long time now and I’ve gone all misty and insubstantial.

It starts simple: people invite me to do things. I like people. Especially people I love and haven’t seen in so long, so I’m happy to do things with them. Ecstatic, almost. It’s so unusual for me to be around people who’ve known me for more than a couple weeks.

But these things that everyone does, they’re so removed from reality. We eat in restaurants, unknown food cooked by strangers with unknown love. We don’t talk about sex, farts, love, fear, joy, or the planet dying around us. Once I say that the polar bears are dying, but the patriarch informs me that it’s all alright. We engage, instead, through our intellects, with board games and home improvement. We sit around a box and watch fake people living their fake lives in a fuzzy cloud of bright electrons; they feel their emotions for us. I look around the room and we are all just as superficially fake and fuzzy.

Soon I stop declining invitations and find myself living in driveways. I sit in a cushy chair and watch people through the fog. I should do something. I get up and I walk the peremeters. I don’t know what to do. I sit down and check my emails. I can’t read the long ones, the fog fuzzes in after a few sentences. I get up and wander the peremeter again. There is a girl on the phone, lost in a cloud of anger. I check my email again, but the words won’t make it past my eyes.

After work I enter a house of sleepers. I have a key. There is a plate of food in the refridgerator for me, a little kindness that I cry over in the dark. I am becoming fat and tame. I will leave soon.