No One Ever Dies

People sometimes wonder if I’m okay.  Perhaps not directly, not by choice in call or mail, but rather a vague prick at the back of their thoughts.  “Are you alright,” they think … and there is never an answer, not from me anyway, and so they go about their day, and perhaps a few weeks later they think of me again and it goes on like this until something happens, more touching, more damaging. 

But not to worry.  Most of them are gone now.  I have let them fade away into the air and dirt.  I’m alone with my pain.  No one can help me.  It is too deep.  I got tired of answering the same questions, the same door, the same ring of the bell.  It was not a life, it was an interrogation. 

Relief?  Getting better?  Not with these sorts of problems.  The ones branded upon my body and stapled to my brain.  Maybe a hot bath, a drug of some sort, music that carries me away, a good book.  Oh, a good movie to get my mind off my mind.

What total bullshit.

The easiest thing is just to drink.  I trade the twenty or so minutes of euphoria for ten hours of increased depression and pain.  But that’s okay.  I’m living during the end of the world and soon enough the waves and cannibals will come crashing through my door.

“Do you love me,” he asks.

“Of course, I do, can’t you tell?”

“No, I can’t, but that’s okay.  You’re better than anyone else I’ve ever met.”  Then he smiles and they decide to take the dogs for a walk down streets were people are killing other people and they can see the black blood spots on the pavement from the last shooting.

Such is life in the moment of moments that don’t exist.

Consider Zeno as quoted by Aristotle: “That which is in locomotion must arrive at the half-way stage before it arrives at the goal.”  In other words, we can always divide a measurement of space and time in half, ergo, we never get to zero or the final destination.  When the bullet leaves the barrel, it never actually reaches the target.  Mathematically it is still going through an infinity of half way points on its trajectory. 

All the bombs ever dropped from airplanes have never reached the ground.  All the arrows shot by bow are still hanging in the air.  No one has bled or is dead and they are all waiting in their moment of time. Everything divided by two.

Of course, if one is insane, they can feel the pain and the bullets and bombs, and the knives and hammers are only too real for them and those who love them. Love is the bridge that connects pain.

Such is the problem of destination and love when the loved one is mentally ill and unable to understand how Zeno has proven that none of this is real.  Oh, if only the depressed could become philosophers and finally get some sleep and leave the rest of us alone at three in the morning.