Land of the Living

Land of the Living
One day you notice a bleak, blue corpse numbness has slowly slithered down your spine. As you sit there in an uncomfortable office chair you think to yourself; in the moment where the phone lines are vacant of calls, that you should be surprised. But your not; that’s the rub of being numb: there is nothing to disturb you. You will eventually find yourself at this plateau of your own organizational success. Generally speaking, you arrive here when you follow a set routine everyday; you coast on autopilot through a few days at first. Then you find yourself coasting through whole weeks without even noticing them passing. Before you know it a year has passed without any exhilarating events. By now you are just living on a perpetual loop; your movements, your expressions. You walk the exact same path each day without much alteration. Even you conversations repeat a infinitum. Your once impeccable fashion sense seems to repeat from day to day; Monday’s it’s the brown shirt with the black slacks and brown shoes with black socks; Tuesday’s is the white shirt with black slacks and white shoes with white socks; and so on in an endlessly repetitive manner. Then one day as you are standing next to the parking spot which is not actually dedicated to you but in which you always park; you realize everyone knows you as a dinosaur of stead fast loyalty to a routine. Pausing briefly, you glance down at your shoes; you note that it is a Wednesday – solely on your tan hushpuppies with grey socks, that’s when you know its been so long since [. . .] Your train of thought loses its track off a cliff in your mind because after a while you have developed blinders and certain thought processes are not traveled on in your routine and thus you are unable to travel upon them ever again. At first you find this mildly frustrating until your footsteps glide back into the quintillion footsteps of yesterdays that have slowly ticked past without your knowledge. And that is it: your set now. The rest of your life is etched in concrete like the names of children from the 1980’s. And it will never change until the day your heart slowly stops, or perhaps you fall asleep behind the wheel, or even your shot in some sort of robbery mix up. Then you will be dead and the small sphere of the world that you affected will morn. Many will take on religions and faiths; others will promise themselves they will live each day to its fullest. A few others will commit suicide when they understand their future parallels yours exactly. Then those still living shall slide down hill into their old patterns until they too perish; whether expectedly or unexpectedly one by one all will disappear. Once the sphere in which you existed has all but passed to the afterlife it will be like you never existed. There will be no great stories told of you. In photographs that are found by distant acquaintances of acquaintances; you are an unrecognizable face. That is what we all we amount too.

© Liam Elliott 2007. All Rights Reserved.