You wake up and it’s foggy. Outside the window and inside it. You are moving too slow, as you always do. Your ears are filled with the strange buzz of no-noise and your mouth is chalky with no-taste. You have one thousand things you should have done by last night and they are not done and last night is gone now. Blunt. The light, the room, the pain sitting on the left side of your cranium. All just blunt and vague.
It’s strange how your life’s tragedy turned out to be so mundane. Neither death nor love, just a list of things-not-done. Just an empty Word file on which you are not writing, and you don’t know whether that’s because you can’t or because you just won’t. Just cheap cigarettes that you keep on smoking while you tell yourself this is the last one without much conviction. Just the third cup of coffee that your doctor has forbidden. You know the ache in your stomach and your head like your oldest friends. They have been with you longer than any of your friends, or even your parents. You are swimming in fog and you were never so light or so heavy as you are now.
Is this how it will end? So blunt and mundane? No joy no glory no sharp tinge of sorrow just this dull, blunt pain going on forever and ever until one day it engulfs all your being?
I saw this image as I searched for Edward Gorey on the internet. I was not familiar with his work. This image looks so much like me in this foggy morning it was almost frightening. So I thought I’d do something today outside the list. I’d write something I’m not being paid to write. Seems like a relief, sometimes.
This is “Elephant with a Prostrate Passenger” by Edward Gorey. The image has been sourced from https://www.wbur.org/artery/2017/01/26/edward-gorey. Do check out his other works. “Weird”, “Strange”, “Macabre” are some of the epithets that are associated with his works. I do disagree though. I think it was all about that blunt fog, all along.
In Other Words 