Man Down

Ah yes, this is what it feels like to be down.

There is no pressure release and every decision, every path, feels equally devoid of possibility.  You feel a fool for thinking otherwise, for knowing how to once walk the path.  The mind clumps together and overpowers all marvel in the universe.  The body rushes to heal a wound, but with the mind torn there is no such instinct, the ripped part flaps in the wind and the noise drowns out all calls.  There is just this boat adrift, the thickness of life around it, a distant panic that this -despite all prior efforts- never really goes away.  The lessening of obligations did not do it.  The enchantment of parenthood did not do it.  The rhetoric of seasons, while right in its own universe, has no meaning in this one.  The first to shore up is my ability to communicate.  This is taken by some close to me as a tactic to spite them, to inflict pain.  Oh were I thinking of anybody else to have such spite.  To think of anything else at all.  The problem is not knowing how to proceed in the face of an unassailable hollowness.  When you drain the significance from all things it becomes futile to respond, without meaning embodied whether fictitious or genuine, it ceases to be a matter of choices, of strategies.  You just wait for the moment to pass.  Wait for meaning to spill back in as mysteriously as it left.  The universe breathing in and out through you.  The thingness of being, felt.