The story isn’t keeping my attention, mostly because there’s very little story. A young woman confined to bed in a room stuffed with her father’s books, trying to reconstruct his life through the books he read. That’s all I know.
The audiobook has been running for 39 minutes and 4 seconds. It’s not passing its audition. Perhaps my level of concentration should share the responsibility for its failure. My mind drifts on the desert sands of depression. My mind wants a plot, it doesn’t want to be asked to work so hard.
Outside is dusk and traffic, the falling light telling me that time still passes, sounds building and receding telling me that things still move. Within these walls it’s harder to know, except that the book drones on. My interior stillness lies unruffled by anything new blowing through.
I exist in refutation of time. These endless moments have more to do with other sojourns in this wilderness than with my brief and anxious forays into the everyday world that exists beyond this room, this bed. The two realities are sealed from each other, one in time, the other a ceaseless circle without beginning or end. I watch darkness fall as if from a hundred miles away.
There is no sadness nor any real despair. Beyond such things exists an awful numbness, lapped at its edges by formless fear. I fear the fear so I stay still in the middle and seek no horizon.
The numbness is a refuge of sorts. To get back to the everyday would be not only to wade through the fear but to pick it up and drag it with me. I will do it sometime. Sometime the fear will come for me anyway. For now, the endless now, I will select a different book and press play.
