the finer line

I didn’t look at e-mail this morning. Didn’t tidy up my apartment. Didn’t check the weather, job boards, national news, social media. Didn’t even shower or make coffee. In fact, didn’t even eat. The buzzing  sound inside my head felt too good to disrupt with the minutia of daily life. It’s amazing how much of life is frivolous and inconsequential once you single it out and strip it down to the base. All this minutia has found a way to materialize as one devouring pod of bewildering noise.

But this morning, the noise was gone.  I knew it was somewhere out there in the distance, but for the time being, it seemed to have dispersed. Mornings like this are best left alone. Better to sit and enjoy the deprivation. To watch the light slowly brighten from behind the mini blinds. To listen to the sound of the neighbor upstairs preparing for work and to think nothing of it.  Just the sound of the running shower. Just the footsteps. The hum of the cars on the highway. Garner from them no reaction.

Is it possible to live always in the upper corners of every room?  Is it possible to send the mind to the far corners upon darkening each doorway? To peer at the landscape of every room from above. To perceive each moment before it comes into being and then observe it like a surgery. A godly fantasy. God is a quiet one.

In my alternative reality, I sit here within this morning for eternity. My body is only form now. My mind, a placid stasis.  Functionality and godliness, those two opposing forces, have stretched me to beyond my death. The neighbor’s door slams closed. Her footsteps rush to meet the pod, ever growing. The morning will make way for the afternoon. After that, something else. After that, something else.