Incipient

Throw off the carapace of sleep, and the day gets old so quickly. So many morning hours have slipped by, distilling into my blood their gravity and brevity, mingling memories, raging with routine. So many mornings, but the wear-and-tear of my everyday remains the same, like carbon cargo―unchanging, a burden, oppressive. I wake like a caged bird, the horizon abstracted and dull because I am behind bars. Tear my errant dreams away from me, and I'm a half-dressed debacle, naked in my modest ambitions, unaccomplished, an indigent.

How fatalistic, I think, and I celebrate it with the anodyne of practice: a hot shower, a swipe of colour on my cheeks, a swish of silk as I dress, a sparkle of light in a piece of jewellery. I blink and smile at the mirror, always undecided: consolation―or disconsolation?

But the day moves ahead with gracious concession, and the hours speak in polyglot tongues―a vocabulary of habits and calculations, of the established and the unexpected, of questions, of answers. I listen, most of the time. The inchoate sense of what I'm doing―could be doing―is usually enough.

Until now. The mystery of change is calling up all the different sides to me―the philomath, the aesthete, the prodigal, the oddball, the rebel―all of them, demanding clarity, grappling for more, battling to exist, co-exist. An imbroglio. I'm here but not quite.

I sit at work, filled with sentimental piety about my imminent leaving. Conversations―within and outside my office space―remains infested with cant. I only seek out the company of a few; there is a glaze of trepidation over my temerity, and too many unseamed voices both disappoint and disengage. I hear the factual and the facetious, and I reply in kind, still fagged out from my prolonged sense of boredom.

That's why you're missed, I think. Your laconic smiles, your gentle intellect; the nadir of our friendship is the capstone of my indolence.