duhpursuit

You are someone else, and somewhere, and the memory of the journey, the lingering smell of travel that inevitably follows you off the plane, the ticket stubs, itemized receipts, the hangover, are missing like your luggage in some vacant airport for someone else to claim.

You paint over the old fingerprints on the stairwell, noticing the frayed carpet, the dust piling up in the corners, the dried up spider crumbled and still clinging to the pieces of fiber caught in her web. All these small endings transpired beneath you as you stumbled half-blind with sleep up the stairs, narrowly avoiding a broken leg as you side-stepped the cat.

Somehow you lose a whole year of your life. You wake up and suddenly that lie you’ve been telling wipes them out. All three hundred plus days. The memory of them should be somewhere, perhaps behind the sugar in the pantry as you spoon it into your coffee, but the only thing you know for sure is that there are not enough filters to get you through the week.

Evidence is hard to come by, but you believe the lies despite yourself. Even the setting seems unfamiliar. You can’t place certain mementos, card stock, magazine clippings, advertisements, within the context of your so-called life, and so they are thrown away, submerged beneath the detritus of torn envelopes, a record of an inane and abandoned existence.