Echoes.

“Half of the time we’re gone but we don’t know where…”

I’ve been gone here for a while now, the out to lunch sign on the door made up of reason after reason to keep me from the pile of work on the desk. The loneliness of this life hits me sometimes like a flash of vertigo, like the camera focused on my head pans out suddenly and I’m sitting in McDonalds alone, with no one within a thousand miles that can solve my problems, and no one in a million that wants to hear them. It’s so reassuring to have someone looking over your shoulder, reassuring not to be a beast of burden for your own responsibilities, but to bear others’ weight in turn for a lighter load a while on. Stagnant is the right term.

It’s like after high school, when people moved on, moved away, branched out to the life they chose. Sometimes those paths follow yours, often they don’t, but the extent to which you can still see familiar faces from afar as you begin to recognize closer ones is dependent upon some of them being close enough to see. I often feel as if I have walked in the other direction entirely, and the only faces I see are ones walking toward and then away from me or walking too fast for me to follow.

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