The Shadow of The Person I Only Vaguely Remember Being.

I've been lost, lingering on the edge of an almost understanding. Wavering, wandering on the brink of a battlefield I can't remember ever stepping onto. Each day I face with a shaking fist and a hidden agenda. Each day I sit and stare at the next, expectantly. I am waiting for something which only I have the will to wish into action. I wonder, like Pessoa, like Mr. Cobain, "Who needs actions when you've got words?" And then I wonder, how can I make actions into words so that they live as actions, wholly and truly and so that the words move just the same as the actions do.

I walk outside, lost in the vague and visually unpleasant tapestry that shrouds the streets of Baltimore. I try to find beauty in all the unfinished things, which we all know will never be realized the way they were intended. I find the most beauty in the broken buildings on the brink of reconstruction because they aren't yet a failure; they are still fighting valiently, hanging wires like vines, pieces of metal- shrapnel- sticking out from beneath the dug up earth. They haven't yet become what people want them to be. They stand, unstructured, gradually becoming more and more shiny, becoming more and more human.

I am struck silent by the city streets. By the uncanny way that everyone is exactly who they are and how we can know them so suddenly. I see someone walk and I know him. I see someone hold her eyes to her brow to sheild her face from the sun, and I know her, her small denim skirt clutching onto small feminine thighs. And she alters her walk to suit her skirt; and she alters her walk to suit her shoes. I see a student stomping steadily down the campus steps, heading to the food court, plugging his laptop into the wall and staring intently at graphs and charts. And I know him because I can write the exact way which he moved along those stairs. I know what he thought as he moved toward the counter at the checkout. He studied his watch; he studied the zippers on his backpack. He fiddled with something, jingling, in his pocket. This is the movement of life, this ethereal, glowing, commonality that is everything we are- whether or not we are aware of who we are.

I am frustrataed by the instinct to settle, the way people sink beneath the briefest hint of frustration. I wish I knew less of the rich, of how rich the rich are and how they feed on each other, worms. I wish I didn't work for them, moving briskly to make them money. Learning facts just to show I know and then coming home and caring about the facts, making them mine, only be be quizzed on them later. As if they're required. As if that's a possible expectation. Some people are so themselves in the midst of so much that is not them. I wish I was not so mutable. I wish I could hold my ground.

I wish I could write more but I must wake up and make myself someone I wish I never had to be, only the shadow of the person I vaguely remember being. All the things I used to do bubble to the surface in the brief intervals between work and I can almost see my own shadow; I can almost step into it, become it. But just as I find it, just as I shift myself into position, it moves. The daylight peeks in through the curtains and throws my shadow far behind me. And I wander, lost, practically motionless beneath the weight of my memory. And I wander through work, a shadow.