24

There are moments, just brief minutes out of your life, in which existence becomes unbearable for some inexplicable reason. The act of living not only becomes tiresome but impossible... almost laughable. Love, for me, becomes the greatest mystery. You are suddenly lost, even in the most familiar of places. It's as if you've lost your footing on a balance beam you've walked along hundreds of times and suddenly you lose confidence and the beam becomes mysteriously foreign to you. You arms wave around in circles, the exercise you were taught in grade school physical education to help reclaim balance, as the angle of the world is off-kilter from its usual 180 degrees. Each of your relationships feel suddenly distant- as if you are looking at your loved ones from a far off shore as you alone are gliding away on a boat into a fog. They are staring at you, all with the same puzzled and slightly sad look on their face while you stare back angrily, expecting at least someone to jump in to those frigged waters and pull your raft back to shore. What love you lavished upon them and they cannot even see how badly you want someone to rescue you from the fog. What sacrifices you made for them and they cannot brave hypothermia to cradle you in their arms. This ire is of course warranted but in these brief flashes, everything is nonsensical in a nightmarish way.

This is the feeling I almost always receive when working in the Library. Amongst a sea of heads craned downward, I join the ranks only to leave depressed, hopeless and feeling as though I had written the most prolific novel only to realize it was all incomprehensible gibberish. The air hangs pulsating with stale stress at the rhythm of a dying man's breath; it wheezes ever so slowly with a chill of a life desperately aching for death. On this particular evening, Chance would have me select a collection of the most morbid short stories I have ever come across. Not the elegant morbidity of The Virgin Suicides, one that is beautifully romantic like wilting flowers. No, it is rather one that wants to make you extraordinarily aware of just how sharp Death's sickle really is. Having stubbornly chose the smallest book from the collection and committing to it as I did to this hellishly taxing class for which this text is due, I pursued the text even despite the shivers that ensued. The building became all the more quiet while my feet felt as though they had been soaked in ice. Dusk turned into night and the florescent glow only made the large room emptier despite how crowded it was.

I was reading a short story entitled "The Black Shaman". Taking place in Kazakhstan, the interaction between life and death are treated as normally and nonchalantly as you would imagine they would be in the Old World. Great-Aunts seem to have this ability, speaking of the dead as if they were still living. It reminded my of a friend of mine who told me she was clairvoyant. She would tell me of conversations she had with spirits, explain to me their forms and their classifications. Everything I had ever gleaned from watching ghost-hunting reality shows was confirmed. She would tell me how she despised going to the Library, relating how she would be followed home or accosted by the Suicides, ruining her day their malignant attitudes, their lingering stress and their deep depression. I imagine they still worry about their books that are now long-since overdue, calculating the fees and multiplying them by eternity. What is the exponent for forever? I imagine when the elevators open to an empty floor that they are still hunting for books or better yet, making light of their ill-fate and are attempting to be playful in this dismal place. Any normal person would immediately assume a student had pressed the wrong button or had perhaps forgotten their notepad in between the space of the call numbers. They have until the end of time to work on their dissertation on a topic they had every intention of abandoning. And whether this is my unfortunate imagination influenced by this unfortunate text or whether the air hangs with the emotional impressions made by decades of students unable to recognize priorities, I cannot help but go where my mind wanders. The air conditioning numbs my mind. They say that just before you freeze to death, you feel the sudden urge to just snuggle up and fall asleep. They say that it is one of the most peaceful ways to die.

My eye lids begin to grow heavy and I know it's time to leave.