dumb-drunk

Sometimes you advance towards a specific destination with not just a sense of purpose and direction, but with a sense of what to expect, and you progress assured in the knowledge that the world you know will be as you know it and have always known it.

When I visited my former boarding house the other week, I knew what I would find there. I did not know of course that there were new boarders there or that the owner had been sick for months, or for how I long I don’t know, but I knew where my dusty shoes would be and that my books would be on the shelves; I knew how the paintings of my old room would be hanging, that the half-consumed gin and empty cigarette packs would be under my bed, and so on. I knew my roommate might be there, and if he wasn’t I knew he would be on another day.

Sometimes I realize that I exist with the sense that life goes on in a regular manner, that I can breathe because I am meant to and air is air, that ‘hello, goodbye, long time no see’ will greet me, that fruit and vegetables will be sold where they were sold yesterday– in short, that I can recognize myself in a recognizable world. And that much of life is ordinary and I am compelled by fate to know it, to live it, for however long.