It was a jagged kind of domesticity. The kind that sneaks up on you from behind on the balls of slithering feet, knife clutched in silver teeth. The kind that drags you kicking and screaming into a twilit world of repetitive killers and zodiac timeframes: boredom reaching through the wires for your windpipe. The kind that drops you into looping arcadian rhythms and hopelessly circadian longings to go leaping, running, dancing, rolling, diving, screaming, laughing, fleeing through the primeval forest just outside the windows in a mad, mad dash for something so fleetingly eternal it has no name.
Twenty years can drip away in a split-second if you're not careful. You close your eyes and suddenly you're an old man, slouched and slinking through a world that keeps getting younger, babies debase themselves before you, prostrate and spread-eagled like some lurid centerfold for the jaded and amoral preschool set. All your seeds wasted under the waves on the desert floor; hopes unfulfilled, dreams unremembered, playing a character in a theater production of your own life, dutifully mouthing the ash-wet lines written by another homelier sort of person in a large empty room where the echos bounce back and the sound multiplies into tone-deaf platitudes.
But at the same time, every day seems to drag forever the same, you know, with elegantly wood-paneled ransoms sweetened with a dim fluorescent hum. Time suspends itself on hooks from the cardboard ceiling, twisting slowly to mark seconds as hours and hours as a childhood lifetime. The jackals cackle from another room, waiting, waiting patiently, for the suspension hooks to finally tear flesh, waiting for the blood to hit the ground in a stream of ghastly eons.
Yes, work made you mean. The kind of mean you didn't want to be, the kind you didn't realize you were until you provoke a confrontation over something idiotic, took a heroic stand on something entirely transient, or snapped at a child, yelling with a dull-headache throbbing on your breath between clenched teeth and grayed eyes. The dull, uncurious workaday rhythms of adulthood turned you into everything you mocked as a teenager or as a child. Everything you swore you'd never be, an inattentive father, a philandering husband, a boring man.
Working was a kind of suicide, but it had none of the bang flash whiz-bam shock of a slit wrist or a toaster in the bubble bath. None of the gory celebrity of a leap from heaven, greeting the ground with a brilliant saint's egg crack. No, rather, it was bleeding to death from a thousand fleshy papercuts each a little deeper than the last. It was death by leaching, color draining, strength remaining, but not for long. It was possible to lose yourself in that static desert with its shifting sands and paperwork dunes. But that was its virtue as well.
You could watch the body sit and twist on those heroine hooks with an empty mind and closed eyes.
You could forget.
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