Afterlife—Death

I lived to die another day. I woke up with the feeling that I was still here. I was. Blue and soft, the vision came to me through the hypnopompic throes of dawn. I stomped down the concrete streets, taking in the shallow ditches full of despair. Turned right onto Stanyan to look up at the confusing colors painted on the walls there. 

‘Damn it’s cold,’ I thought. 

Sweater soaked with sweat, funny why they call it that, a sweater I mean. that hung from my shoulders like a wet beach blanket. I’m soggy. I choked down a cigarette which never taste good. So when I coughed up my anxiety, flavored like blood and phlegm, it felt like a reminder of how I can control my life. Is this how it feels to be alive? 

Before I realized it, I was running. Running towards the loud sounds and strobe lights, and I think I began to cry. I was happy. I might have been sad. But in all the spinning, and gestures, and yells that I got as I dodged through traffic I didn’t know how to stop, or how to be more careful. I was just trying to escape the roar inside my head. I turned my attention to a yellow taxi cab honking at me, headlights cutting through the dark rainy night and I don’t know how I ended up here. I looked around me to see that I was standing in the middle of a cross road, cars hissing past me, rain like bullets on my head. 

Even when I’m awake it can feel like the sun on my skin is unreal, like I’m stuck somewhere in the between—a place that I can’t get out of. But it’s just me against me, and when I look into the reflection of a storefront window, I recognize myself, but only barely. Tomorrow I will wake up to die another day, and it’ll be beautiful, and it’ll be scary, and I’ll laugh and hope Kubrick is not writing my life down in his moleskin notebook.