Moving Like A Ghost

Some days, you are able to keep your shit glued together until you start driving to work. It's times like that when you are grateful to park your car in a lot frequented by alcoholics and meth heads. No one even gives you a second glance when they see your shaking hands, snotty nose, red rimmed eyes, and unsteady gate as you exit your vehicle and begin your day.

Other days, you keep your shit glued together until you reach your lunch break. Or perhaps until you get a phone call from the next brick in the wall bureaucrat who is laying the mortar for the prison cell that keeps you in and the criminals out. You must learn that the system is there to protect the guilty and fuck the innocent. God Bless America. Be sure to pay your taxes on time and salute the flag.

Perhaps you're lucky enough to have a day when your shit never comes unglued. Perhaps it's a day when you look in the mirror and the only thing in your face that betrays your situation is your eyes. The thousand yard stare of someone quietly, inexorably, falling down in slow motion.

But every once in awhile, you wait until you get home. You visit the mailbox hesitantly. Will it be a letter from the County? The Police? The Lawyer? The Victim's Reparation Board? God? Satan? Nothing would surprise you. You're lapsing into numbness. It's the only protection you have anymore.

And then you see a letter addressed to the puppies of the house. It doesn't have a return address. When you open it, it's a gift certificate for Petco.

A gift certificate to go along with the other anonymous gift certificate from Yarn Harbor that someone slipped you secretly while you knitted with your friends.

For one moment, you're able to glimpse a crack in the morter. You're able to remember that no matter how alone you feel, no matter how powerless, no matter how lost, there are people on the other side of this wall, slipping little notes through the cracks.