I walk a lot. It's always night, usually cold despite what the thermometer says, and is always, most definitely a long walk. Sometimes I find myself only a few blocks away after the hours drift by and I realize that it's time to head back to my hole-in-the-wall apartment. Sometimes I'm miles away. It's always the miles one that ends up costing me the most, especially in the wallet. Do you realize how much some hotels really are for someone who can only work nights and on off days? A lot, believe it or not. Oh sure, there's always some dump with a lackluster night manager willing to give me a room with no questions asked, but it's good to keep track of where they are and during my nighttime wanderings, I often end up places that I don't know. It's scary. Well, to me at least. I kind of go to sleep when I walk, get lost in my head, and when I come to it's hard to tell where I am or what I've done. Honestly, it's the only reason I always choose to live in large cities. Always somewhere to go even if you don't know where you're going. Always some crowd to blend in with, even if you don't know why you have to at that very moment.
I think the scariest part about it all is that when I come out of this lost state of mind, I don't even remember what I'd been thinking of in the first place. Sometimes I know I've been thinking about nothing major, nothing important, but more often than not I carry around a dread. This gut feeling that tells me that whatever my thoughts may have been at that particular moment, that moment that I was lost so far inside myself that I had no idea of what I was thinking or doing, they weren't so pure. Weren't too kind. That whatever was rattling around up there just wasn't me.
Ever feel like the waking world is just a dream? Ever feel like all you are is the skin that someone else is wearing? Sounds crazy. It is crazy. Doctors call it schizophrenia or something. I've never been up to par with their medical terms. Hell, I haven't been to a doctor in well over two hundred years, why start now? I think that most people actually feel something like this, they're simply not active long enough to realize just what is going on. That they're not the people they think they are and the thoughts they think aren't so much theirs as much as they are a mask placed in front of their minds to keep them complacent. They don't realize that they're just a suit, just like me. I often wonder if thinking about it too much makes it worse, like picking at a scab that hasn't quite healed. Maybe this is just one of those situations that needs to be left alone to ferment into whatever it's going to become. Maybe if I forgot about it, it would all quit. Maybe this crawling sensation and my absent mindedness would cease. Maybe I would stop really hearing what it is whoever I really am wants me to do. Maybe I would be able to sleep when I'm supposed to sleep rather than sleep when I'm supposed to be awake. If it even is sleeping.
I've been confused for a long time. I don't think it's going to stop. I don't know how to stop it. I do know, though, that I can't go on living a lie anymore. And no matter how much I cut, I can't seem to find the bottom of this fucking suit that acts and looks like skin. It's under there. I AM under there, I know it. But I just have to try to figure it all out before the time to walk comes again, because I can't get lost again. I can't go through another night without knowing where I'm going or what I'm thinking. I'm under here and I will find it before I lose myself again. If not, I hope the sun burns away what I've failed the slice off.