Untethered

Do you ever feel like your life is over, and yet it’s still going? Like an old movie that’s run out of film, forgotten by a neglectful projectionist? The credits have rolled, the sound has cut, and yet the reel keeps spinning and spinning and spinning in the projector with nothing but the ghost of a story fully told. Nothing remains as the celluloid screams and sears, the imagery bursting into flames, the story going up into smoke and ash floating off into the air, never to be told again, soon to be forgotten. And yet, untethered, it keeps spinning and spinning and spinning.

I spin and I spin and I spin. I don’t know how many days I have been up here. Down here. I see her eyes when I close mine. I’ve lost track of time as I stare at the Earth below, so peaceful, so unaware of the suffocating darkness encompassing every aspect of my being. It’s like I am inside of a pretty little snow globe, unimportant, forgotten, a delicate structure tucked away in some insignificant corner of a room. Everything is still and silent and beautiful, and yet I feel shaken, residual vibrations dizzying my thoughts and leaving my world ever changing.

I think about her. I think of those old movies she liked to watch, and how she liked to sit on the beach on a cold winter day. “It’s so silent and peaceful here,” she’d say with a dreamy look in her eyes as they fluttered across the frozen waves. It was as if time had lost all meaning, standing still and unencumbered.

“It’s so silent and peaceful here,” I say in a bone freezing cry, my delirium overcoming my will to hold on. I float on. I fade away. No gravity to my soul, no love to keep me spiritually grounded. No literal gravity to bring me back to Earth. Nothing to pull me back, nothing to hold me down. Untethered, I am forgotten, and I drift slowly, like a breeze, like the waves far out in the vast summer sea that she hated so much. Too much crowding, too many lost souls, here I am, the frozen waves, a single lost soul, the epitome of everything she loved about that frozen beach and everything I hate about being so far away from the only home I know. Isolated, I spin and I spin and I spin, the movie is over, the lights are going out, but I am not going home.

How many days have I been here? How many years? I am a butterfly, wings ripped and pinned, collapsed back into its cocoon. I miss the Earth, silenced in its orbit, lulled from my sanity in its violent silence as I exist on a plane balanced precariously between heaven and hell. Sometimes I hear frantic voices calling my name, and I cover my ears and scream for them to stop. Nobody is out there, and nobody is coming. The darkness consumes me and everything I thought that I could be. I spin and I spin and I spin.

“Come home,” she whispers, giggling as she swims through my atmosphere. I’d only wanted to dance among the stars. I only want to see the stars in her eyes, her light reflected in mine, reaching for the glow of a long extinguished star, I only want to dance with her in my arms. Her light hits me as she turns to dust; I reach through her, particles shattered like glass, far too fragile and far too late, like smoke and ash, floating off into the air, soon to be forgotten. “It’s so silent and peaceful here.”

“It’s so silent and peaceful here,” I echo. Voices call out for one final time as I look down to the Earth below and remember that I have no one to go home to. This will destroy me. I let it consume me. Like a black hole, I collapse inside myself. I lost my sun, I lost my stars, I lost my universe. I cannot let go of her; isolated, I let go of myself. I am untethered. I spin and I spin and I spin, into blissful oblivion. I spin. I spin. And I spin.