#52

I'm one of those people who have left all their friends behind, or been left by them. With me it's a mixture, as it may be for most people. I wouldn't know.

What's there to say? I saved a few of their lives, shared whatever I had with all of them. Most did not share in kind. Some did.

With some, I dropped out of sight when I couldn't bear it any longer. Some dropped from mine, I assume for similar reasons. Now it's quiet, and I'm back where I started; they are sand on the wind, gone, scattered.

I know a few locations; Denver, Madison, Chicago, somewhere near Northampton, some city in New Jersey, somewhere in Thailand, Kyoto, Caracas, Rome, St. Petersburg, San Francisco, Havana, New York, Seattle, Paris. Some I forget, some I don't know. Some are here. Our paths don't cross. I stick to the shadows when I walk and work in the back of a building. I stay home.

Some people are dead to you, and you're dead to some people. No bodies have been buried, but this is death all the same. And if their eyes met mine one random chance? What would they see? What do dead eyes reflect off one another? 

Ghosting. So apt. All of us restless in our graves, all of us subject to running into someone we left for dead.


--JL