Worry not my friends, for I am here. I am here and yet I am not here, both at the same time. I’ll help you but I won’t. That’s my party trick, if you will. I’ll solve all your problems, and yet I’ll leave them with you as well. You’ll be saddled with them forever…
I’m always looking for new things, and yet I get tired of them the very next moment. I’m always hungry for novelty, and I’m also sick to the back teeth of it, sicker than you can possibly imagine. I am sickened by myself, sickened by the sickening attitude I have towards myself.
The ticket inspector is approaching where I’m sitting in the carriage and my ticket is nowhere to be found. It’s a bad moment. It’s OK though because I’m not really here at all. It’s always like this – there’s a moment of horrible raw panic, a feeling of things closing nastily in on me, followed by the unexpected and distinctly humorous relief of discovering that none of it really happened anyway. Nothing happened, and it didn’t happen to anyone.
I am tortured on a daily basis by the exquisite tedium of my own horrifically sterile existence – events come around according to a routine that no force can change. The events of my life come around with the type of superb predictability one might associate with the finest Swiss watch, and yet at the same time I can’t help knowing that it’s all just some kind of joke. It’s not what it seems at all. Somewhere, someone is laughing…
I express many fine sentiments, sentiments that are expressive of many different and varied things, and yet expressive of nothing at all. My words and phrases – although polished to perfection – are only there to cover up the greedy void that lies within me. It’s not really me, you see – it’s just the void talking through me. It’s just the void talking through me, trying to keep itself company. Trying to keep itself company throughout all those unspeakably vast and lonely Eons of time. Eon after Eon after Eon. Eons without end.
I am myself, and yet not myself at all. I am awake but at the same time fast asleep. I know exactly what I’m doing, but at the same time I haven’t a clue. I know and I don’t know. That kind of thing. I stare absently out of the train window, watching the trees and ponds and fields flash by, and as I sit there I find myself suddenly overcome with a strange sadness because now I know that I’m not really there at all.
