The Breath of Death

Sometimes I wonder if I died a while ago and just didn't realize it.

Things that would have once sent me a'shivering, songs, for instance, or seeing something so touching, now just aggravate a fuzzy space where my box of shivers once resided. It reminds me of something I read in Stephen King's Bag of Bones, about death making someone crazy.

Ever since I read that book, I've meant to read The Moon and the Sixpence by W Somerset Maugham. I believe I have the text on my Kindle, or perhaps my Nook, which I cleverly called Nookworm. I amuse myself without reason sometimes.

The rain has had me itching to write. Just sit down somewhere with a pack of cigarettes, a pot of coffee, and a bottle of whiskey and just write until my fingers go blue. I've said it before, and I'll say it again, my children keep me this side of complete madness, for which I am grateful, but when I'm not with them, when I'm driving or sitting at my desk in my cubicle at my job, I can imagine, perhaps too clearly, going insane with words and music and all my vices.

My e-mail is full of messages from writing websites of all sorts, with how-tos on beginnings, middles, endings, contacting agents, convincing publishers that I'm the one, descriptives, character analysis, building to a climax, etc. etc., but they don't tell me how to get past this reality and lose myself in whatever I want to create.

I feel most of us are the same...being broken down one dashed dream at a time, one disappointment, one heartbreak, one loss, one memory at a time, until the children we once were who believed in, hoped for and whispered magic are naught but ghosts pretending to still breathe, walking through our day-ins and repeats until we can just figure out how to get to the other side. My belly burns with indigestion or perhaps even an ulcer, but even that is muted, tickles the bridge of my nose and makes me want to cry, but I don't, because I can't feel anything anymore. Only my children bring me back to life, to reality.

I fear this for them.