inner workings

You get up early when the day is new and dark. The smell of coffee and dying midnight pervades the empty spaces and everything is quiet and settled - and safe. Bodies are still sleeping in black rooms of slowed breathing.
Somewhere, he stares at her sleeping body and ponders their circumstance, their position, their time, their place. We remain strangers, he thinks. Eight months and we are neither friends nor acquaintances. I am the foreigner. She, the outsider.
The inner workings of spiders and robots. The gears. The thoughts. There are combustible flashes under her lids of flesh. Dreams. Visions. Beauty. I want to know them, experience them, live with them, die with them. With her. This alien. This stranger. This woman, sleeping.
What drives us? Are we all those things we claim to be? Actors on a stage of our own design with coordinated movements and scripted dialogue. Soon you will rise from your slumber, freshen up, put on some clothes and go to that job you hate. Where will I be? Will you think about me? Us? Will I be the subject/punchline of gossip among girlfriends? You will go out - there - onto a stage and into the world and contribute, socialize and separate yourself from me, from this wreck of inadequacies. You will be unattached, floating like dust on invisible currents and I'll be here, pretending to sleep in this cold bed blanketed by daylight, alone on a darkened stage. And I'll wonder about you. Think about you and that thing you do with your fingers when you get irritated. I'll picture you, that beautiful stranger on stage, contributing, living, waiting in line for a cup of coffee.
I'll be here, just waiting. Eyes rolling over the barren landscape of my apartment. Photographs souvenirs radio mementoes furniture television telephone computer CDs records: Possesions built by robots, machines. And the books: Written by dead men, the machines of time.
Those people and these things, all lacking permanence. We're only as permanent as the materials constructing us. The skin, the plastic, the glass, the bricks, the leather, the paper, the wood, the metal, the thoughts: Construction materials constructing us.
The sun will be rising soon and so will you, he thinks. And we'll continue to build, construct, assemble and fabricate something - a circumstance, a position, time, a place, a stage - without knowing what any of it means.
The thoughts. The gears. The inner workings of spiders, robots, actors, strangers and outsiders.
And here comes the sun.

mc