Molecules

I’m desperate for comfort, touch, human kindness. It is not that I lack these things, it is that in any moment that I am alone I unravel. Absent a person next to me, reality scatters. I cannot exist alone when my self, not called into action for interface with another self, explodes into a million shimmering droplets that are lost in the chaotic ocean of reality. I become aware of my subjection to the electrical impulses that translate what is true into what I sense. I can only yield to the waves, can only attempt to stay above them.

I am overwhelmed by the water flowing into the silver drain-cover in the shower, away and away and eventually to some facility where it will perhaps be cleaned and redistributed, or will evaporate and dissipate into the unthinkable volume of the atmosphere.

Drops of water fall from my head as I stand under the shower, looking down the drain. They seem to slow, disorienting me as they fall, shrinking only in my mind, and splash onto the shower floor. I won’t see them disappear down the drain. I may never meet those molecules again.