My Entire World

There are hidden meanings for me everywhere I look. This life is a metaphor to me, a microcosm of the human condition. My reality is a symbol, a metaphor -- whether I feel well or ill. It is subtle. But it leads nowhere. It is a beginning and an end. It is my life -- full of strangers, people I'd like to know, people I'd like to forget. Though I am originally from another place, I never want to go back to my place of origin. I intend to die here.

This is the whole of my reality, my entire world. My life does not lead anywhere else. No one, not even my psychiatrists, expect more than this. Though my life is empty, my room in some perverse reversal of my identity is full: books cover the many shelves, pictures cover every wall, chairs and tables abound, for no one ever visits my room. There is no music in my life, though the room echoes with recordings of Chopin, Beethoven and Schumann. Though I am not a card player, I keep a deck of cards in my room. In this atmosphere, the deck of playing cards, especially the picture cards, seem highly colored and evocative, and I find myself lingering and discerning expressions on the faces of the jack, queen and king -- mockery, haughtiness, defiance. I am kept company by a host of royals.

I take long walks to pass the time. In my life there is nothing else to do but walk, for there is no exploitation, no work, no play. There is what you see and nothing more. No wanting, no desire. The melancholy of it, I think; but that is wholly my feeling, and probably the feelings of others who know of me and my plight. It is not heaven, not hell, but earth as limbo for me who has always believed in limbo.

There are no longer any thoughts of the past. The other world is so remote in time and space that it has no features. The emptiness of my life has replaced all other realities, and so I no longer even reminisce. My thoughts are of practical matters in the present. And though Washington, DC is my reality, neither politics nor local culture interests me much. I used to be vain but I no longer have much vanity. I am inward, even a bit shy. When I am not being silly -- in front of others I always talk in a jokey way -- I am solemn. I do not think all that much about the future, though I occasionally think of death or eternity.

My clothes are simple, but even so, that does not make me seem poor. On the contrary, it gives me a sense of serenity, and makes me seem indifferent and unworldly and spiritual.