Today I turned fifty-seven, or maybe it was yesterday, and still perhaps it wasn’t yet fifty-seven that I became at all. Who keeps records but god. Not I, not I. I, who might’ve grown a year or two or ten years older, or perhaps not—and the uncertainty seems concretely definite—am in a room. It is not my room, but I call it my room. It is my room. And I am in my room, I have been in my room for as long as I can possibly recall. Little is left to tell. My room is naked with the notable exception of a bed and a pot and a shelf, which I can no longer reach, and how could I forget this writing book and pencil, my treasured devices. It is daytime, though I couldn’t know for sure. There are no windows in my room, only a crack in the door so needlessly small I often forget its existence, and I must imagine it returns the compliment. My room is all I know, and barely even that. One might imagine that when confined to such a space one would know the entirety of such a room with precise detail, but one would be wrong. But one’s never anything but a nuisance, a stain on the silence. Details bore, so I cannot tell much but what has been told already in black and white (though it is all black to me). I see nothing, most days I remember. I don’t recall if I’m blind or if my eye balls took a permanent leave. It doesn’t matter. I have eye balls. I cannot see. Not that there is anything to see. Or hear. Or feel. Or…anything. Wake, sleep, wake, excrete, sleep, eat, write, repeat; repeat. Such is life. Such is a life which happens to be mine, of which I know to be mine with the absolute uncertainty provided. Little is left to tell. I might count the moments but there are no moment worth counting. I have forgotten the years. I have forgotten yesterday and I will forget today. Mine is an existence in which nothing happens, daily. Mine is a room in which these nothings transpire, eternally. This room will outlive me. It will not be mine forever. Though it is not mine at all. Little is left to tell. I have forgotten. I have nothing. I? Whose I am I? Certainly not my own, this is a clear fact, in the final analysis of life. But to whom do I belong, whose am I if not mine? I am a rented I. I am not I. This I i not mine. This I is mine. I know nothing, not even that I am I, or that I am whatever I imagine myself to be, or if I am at all an I and not an it or an is or even an isn’t. I know nothing. I feel nothing. I see nothing. I am nothing. I…I—I (I). I. I
Little is left to tell.
Little is left.