Borrowed Life.

Riding the train back from Philadelphia, cruising at alarmingly high speed, I think the conductor must be making up for lost time. It was just fifteen minutes behind, I read somewhere, but now, as the train darts down the track, shaking toward home, I wonder what we are in such a fucking hurry to get to. Maybe its just the way trains work these days, or maybe its me.

This year made its way like a bullet too, gliding along easily as if nothing could stop it from just getting the hell on over with. Something has always urged me to hurry, hurry, hurry on up. Move it or lose it, toots. A frame of mind some people I know cannot, and will not for that matter fathom. Refuse is too strong a word, but its not far off. Time flies when you're having fun, but I would say that's too strong a word too.

I always liked the phrase working on borrowed time, even though I was never sure if I was borrowing the time or working on finding it. Right now I’m working on finding the pieces of myself that I lost while racing around so damn much. Or maybe they aren’t lost as much as just sort of jumbled up and now don’t make any sense. Perhaps its not time I’ve borrowed, but something else. I do borrow a lot, look for things to trade. Not just these untouchable things, but really that's what this is all about.

I borrow patience, see. Maybe I tapped out my loan, as I seem to have so little so often. I had this idea for a story once about a man who runs a storage space rental company for sadness. His business went under because no one ever came to pick theirs up and he ran out of space. Maybe I need to find a place that is like that but stores other things like patience. Or time. Joy. Love.

Love. Borrowing love sounds like a bad idea. Really it just sounds sad. Like losing the ability to love and having to take out a loan for it might be the worst thing ever. Yet sometimes that feeling digs into my savings like I'm already borrowing love like I borrow time. Like I borrow love like a recommendation for a song- eat it up in every chord as if when I wake up the silence will be too deafening. As if when I wake and know he’s gone, the man who cupped me in his warm embrace left a space behind my back as cold and dark as the white tile of my bathroom floor. People always say white tiles a bad idea, it shows too much. Maybe I was already cold and dark; showed too much; not enough.

No arms can warm love on loan.

How do you even pay back a debt like that? It makes me tired to think about. I’m so tired I can’t even borrow sleep. Ironically, I sleep-walk through this morgaged time in my life, waiting for the purgatory I am in to end, until I can claim it as my own. The life of my own where the only storage space necessary will be in my back yard, and that borrowed time will be time well spent. Its easy to dream when you don't sleep because they are lucid and built on the lessons of your current mistakes and the fantasies of never repeating them. At least I don't have to borrow those, dreams that is; just slumber. Though the sleep part won't change, I can stick to the dreaming, and one day pay back my debts to get out of this interim of a borrowed life.