What Am I Doing?

“What am I doing?” he said aloud to himself. Did he mean with the day, the morning, that moment, his life?

The coffee in his cup was cold...again. He'd already warmed it once in the microwave. He didn’t ever seem to be able to finish a full cup in its state of straight-from-the-French-press hotness. Many days there were multiple trips to the microwave just to invigorate the sweetly bitter liquid with enough heat to warm his throat as he swallowed. Why should this day be any different?

What am I doing? That question continued to plague his thoughts. It was a big question that led to other questions. He couldn’t answer any of them really. Or wouldn’t.

The exotic fragrance of bergamot from a candle burning quietly on his kitchen counter wafted into the room where he sat. One whiff of its perfume always put a smile on his face. It was the essence of comfort, luxury, and happiness, set free by the heat of a flame.

His own flame was flickering. He wasn’t aging gracefully. Just that morning he’d been admiring a picture of a handsome older man in the pages of Vogue magazine when he read that the man was 48 years old. He felt like he’d been slapped in the face. He was going to be 48 years old himself in a mere three months. Reality! He didn’t see himself as older. He wondered how others see him. He thought he probably didn’t want—or need—to know.

“Time is a funny thing.” How often had he heard that phrase in his life? Where did it even originate? Does it even matter? Not really. Time isn’t funny. It continues forward through the good, the bad, the ugly, and the beautiful. It has to continue forward otherwise he’d be dead. And he didn’t want to be dead…at least not today.

Dead is a heavy word loaded with fear and darkness, the inability to escape the black nothingness of the unknown. Gone. 

He had often wondered what life would be like for the people who know him if he was no longer present in their lives. Since he feared the word death almost as much as its result, he thought about this lack of presence as more of an absence. Like, say, severing the connective tissue that is cyber space, freeing himself from the binding filaments that are often more detrimental to his psyche than beneficial. Then he pondered the essay he would most assuredly write called "Separation Anxiety and the Negative Effects of Solitude" and decides once again to stay present and connected albeit more limited than before.

The perfume from the burning candle continued to fill him with contentment…and longing. The coffee inevitably cooled once again in his cup. He took a deep breath. He sipped, grimaced.

Time moved forward, his pendulum swinging, marking. His flickering flame did not set him free. 

He was told recently that he needed to dig deeper to uncover the truth of his sadness. He was good at avoiding.

So the question remains: What am I doing?