Days turn into weeks

Weeks turn into months

And now a little more than a year everyday is the same.

My coffee maker sounds like a raptor. Clicking at my presence I’ve come to delay making coffee each successive morning until I dare enter the kitchen.

The units above my apartment flush toilets; that, sound cascading down through my walls, it, for a moment, feels comforting like nature splashing over me at the base of a waterfall, where a raptor quite possibly watches me within the rainforest.

I feel beaten like many batons have bashed me in the night as I slept. I stand solely to shake off the ache of hours of long, lonely days and nights of rest. Sedentary for hours. Then standing, staring out at the concrete, as the cascading waterfalls flow, while the raptors click a communicateè of prey.

I take my daily cup to a flat long table that pins me safely into the corner like a ten foot tall tortoise shell on my back. I push three buttons to zoom out of this sterile square box through the ether into a computer screen filled with six other square boxes all looking back at me in a conference call.

As I stare not at my distant, pained colleagues who try to muster some intelligence, to work, to breath, smile or function, all I see is my neck. My old, sagging flesh, it hangs from my chin.

I want to think, “well you’re finally losing some weight” but the charade can’t conceal it, as I sit still in the screen, my god I look like a lizard.

Zooming through their comments, tasks, their facts, I can only nod, silently, yes to my colleagues.

My mind wanders. I haven’t seen a fly in ages.