Temperatum Est

It was dark, after 9 p.m. I was walking up a hill from my subway stop when I found myself listing forward, struggling with my heavy bag and upper-back pain that had been bothering me all day. I looked over at the street to my right. Oddly, with a melting in my gut, I saw that the sloping slant I was trudging up was unusually tilted—or I was unusually tilted. I tried standing completely upright as I walked, and I began to feel like I might tip over. I realized immediately that something strange was happening, because I was not just struggling with the physical reality of walking up a hill. An acute anxiety wavered through me: what would happen if this was the only gradient on which I would ever walk, only, ever again? The sidewalk began to seem utterly too hard to navigate, the skewed life ahead seemed too difficult to endure.

It was then that I realized I had dropped off into a strange spiral of madness. And I saw quickly that if I did not force my brain to slap all these weird thoughts right out of it, I might actually lose my sense of reality…forever. So I did.

~

Anybody have any thoughts on Miami? There is a job for me there, and I've never been.