Postscript? Perhaps.
Dave and company came and went perhaps as inter-dimensional types or perhaps they are better explained as time travelers - nudging life history trajectories like mine to suit a timeline I will never be privy to. The time travelers always enviable types with a set of rules the likes of us will never know. At some point I have to enter a request.
I've been left here on this dimensional shelf of a real estate parcel of containment. Trapped in a life I wouldn't wish on anyone. And a life despite however grim and Gothic I must practice thankfulness for. The gods know things could be worse for me just as they are worse for all too many others.
My life's residual negativity and discontent from an accumulation of too many of life's curve-balls ensures that I remain confined. Curve balls that came first to my folks life long before the meteor of 1976 struck us. As if the economic confinement of the years of my employed life always being low wage subsistence wasn't enough to make me reject everything about Capitalism, Democracy and the Republic for which no one in their right mind would stand if they could turn off Fox and just be honest with themselves.
I don't want to beg but basically that is what all of these words here and in the rest of this Shelved to Obscurity blogette are. If you are the inter-dimensional time traveling Dave or from his entourage - or know of him - then with all these words I am just asking to be remembered. And would you or any of you just come get me. This isn't where I am supposed to be. This wasn't how it was to be. No one should be in a world and yet so cut off from it as I am. If you have the ability to teleport in and out of lives to nudge history then you can certainly come here and take me somewhere else. At the least to a different climate - perhaps one less humid. At best somewhere away from down the street from everything you used me for.
Years of recurring curve balls and subsequent depression and gut disease cannot be removed my mind. There isn't much left of me. And no one is coming for me. And we both know I am stuck here - albeit whether if feels like it or not in some state of privilege for which to be gracious. Some of which I have only myself and chance to thank. But if you are out there. And if you are reading this. When you retreat into your own world outside of work - when you withdraw into your room within a house to your comfortable chair in that withdrawing room of old. With drink in hand and the lights are dim after dark - when the people in your life are quiet... will you consider me. Not then from out interviews - consider me now. Where you left me last - consider what you know now. Just pause for a moment and meditate on me now. Feel my social isolation, consider my lack of family or friends. Think about how there is no way out of the economic gridlock of a diseased life that hinders employment and no freedom from a broken healthcare system in cahoots with a predatory banking system of social control. Trapped within a miserable outer-belts clutches. 5 Days off a year. No healthcare benefits at work. Medicaid dissolving around me. Mental health precarious at best. Financial illiteracy and fragility. Daily rounds of relentless diarrhea - trying to compete with guys half my age without the baggage I have to carry.
Think about how much I just want to talk to you or someone like you. Someone who knows what it was all about for which you came to me. And having you inexplicably gone for reasons I will never know. You having left me within a vacuum that will suck up my life. Without the ability to cultivate a life of my own. I'm thankful this isn't a prison cell like Margo's 38 year containment - but I'm trapped in an illusion of a real estate parcel and containment not too unlike her confinement.
And you know more than me. And if you set your mind to it - you can grasp what I'm writing to you about and why I've written to remember. And even if we both know you weren't real and none of this happened as I am obliged to say in print. You know what did - you know what its effect was on me. And you know what your continued silence does. And though it is well within your power or the power of the people who you worked with to step through to my reality and in an act of compassion if not lend a hand up then just talk to me again to answer a few of my questions as I answered yours.
Relish your privilege. Considered my impoverished post Belgian life. Post family. Literal gay divorcee. And you and I both know that the me you worried I might have been back then that compelled your bureau to seek me out was probably more real life than what I actually was and certainly what I am now. I am a nobody. We both knew that. I'm just astonished to this day you spent as much time and department budget on me as you did. It was a privilege for me. I will never know what it was for you. But I am asking for that bit of latent compassionate humanity so professionally buried to reach out to me. Because I don't want to die with so many unanswered questions about myself - that your file on me contains the answers to.
You came into my life like a sci-fi time traveler - and you teleport-ed out as such. And the very fact that you talked to me caused a series of cascading effects that weren't for the better. There is a file on me. A file I don't get to see. A file that if I could see could help me arrange the fragments of my shattered mind and life back together as much as they can be. You could talk to me - this could all be a bit better with some conciliatory effort on you and your agencies part. And you and I both know you won't.
So as you sit in the dark and the quiet - sipping your drink. Remembering other victims who's lights you extinguished - though their hearts stopped beating. You extinguished my light but left my heart beating. Sip on that.
I forgave you for all this a long while back.
But this dark unlit candle wick that remains of my life - its all I have left after the machinations of your work obliged you to perform on me.
Forgive me if I feel like I am owed something of what your work earned you that my misery made possible.
If nothing else show me how to make the numbers of my life and lack of decimal places work so that I can navigate from today until my heart stops beating.
I hope you and the file and the answers and assessment that I don't get to learn from because I don't get to see them - redaction's aside - because you and your agency do no extend to me the humanity you all extend yourselves. Therefore I don't matter. We both I know I am a nobody. Never was somebody. The human life equivalent of Spam.
Trying to finance a spartan life of solitude and depression while wondering when will my heart stop beating and I breath my last - knowing your memory will haunt me until then. Knowing you mostly try to erase me from your memory. Knowing you lack the balls and ambition to step outside of your professional limitation to help when you very well could. Thanks for not extending me that hand of humanity. I guess we weren't all in this together. You and the list of names I carry in me - the people who profited off of my suffering - the list of guys who aren't going to give back in any way. I image your self-rationalizations. I image what you could have done to me that could have been much worse that thankfully wasn't. But now this much time later - could you not find some compassion to consider my being. Consider my longing. Consider my asking for your assistance - with what I was and what I have become as a function of your intrusion and damage.
This isn't who I am. This wasn't supposed to happen. But being marooned in the remains of all this is very hard to endure.
There are very few handshakes now. Very few hugs. There is no necessary physicality after dark in a bed shared like a life. Meals if you could call them that are canned and eaten alone.
Technology further amplifies isolation. Even watching TV as a kid from the extra added sugar TV generation eludes me now.
I can't wrap my mind around this life this many years post Belgian. I don't know why I long for you and your kind. And I can't help think you got the luxury to travel in and out of the dimension I am trapped in to return to your better place. And that you can't look back or acknowledge that my heart beats on. And though you were never obviously a lover of any kind - its either time traveling agent or former lover is my limited brains way of filing you away so I can plod on in my misery. Lover no of course but sincere admiration.
When the air and the sunlight from life and your dimension happen upon your face and you sense those natural privileges - well I am trying to imagine that - and I'm hoping you don't leave me here in this canned airless world. Trapped in this illusion of near poverty on every level imaginable. You won't call. You won't write. You won't send cash. You won't send an oblique message. You won't sent encouragement. You departed and I was left to live out what you left me with dead on my feet.
Gosh I am naive because as I write this I actually think you will move.
This is the work you do. This is what you make. This is what you don't take home after work.
This has a name. It's my name. I am a life not worth living. I am waiting for the stamp in the file with my number on it marked
DECEASED
