Ritual ablutions

The hours of daylight stretch out before me. I find myself, suddenly, alone, with myself. The child, sleeps, or plays, or goes to school, and my work, it seems, is suspended. In a far-off land, a friend admires my optimism, and I reply that it is no such thing, but rather "un vacilar entre el abismo y la rabia". It sounded pretty, it may be true. It is, at least, an alternative to the nothing.

What to do with myself? Where to go, but inside? And I am tired, so tired, of drilling farther in, deeper, back, until there is nothing surprising left. So I leave it, and I look for an escape, from me, from the hours of sleeplessness, the dark hours that also extend, spinning, endlessly. Perhaps these hours are longer, because there is no company to mitigate the silence. Compounding. Darkness.

So I lose myself in my ablutions, nothing as religious as a Mikveh, but I wash, with water, away, away. The pounding droplets on my head drive these thoughts from me, carefully I examine every follicle, lather with vegetable oils and minerals, nothing so harsh as lye, not for my tender skin, under the fervent stream that pours over me. My eyes close, there are no thoughts left, for a few brief moments, but the sting on my sun-deprived parts. And I stand, motionless, until the water begins to cool, until the ecological ramifications of this pleasure-seekeing activity make themselves manifest, and I once again, look for sleep, for something to calm this ache, or to name it, to drive it from my bones.

There is nothing, but the water, the steel blade, scraping away the unwanted, unacceptable parts of me, the milky lotions to seal the burn within. To close each pore off from foreign penetration, disease, death. I pull the cold sheets up around me, my soft flesh, radiating heat that soon reflects back. One more day, one more night, one more day, one more night, out into the infinite black of the ocean, forever, one more, until there are no more, until I don't care anymore about what is not here.