[I want to be alive]

Let's see how long it would take to put all your shortcomings in a shadow box and have them labeled for quick reference. Then, after the twenty-some-odd years it'll take, we'll plaster it up on the wall so that the next tennants of this house can't ever get it down.

Sure, this house would sell just fine then. But it'd sell a hell of a lot better than if we made my shadow box first. If we made mine at all.

Maybe it's a bad idea. Or just a bad representation on a set of bad esoteric claims. Maybe it's just bad enough to actually work.

But that doesn't change things here - in this tiny little apartment room - where you're laying on top of these white sheets with a cup of tea in your hand and that damn smile on your face. It doesn't change the paintings we've hung on all four white walls that close us in here, that make our lives little black shoeboxes of the existence you say we're allowed to live.

We say we're so happy; happy enough to live that way for now. We say that our little shoebox-world is a safe enough place to settle down until we get something else altogether. Then we say, if we walked even down those dark old forest trails, we'd be stabbed to death for sure.

So we don't.

We don't breathe the clean air. We don't wear our clean clothes. We don't bother to eat more than scraps from our own cluttered table.

We don't live convincing lives.

We live like corpses traveling upper row until we're sent back down to our graves with a bow of our heads and a bend in our backs and the soft utterance of "hopstoctch" echoing from steely breath unbreathed beside us.

We all live with the same bated breath - living simply waiting to die.

-RK