The Alan Wozawsky Social Experiment: 07

Am I alone? The echo of Henry’s words haunt me now more than ever, in a vacuum of context they are all the more troubling, all the more disheartening; it’s as sitting in the dark, suddenly aware that all which elsetime and elsewhere illuminates is intrusive, and all the more the senses are perturbed by this; the audible ethereal, the tangible unrecognised, the tasted unanticipated, the smelt disembodied, and yet they are all the more real, all the more pervasive. “You have no meaning” he bellows and echoes in those hollowed caverns of memory where his charge reigns unchallenged, “you're like a ghost pointing an empty sleeve and smirking at everything that people feel or want or struggle for. I pity you” I don’t retort, principally under the crushing weight of there being none “Isn't there anything... what touches you, what warms you? Every man has a dream. What do you dream about, what--what do you need? You don't need anything, do you”; I instinctively protest –you err kind sir- but on what grounds? It ought not take a moment’s pondering to invoke a need and yet there I stood, a blade of grass pleading neither sun nor rain, adding nothing but the grace of silence “people, love, an idea, just something to cling to. You poor slob; you're all alone” ever gluttons of a convenient lie over an inconvenient truth are we; never shy of self deception, perpetually mindful of a convenient cover story, a maintainable narrative. But time comes when we all meet our Henry, and this was distinctly looking to be mine “When you go to your grave, there won't be anybody to pull the grass up over your head, nobody to mourn you, nobody to give a damn. You're all alone”. I sigh. Not the hot, heavy angst laden sigh of Lawrence, nor the flustered tired one of Austen, not one of reminiscence or tedium, nor any of the hundred meaningful sighs so oft mused; it was no more than a breath having nowhere else to go, a corporeal existence -bemoaning its forced solitude- moving to second his motion. But was it me in that court room listening to him after it had emptied? Was it me in that gray suit and flat top straw hat smirking even as he spoke? These will be pondered, but not now, not today.