The
Sylph
I
walk in the daylight among the rest of you, watching, slinking,
moving from tree to alleyway to mailbox to parked car, weaving into
the crowd every so often, anonymous, quiet, unseen. I watch people on
their phones, watch as they order their coffee, watch as they run
down the street. When they speak, I listen and murmur the words to
myself in the darkened alcoves, letting them wash over me, the stolen
sounds of another person’s mind. No one can bear to look right at
me; if they stare they look over me, and so they see nothing, a
tramp, perhaps, but more likely an inanimate object, a dumb thing
lacking agency and life. When night falls I rummage through the
garbage bins, dining on their refuse, their half-eaten sandwiches,
their rotten apple cores, lapping up sour milk from grimy cartons
that collapse in my hand, their outsides wet and stinking.
Afterwards, I go and look into windows and observe the people as they
stare at the screens, their faces hollow, their spirits draining into
the ether. Sometimes I try the window latch; sometimes I turn the
knob on the backdoor. I can come into a house uninvited; I am not a
vampire, and the owners have little ownership over vacated space. And
so I wander about, turning over couch cushions, looking under chairs,
taking dropped change and little things to hide on my body and ponder
in the cold loneliness of the morning, when I am away from those who
cannot speak to me, who will not see me. I watch them sleep
sometimes, hovering above their stretched-out forms, watching as they
breathe through their mouths and choke on invisible spiders. It would
be nice to sleep, to relax and forget. The little deaths that they
are granted are not given to me.
I
wonder often about my lot in life, and question why I am not afforded
the little pleasures that others enjoy without notice. I have never
felt the touch of another; I have never gazed into the eyes of a
pretty person, nor have I felt an embrace. My words disappear as soon
as they are spoken; my thoughts float away on the breeze, lost on the
winds that spawned me. In the countless years I have spent
contemplating my nature, I have concluded that I am either a
sacrifice given so that others might live, or I am the future stuck
in the now, a prophesy given sentience.
The living drift closer
to my sphere every day. They have given up on each other; they walk
alone, enshrouded in their personal cones of silence. It used to be
that I fed off of their conversations, but I now I must lean over
their shoulders, staring into their flickering screens, feebly
attempting to obtain some nourishment from their solipsistic
concerns. Perhaps they
will amuse themselves to death, and they will join me as elemental
spirits, and we will all walk, severed from each other, picking
through the garbage of the past, as we search for some trace of
former identity, some god that will tell us, finally, how to live.
