Writer's Block: The Sylph

 

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.