"Contemplations..."

Wandering aimlessly through the streets-head tilted to the side. Contemplative glares. Black crow perched atop my shoulder-pecking mercilessly at my neck. Mumbling random William Blake quotes at the random passerby,as I dab the splotch of blood that trickled down my neck with a Kleenex. I scoffed at the supposed beauty of nature...of love...of.......

Somehow I found myself in an abandoned library,on the outskirts of town. I was drawn to a section of the room by a force I have yet to fully comprehend. A magnetic pull of sorts. As I knelt down,the floor creaked beneath me.The building looked &felt as if it had been built in the 19th century. Very unsettling.

I grabbed the last book that was on the last shelf. It was covered in filth,cobwebs &dirt. I read a few sentences here&there, but only one really captured my attention. A passage about how love was much like the sun.

When you expose yourself to such an element, you subject yourself to harmful effects not immediately felt or observed. At first,the warmth on your face is soothing,maybe even slightly euphoric. The pores of your skin willingly soaking in the Vitamin D;but prolonged exposure could cause irreversible damage.

Equating love to a carcinogen.

Seemed to make perfect sense to me.

Also, logic would dictate that if you were to get too close to it-before your brain would even have time to comprehend the magnitude of the extreme heat you were experiencing,you would have already turned into a pile of ashes.

Irreversible damage.

I flipped through the book,coughing each time I turned a page from the cloud of dust that emitted from within the pages. I wondered if that same philosophy applied to the opposite end of the spectrum. Some plant and even animal life thrive in the darkness,thousands of meters underneath the water. At the bottom of seemingly endless caverns. I then thought to myself,am I a cave dweller-an amoeba dependant on the darkness to maintain normalcy...comfort-or am I subconsciously longing for the UV rays I so feared?

The lone lightbulb that swayed above me flickered on&off for a few seconds as I contemplated this. Maybe there was a happy medium. Happy being the operative word. Do I thrive in the blackness. Or do I wilt in the sunlight.

Before I placed the book back onto the shelf,amidst books by Poe,Shakespeare-I ripped out several pages & crumpled them up into my coat pocket.

I sat on the front stoop for a bit,watching the moths flutter into the light that cascaded down from the only working lampost in the entire parking lot.

Maybe my life,(or life in general) is just a series of guided &misguided steps down the road toward our destiny;&maybe love isn't supposed to be found. Maybe it's supposed to be realized.

Or maybe I had just inhaled enough dust to have euthanized a small farm animal.