City of Immortals

The couch holds my weight,

but poorly, sinking under the

excess drink between my bones.

My leg droops. Foot tapping

at the floor and the pinch of couch cushions

doesn't hold me up, anymore.

The cold bottle has grown warm in my fingers

but the ceiling doesn't change as long as I stare at it

and the crack stares back.

It's raining.

A rivulet of escaping water

hurries across my basement apartment floor.

Everything's escaping from me

these days. The case doesn't help.

The impossible case.

Not a single trace in a city where

everything is pencil, drawing lines.

I've gone back and back and back to the database

searching faces

reading pasts

(more than I needed to, getting lost in people's stolen stories)

(but I never look at my own file anymore)

and there's nothing.

Not a crumb of DNA or a single lingering

whiff of

who they might have been;

they've erased themself.

I chase a ghost and find myself

pretending I don't envy them.

Oh, to disappear.

To dust, to dust, we all die in the end

but I can never die when my

entire existence has been catalogued and chronicled.

They've created, with their surveillance,

a city of immortals.

I know I'm listed as depressed

and maybe that's why I've wrapped myself

in this impossible job, a last ditch

to fall into so I can pretend to die;

a shroud of empty searching,

except—

Something tickles at my mind

and I almost wonder if I'll run away.

The light flickers like a firefly, on and off,

and threatens an ending, but

I don't know if I can survive another

success

that doesn't,

in the end,

change

anything.

I'd rather be a moth in the darkness

than chase the moon and find an artificial light.

But the blinding bulb calls and

drink in hand

I keep fluttering flickering towards it.

But I'm good at my job.

Sometimes I pretend I didn't

wish I was a failure so I could

wallow in peace. But

I know I'm good at this.

Even in the impossible cases,

I smell something.

An elegant killer that leaves

a trace of perfume,

a footstep that never touches the ground and yet,

I can almost make out footprints in the air.

What's the easiest way to be invisible? I mutter

into my glass and the liquid answers,

don't exist at all.

They asked me to find the murderer.

An invisible, untouchable force that kills and leaves

nothing behind; a wound with no knife;

a scream cut off as body hits floor

with such impossible weight, because death

is heavier than a body.

And a mind, alive, is lightest of all;

so light it floats and drips away like rain

leaking across a basement floor.

To be seen keeps us sane but

to be watched

might kill us.

My body already so heavy on the couch.

When I close my eyes, that's all that changes.

I was dead already.