So what should I do to try and numb this feeling? I eat poorly. I get myself to the nearesty bad-for-you foodary and order anything with bacon. My decision, pre-flight home was to visit the only Burger King in all of Durangodom. I walked in only to smell cleaning fluid and french fries and to be greated by the noise of several barefooted children running about the place, large drinks in hand and ketchup splashed across the front of their shirts.
I sat in the corner booth and watched as a man whose slow-moving, clumsy eyes revealed his drunken state. I quickly scarfed down my Number 11 with pasty cheese and precooked bacon and then sat for a while. I considered the state of my life as I do often. It only took me ten minutes. I left.
When I finally got to the airport I had two hours before my flight was due to depart. I picked up my book, "Interview with the Vampire" and began to read. Though I find the book interesting, and much more meaningful than the movie, I still found my attention moving about the room. Every few paragraphs I would raise my eyes and look about the sun light check-in to the airport. There were a few groups of people, most of them looked like families, and all of them talking with eachother about this or that. I sat and watched them all for a long while, to the point of almost being in a trance, the lazy afternoon light having made me feel out of myself.
I have a habit of loosing myself in books. I suppose it's not really a habit, nearly everyone I know does the same. You find a book that interests you and two hours later, after having been in the mind of a character, or watched the life of a person unrole before your eyes, you find yourself mentally narrating your life in a style similar to the book. When I was in France I read David Sedaris, which I believe is the reason my journal logs for the entire month are some of the most clever, off beat things I've ever written. I'll let you guess where my mind was in that airport while reading Anne Rice. After only eleven pages of reading the Vampire's thoughts I had already fashioned myself into a self-reflecting dandy. Pretending to have the ability to flit before mortals without their knowing. Had anyone seen me in that airpot, I would have been a cross-legged man sitting alone reading, but in my mind my imagination had lead me to feel akin to Louis. I enjoy reading for this feeling.
One of my favorite images from "Interview with the Vampire" so far. Lestat has just returned to Claudia and Louis after having been poisoned with dead blood. The event shakes Louis, and he begins to wonder if they, as vampires, are truly immortal, so that even should their bodies be tortured past endurance, past familiarity, that their ability is to continue on with life, whether they wish to or not.
'I don't know...' I whispered to her. 'Only that perhpas there was no will to live, no tenacity...because very simply there was no need of either.'"
It's a wonderfully horribly thought. And one I've never considered in thoughts of what it would be like to live forever. It's uncomfortable to think on, almost like lying on the ground under a star strewn night sky and imagining what it would be like to simply fall up into that vast black ocean above. The stuff of unresolved nightmares.
It was a safe trip home.
