Calendar of Monotony
Yesterday, by accident, I looked at the calendar.
It was a block of repeated days,
a bureaucratic parade of tedium —
save for those dates once etched
in pencil and longing:
our monthly anniversaries.
We celebrated like sinners at a sacred altar,
a forbidden devotion,
a crime against the First Commandment.
Then it became a ritual,
a silent treaty against forgetting.
Until, at last,
it was merely a crooked face of memory,
half-drunken, half-fevered.
In those dates,
we searched for some trace of what we once were —
or fancied ourselves to be.
But yesterday, again, I looked.
And found nothing.
No you,
no dates,
no us.
Just scribbles from the day I planted sunflowers
(as if flowers could save me)
a few saint’s days,
some reminders about overdue bills,
and mostly,
an enormous white expanse,
staring back at me with the coldness of one who says
that I have a dreadful laziness for living.
This calendar full of minor uselessness
mirrors my life with poetic precision.
So I decided to change it.
I read in the grimoires of self-help —
those dime-store scriptures of bottled hope —
that rearranging your days is a good start.
But truth be told,
I learned I had turned sixty when I was still fifteen,
with the kind of wisdom — if you dare call it that —
of someone who hasn’t existed five minutes yet.
And when I think of the road still ahead,
its kilometers of repetition and protocol,
I feel an overwhelming urge
not to live,
but to pull over somewhere quiet
and vanish into the woods
like a tired animal
unfit for the season.
– Painting: “The Balcony Room” by Adolph Menzel, 1845.