Alone.
I think.
The room is empty. Of people. There's stuff in it. People's stuff. Strangers. Unknown. I acknowledge the link between these things and people. Individuals. Persons. People. Pasts. Faces and laughs. For some reason I think of laughs. I think it's easier to identify a person, the image of a person in my brain, by their smile. Laughing. Those are the more willing memories. Your mental picture folder. Of all the good times, the times that made you look forward to new, similar things, or perhaps similar in effect and quality and consequence and not necessarily factually or superficially similar, and therefore somehow ended up
being more directly responsible for the places you went than the bad times even though the opposite could be said, that the conscious evasion of similar events to those poisonous had an indirect effect—but that's the thing, indirect, unknown, unknowable—so, yes—perhaps more effectual of change , but only because they do not cause anything, because they are inexistent, parallel lives that stretch second by second through different strata of reality and are therefore infinite, and therefore infinitely outnumber the actual events that take place in the lives of... People. Who right now are not in the room. And whose stuff lies all over the damn place. Their personalities laid bare.
I think?
I mean, they picked this stuff. It all seems second hand. Sort of like my stuff. I just settled here. But I got new stuff, too. And, actually, I stole some furniture from this place—well, I was here like a week ago and Jason told me that if nobody picked it up I could take it ‘cause a lot of the artists usually left all their stuff there ‘cause—well, anyways, it was nobody's, ‘cause it was in the hallway and like, it's never been moved. Unless some person or persons move the thing when I'm not here, but that seems unlikely. There was a point to this. But now it's about stealing and personalities. Who are these people? They left so much of themselves. Painted on these things.
But then again. Well, it's all a mish-mash. The eccentricities mount to a cacophonous level and mix all to an uneven shade of brown. All the same. All stuff. No faces. Just stuff. None of them are
here, so none of them are real. To any extent.
Not to me, I think. I see people in my head, but they are not people. They are people in my head. Not people. This stuff is not people. It reminds me of people, but just the idea of people.
Not people. Individuals who don't exist but are people and have left themselves painted here for everyone to see that they do not exist and are faceless and leave stuff behind so I can grab it when they don't move it after a while.
And then I leave and I never existed.
I hope nobody takes my stuff.