I've Been Right Here for Thirty-seven Hours

Limbo necessitates a standing still of time even as it technically moves forward. Such is the nature of limbo. A person in limbo can wait out anybody not in limbo. It's easy, one of the few benefits of limbo. Limbo is a good place for hatching longterm schemes. Operation Eripsa Realizes How Much His Life Sucks Without Januarygirl is well underway and picking up steam.

Here, I am too busy fighting rain and bugs and neverending fireworks to worry about much else. I swim the green green roads. I cut out laminated phonics fish. I brush up on my Espanol. I wait.

I've been right here for thirty-seven hours.

Kristin Hersh Knows Limbo

She says:

If you lived here,
you'd be home by now
and suicidal.

Water

In limbo you are always wet. The air is saturated. In response, the body pumps out an oily sweat from all of its glands that runs down your smooth parts and puddles in your creases. Here, it is either unbearably humid or pouring down angry rain, trapping you inside, washing out roads for an hour before the water seeps back into the swamps through the sand. Then it is humid again.

Fire

In limbo, the explosions in the sky go off in a cycle. They start at 7:45 and continue on in 30 minute increments. They continue this way until 11 on weeknights and midnight or later on the weekends. Every evening, no stars, just explosions in the sky. This is limbo.

Fauna

In a different world, when I'd see large birds overhead, they'd glide off to the distance, only briefly in frame, recognizable as hawks and eagles, maybe ravens.

In limbo, when you see large birds overhead, they circle in black oily clusters. In the distance, you can't tell what they are, but when they land, you can walk up close and peer at their featherless, wrinkled heads and blackened beaks. They will not flee. They'll glance your way with their soulless yellow eyes, but they will not be moved. In limbo, the only large birds are vultures, and they're everywhere.

She's Back

There is no god, but there is limbo.

In my infinite freedom, I have ended up here. In limbo.

It is green here all of the time. Always.

I try to comfort myself that writers can survive anywhere. And, at the very least, there is internet in limbo.

I've been here for four weeks, and I am both weaker and stronger. Such are the contradictions of limbo.

Such are my contradictions.

Limbo has a soundtrack, forever on repeat. Sometimes I block it out and try to remember other songs I once knew, but the song always seeps back in, quietly at first, like a zen alarm clock, until it blazes in my mind, a supernova exploding. And, at the very least, I like Kristin Hersh.

Nice limbo you have here
Nice limbo you have here
Nice field you have on
Baby go back to your womb
Baby go back to your womb

You grow the apples around me
I’ll spit the seeds in your grave
Bead me a necklace
A decade
I’ll wait

Picture this gun
I’m tired of crying
I’m gonna run
I swear you
Move you
To my pores
I’m not gonna cry anymore

Dead is next door
Dead is next door

Baby go back to your womb
Baby go back to your womb