243. Folding In On Yourself

The weather looks calm and sunny, so I ask if you would like to join me for a walk. You tell me that you’re too busy right now, that you’re in the middle of working on something. I ask if you might have time later. You tell me that you’ll have to see how things go, that you can’t know in advance how you’ll feel later. I’m forced to accept your uncertain answer, as I can see there’s no point in arguing with you.

My suspicion is that you won’t have time later, because you’ve become preoccupied with your work. Taken by itself, this is not a problem. I can go for a walk by myself or do something else. The real problem is that this seems to keep happening.

You never seem to have time for anything. You seem to be quietly receding into the distance, growing further and further apart from me as your attention remains fixed on your work. You seem to have become more distant from everyone else as well, pushing them away, almost fending them off at times, so that you can have your private space where you can do what you want.

It’s what you want that seems to matter and nothing else. What you call your work is really just what you want to do. There’s no space between you and your desires. In a way, you seem to have become your desires. Are you in control of them or are they in control of you?

You’re so in your head that you’ve stopped seeing the world around you, the world of other people, people like me. You’re folding in on yourself, gradually closing down, and there looks to be no end to the process. You’re so much smaller than you used to be, and you shrink more and more every day.

How long will it take before you’re not here at all? How long before you’re permanently lost to your interminable obsessions? How long until you exist completely in your own little world and not in this one, with no way for me or anyone else to reach you?