Where?

I didn’t want them to go. Why did they have to go? The bite of the coffee shows up on my neural radar. The scars dotting my misshapen knuckles glow pink in face of the monitor. Where oh where have they gone? Being trapped in the sensual/perceptual realm is not a pleasant thing. Closing the door to a world which was once so important. Where did they go? It’s not nice to be a ghost in a long-dead city. It’s not lonely. There are other ghosts. It’s insubstantial. Where did they go? I sometimes try to hunt them down in the corridors of my own twisted cerebellum. Pursuing them as though they were mere thieves. “Stop, that’s mine you’re running off with!” I just don’t’ know what happened to them. What happened to me.
Being an automaton is fun but the opportunities are limited. This is what I feel now. Have I sacrificed them for the pleasure of physical automation. It would seem unlikely. I once strolled serpentine streets in Calcutta, warming my sinuses with the pungent scent of cinnamon and shisha. I watched my father gas the innocent in spite of my protests – some faceless boy in the tides of history. Where have they gone? Where have I gone?
Is it possible, or even likely that the external pressures have forced me inside out? But that is perverse, I should not be so inside out. Or perhaps the weathering of the epidermis has reduced my ability to communicate, to feel. Desperation sets in.
Twenty years old. Twenty. In the same old place I tried to run from so many times. What is the meaning of all this. Nothing. Am I moving too fast or too slow? Will I find myself stumbling, crashing to the ground in an uncoordinated dance of despair or will I simply slog safely behind?
It’s insubstantial. Where did it go? What happened to the sense that something tangible could be created from within my own sanatorium? Where are my keys? Do something. Stop thinking. DO dammit!