I Have Always Lived Here

I feel like Diggory from The Magician's Nephew. Trapped in the world between worlds. If you asked me, I would tell you that I've always been here. Perhaps that's not even a lie.

Of course, I'm in a real place. I'm in South Korea. I live here. I'm a public school English teacher and a taxpayer on two continents (I still have to figure some of that out, I fear I must do paperwork). There's a glass, a sheen to this world though. I only see it as a casual observer, like through one of those mirrored glass cases where they keep all the deserts. I'm not sure which side of the case I'm on though, or for whom the obvious myrth of this interaction is intended.

The texture and sparkle of this place (or perhaps the sparkle of my eyes as I look at it) excuses me from so many things. I have never had to discuss religion, sign a petition, give blood or even perform complicated banking procedures. It is not expected that I should interact with this world in such a way as to change it, nor that it should change me. I get paid. They built a Mc'Donalds. That is all we will hear on the subject.

My eyes get a little warm and misty at night on the bus. It's not sadness or depression rearing its ugly head again. This is what happens when you're tired and you ride the bus a lot at night, routes you could never navigate during the day. Some places only exist at night with blurry eyes.

This fog spills out of me and into my world, slowly filling it to the very top, where the people would go to breathe if they saw the way I look at them sometimes. And all the words painted on the windows bleeding behind neon light join in the mist so happily, their meaning obscured to everything but the simplest of phrases.

That is a motel.

A Chinsese restaurant.

A PC room.

A bar.

I'm drowsy from the rumble of the bus; the slow, steady, bobbing up and down with the indestinguishable divets in the long winding road that somehow never quite seems to stop anywhere I would call home. Maybe that's my fault, though I know I'm not the one driving this thing.

If I squint my eyes just right, everything numbs and sparks, blurs to a soft red. When I open them again, will the world have dissappeared? Or, will I suddenly find myself transported? Perhaps to that elusive place that I keep chasing, though I am constantly leaving things that I had sworn embodied it? Does it even exist anymore?