Life at the Rectory. The Invisible Man, #10

I wanted to believe in something. I prayed. But all I could hear was the echoed clang of a clapper against a bell. The bell ringer was dead. The universe was empty. I was the miserable beggar on the street, my palms slashed red with the cuts from freshly minted coins. I was the bitch, the poor cur whining in the overheated parked car in the middle of the afternoon in the middle of a parking lot in the middle of the suburbs.
I waited in the middle earth between paradise and suicide. I studied. I studied with Plato in the coldness of his cave, huddled around the fire as reality played out on the walls. I tried to find the sun but I could never find the entrance to the cave. I argued with Sartre in a room with no doors. I studied. Running along the streets of Copenhagen with Kierkegaard as the Danish brats pelted us with stones and laughter.
I wanted to roast the little buggers over an open fire. I wept. Like hills into ditches into an empty sky. I saw a lonely man hanging from a tree and mistook him for Santa Claus. He looked down at me and smiled like a drunk in an alley. 'Follow me, ' he entreated. 'Or buy me another glass of wine. Or if you do not have any loose change, cut me down from this tree where I have been abandoned by the wind.'