Late for school.  
It seems that I’ve been late for almost as long as I can remember.
There, where I should be, but barely.  If I’d been a breath, a hesitant breath further from it, my destination, which grows ever the vaguer, I wouldn’t be there at all.  Did I even want to be there?  Here?  In my body?  Was there a difference?  This incongruity was so unfamiliar to me.  But it was healing…it shrouded me in a dream.  Not a beguiling one.  Nor a grievous one.  Nothing in between either.  Just a dream.  Simply a dream.  So false, and yet so securing.  Its barricades are gentle; yet its bond to me is relentless.  Like everything else—just scarcely enough to keep reality from seeping in.

The echoes of my footsteps brush my ears, awakening them ever so slightly.  They are from a separate realm, for in my mind they sound so rhythmic and eloquent…a song.  My song.  But in the back of my mind I knew very well that nothing I did would turn out as beautifully as they were made to be in the alien universe I now resided in.  The world wasn’t a beautiful place.  It was only a domicile constructed to carry the essence of every creature and substance alike.  But I’d lost my essence.  I didn’t belong here, or there, anymore.  I wanted to break free of its grasp, but my dream world was too subtle, too forgiving of the harshness reality heaved upon its lightly pulsing fringes.  Maybe it wasn’t just that.  Perhaps there was a thin thread that still tied me to the earth where my footfalls resounded peculiarly on cold tiles that didn’t welcome them.  A thread composed of nothing substantial but wrapped in everything that used to matter to me.  All I had to do was break that thread—that persistent link.  But, as I knew all too well in the crevices of my conscience I’d fervently avoided, to do so would mean to face all those things that made me who I was.  It would mean to face the essence I’d lost instead of heeding it as every person should.  To touch those zealous memories and emotions would be parallel to returning to me everything losing myself in the first place required.  That raw hurt…a throbbing that had taken every last bit of compassion away from me…yet a hurt that I’d thus far come to cherish, for it’d disengaged me from the things that could wound a person; sensations that sliced one’s essence.  But then again I didn’t have an essence, did I?      
There was so need to retrieve what I’d lost.
I wasn’t meant to go back.
I’d tasted apathy, and it suited me.
It allowed me indifference; indifference to the unruliness of being late.  To the regret that would’ve dwelled and spun morbidly within me if not I relinquished my old self.  My soul, you could say, I’d lost contact with.  It couldn’t touch me.  It couldn’t punish me.