In the Tunnel At Night

There is a tunnel that runs from center city to West Philly on the 34 Trolley. It emerges around 42nd Street at Baltimore.

I take it often. But tonight was a passage.

At night, tonight, the sleep of winter, it seemed, as I passed through this tunnel in my glass, watching the steel beams meander by in their finery of graffiti flounces, silent clothes that say nothing, that perhaps in fact I have already died, and all of this is really the underworld. That I have chosen to bury myself here, in this city, under all these layers of age and death and dust, and I will never emerge. That my whole life will be like this, this slow death-glide in the dark in this tunnel underground.

I thought of writing my friend tonight and saying I didn't want to go out because of "an existential crisis." But that was silly, and I didn't write it.

There is no existential crisis. No one should have an existential crisis. Anyone who has an existential crisis should commit suicide directly because they are wasting all of our time. I have never had an existential crisis because I love existing, and I would rather exist morosely than not at all.

I didn't meant it as it is commonly meant. I meant - is there a way for me to exist? Is there, at all, anywhere, a little carved-out space in the ceiling somewhere, through which I might glimpse the sunlight? Or bars, perhaps. A grate of bars. There is this word oubliette, and for all I know it could have been invented in Philadelphia. This whole place is a damn oubliette, except that nothing is really completely forgotten, one only hears its soft aching cries from the stones below, and smells the smell of old, old wrongs.