Zombie

by Joyce Carol Oates

Because sometimes things happen to me I can’t comprehend. Too fast & confused for me to comprehend.

did I feel that feeling affection was being manipulated & that was why I lost control, it was control of my own emotions I had lost wasn’t it? & feared?

Especially since I am determined to turn over a new leaf this time.

Every day.

there is the GOOD BREAST & the BAD BREAST. There is the GOOD MOTHER & the BAD MOTHER.

Because Time is like a tapeworm jammed inside you in any direction.

THE PAST IS PAST & you learn to move on.

For the first time driving that day I believed I could feel the motion of the Earth. The Earth rushing through the emptiness of space. Spinning on its axis but they say you don’t feel it, you can’t experience it. But to feel it is to be scared & happy at once & to know that nothing matters but that you do what you want to do & what you do you are. & I knew I was moving into the future. There is no PAST anybody can get to, to alter things or even to know what those things were but there is definitely a future, we are already in it.

If you want something to happen, you do it.

I am the presence standing here at this juncture of Time & Space—who else?

For all that has happened, has happened. From the beginning of Time.

so it would come to pass, & so it would be. For a true ZOMBIE could not say a thing that was not, only a thing that was.