You probably want to know what the novel I mentioned is about, but I’m not going to tell you. Might be that it’s not even real, and that I’ve invented it for the purpose of having something to talk about here when I run out of other things to say.

And that part of us which has been released (the soul or what have you) is in fact off somewhere doing nothing, as perhaps had been its goal, or endpoint.

So that the decomposing would not be happening to ‘us’ so much as to some part of us (the body) that is important and special but that must be left behind.

Although I suppose one should allow for the possibility that some element of the person (the soul, let’s call it) is released after death. Or ‘continues’ or ‘persists’, I’m not sure what the best word is.

For there is no such thing as ‘doing nothing,’ not while we are alive. And even when we are dead we are decomposing, and returning to the soil and the mulch, and what have you. So that perhaps there is no such thing as ‘doing nothing’ ever.

The bird eventually departs, but the man remains where he is, doing nothing, or appearing to do nothing, even if the appearance of doing nothing is in fact the enactment of something.

I imagine a man seated on the ground beneath a tree (eyes closed, a benign smile), and all around him silence, though somewhere in the branches a bird is singing.

Not that language can ever be as precise as one would like for it to be, since all language is an approximation of the meaning it is intended to convey; this is inevitable, and could be avoided only by uttering nothing.

Which isn’t as surprising or as unusual as it might sound, for I distrust the gesture toward resolution in art, except insofar as it applies to the medium itself, in this case the written word, and the particularities of language.

After that, I got out of bed and wandered into the living room, and sat down at my laptop, and wrote for a while in the dark, trying to make progress on a novel I began several months ago and that I work on every day, though usually not at this hour, and that I keep thinking is near completion, though it always seems to find itself entering a new phase of complication, or intrigue, whenever I try to bring it to a resolution.

All of which is to say that I was bored, and was trying to ‘pass the time,’ even if I wasn’t aware that this was what I was doing, in the moment.

Eventually I did look at my phone, and scrolled through some apps for no reason, though as I scrolled I would experience fleeting moments of engagement or attention, which I suppose was why I’d opened the apps to begin with (to have that experience), so that perhaps there had been a reason after all, even if it wasn’t much of a reason.

Meaning, I suppose, that in my insomnia, as the sounds of the city reached me from outside (and as I imagined to what, or to whom, those sounds belonged), there flickered across my mind pictures or visualizations that helped me account for what I was hearing, even if those pictures and visualizations were only vestiges of my subconscious, and didn’t correspond to reality except in outline.

I could’t sleep last night. I did sleep for a few hours, after I’d first gotten into bed, but then I woke at some point, and could only lie there with my eyes closed, trying to return to a state of unconsciousness or of dreaming, knowing, without looking at my phone, that the hour was early enough that certain kinds of people around the city would still be awake, doing things, and that this would not be unusual for them, but a marker of the schedule they keep, and of a life to which they’ve become accustomed.