Lovely Zombie

I work on the computer every day, I flit around the internet like a wee ghost, an older slightly more mature Casperetta with a new haircut and too many responsibilities. I download my assignments from FTP servers in Germany, the UK, down the street in Pittsburgh, once from Hong Kong but only by mistake. I fix people's mistakes and speak their words, write their misshapen colloquial speak and hand it off to blood thirsty marketing researchers who are sometimes nice, sometimes gruesome in their greedy collecting of human opinions. Money makers, shaking, speaking, shaking again, bits of gold cascading from plump breasts, lean bills straddling poles and grinding incessantly in front of the bleary eyed customers.

I live a fairly cloistered life. Cloistered. When I was in college I looked at an apartment in this giant fading building too far from campus in a building called The Cloisters. It had been a subdivision of a long gone nunnery that housed the incoming 'recruits'. Potential Brides of Christ. Although the location was impossible for me I still wanted to live there, still take the time to drive by there when I'm in town, longing for that giant stone building, the long halls with slight perspiration dripping from them because of said stone, the dark, dark woods floors that made my feet look like bright slips of Puma ensconced wisps, young women cloistered inside like a herd of unsure penguins, quiet, as damp and cold as the walls around them. 

No, I'm not cloistered. It's more a self imposed hermit-ism. When I make myself join my extended family in celebration or for dinner I have such a good time I wonder why I don't force myself to do it more often. Until of course I am forced to do it more often and I decline.

"I have too much work!"

"I am behind on several projects."

"I have to finish the housework, already started making dinner."

Hanging up on quickly so as not to be embroiled in an argument. Hanging my dark head in shame because I really, really want to go. But not really.

My children entertain me, keep me grounded and not floating vacuously near the ceiling, floating but grounded in this house and not up, up in the sky like an escaped balloon. They delight me, frustrate me, make me tired when I have no right to be...these exciting and infuriating little imps I have formed and dropped from my body.

But yet the internet is still my world. Working, working, working, reading, staring at random strangers photos, watching them make music or art, watching them make fools of themselves, catching up on the news, speaking my mind, using my fingers to make things come from my mouth which would never be lighted upon my tongue in other circumstances.

Would I give it up?

If I were forced to let all the wonder go would I be a zombie, albeit a lovely, non-rotting zombie? 

Do you think I'm afraid?