Spaghetti

So there I was, a 23-year old Swirl, the year 1973, boiling spaghetti and reading Hemingway, the one where the protagonist chooses to eschew emotion and pushes himself through the void of existence using only his swift power. Maybe that was all of them. What's the difference. This is a life I feel has been lived 13 times or more. Slight variations, but always spaghetti, and, well, always cats. Tokyo is a suffocating place to not have a cat. Sometimes I feel like I want to just crawl into a well, though I fear - more than waking up alone in a forever black pit of despair, blacker than the souls of the right wing politicians selling the war machine, blacker than my first cat, who I never bothered to name, blacker even than my shameful whiskey-soddened memories of my ex-wife - that my spaghetti would get cold before I could finish eating it. Or that my bottle of Cutty Sark would break on my journey into the precipice.
As the timer dings, I taste a single strand and add another minute to the clock. The only thing I like that hard boiled is a Chandler novel. I have several.
The phone rings and my mind goes blank.