 |
warning: kind of graphic. I was in a really intense mood when I wrote it. And had a LOT on my mind.
~
A strange thing: as I was writing a letter to my beloved this afternoon in the glow of a tired sun, I became all of a sudden entranced by the way the ballpoint had stabbed into the paper, the way the ink bled from that one word--just a meaninglessly crucial word, “forever”, at once the kind of stereotypical nonsense found in cheap romance novels and a real word, a true word with a truer meaning that fell before my eyes in a stream that felt decades long; the only forever that I would ever know. And it seemed to me, then, that the entire world slipped away, fell like threads from worn clothing away from me, cascading like shimmering rain in a halo around my dizzily faltering body and falling into nothingness in the black void that was now my only companion. Everything but that one word and the brutally stabbed and ink-stained paper surrounding it, giving it its only tangible existence in the world.
And I realized, then, that forever was a concept humans had not designed simply because they--they not I, that distant simian species babbling in ignorant choruses in the streets and emotionally ravaging one another behind closed doors--could not understand it, how could you understand eternity? How can you wrap his mind around the infamous Möbius strip, you can’t, it’s only got one side to begin with, and how can you see infinity when it’s always going going going always running away from you with somewhere else to be, leaving permanence in its wake, permanent misery or else individuals cursed with the gift of indecisive destiny, in whose lives both happiness and agony flicker by before either one can even register, dissatisfaction and the inability to change always in infinity’s retrospect as it hurtles on raping time and space--
And I saw myself clearly too, all of me, all I have been and all I would be, three four five ten thousand million futures opening themselves up to me like a virgin’s innocent legs, and I knew then that I walked a narrow fissure, a tightrope made of grey thread, and the person I saw as myself was mortally afraid, always balanced between fears, frightened to death of both monotony and impermanence, two concepts not entirely the same, I fearing the boredom of a wasted life as well as the drifting of the nomad who has nowhere to go and is welcome not even in his own ramshackle home, I loving both the comforts of a home and dog and cat and grocery and bed and beloved as well as being bewitched and enamored entirely by the seductive promises of the open road, of adventure and beauty and romantic scenes in some universal play that I had never seen or even heard of in the papers, knowing that road lay just beyond the glass of my window as I hazed it with my breath and fingertips, all the whispered breaths of hope misting the edge of familiarity and hiding what I knew lay in infinity’s wake, just beyond my grasp--
And what did I want, anyway? What tweak of the universe could toss any of life’s pleasures my way while I wobbled so unsteadily in my insane--am I insane? Is this a dream?--way of life; what pleasures would I receive if it did? What was left for an adventurer, a pirate of lost dreams, trapped in the sameness of a world that does not welcome change? Could I ever marry? Bear a child? Even keep a lover and a circle of friends? Have a home, a place to go when I was hungry or thirsty or tired…would the life I know now shatter and crumble like broken church windows around me if I leapt into the misty improbable voids on either side of the delicate line I tread? What could I give up? What could I salvage? What could I create; what could I destroy? If that single thread snapped and carried me spiraling into the eternal infinity, what would I snatch at in the air to take with me? What memories, what dreams and hopes?
As I stared at the scrap of paper, its edges burning from the intensity of my thoughts, I felt as if my entire fate--a pressure that would last so much longer than this mortal life, the pains of which would take so much longer to heal, and the joys of which would fade a little slower--rest in my trembling hands. Sixteen years old and a refugee of another time, another place entirely, stumbling along in infinity’s wake with the weight of a world on my shoulders. The taste of fresh mountain air and pure rainwater. The touch of a lover’s lips. The joy of being useful, being needed, being part of a small whole in the same village I grew up in. The intimacy of lost virtue. The whispering breaths of an infant. The deliriousness of freedom from monotony, from reality. What would one day be mine? What would be lost to me?
I shivered and trembled on the borderline between reality and insanity, between monotony and impermanence, as around me the crowded cafeteria filled with people living, dying, breathing, laughing, with my life held like sand in a sieve in my palms, wanting at that moment nothing more than the comfort of a lover’s arms and the sweet kiss of the kingdom of oblivion, the realm of dreams
|
 |
Reply
