I’m not always used to thinking profoundly — in terms of things existential and long-forgotten. My entire life seems to flash before my eyes, like something I’ve never really lived through; just a moment of deja-vu. I have those all the time, where I stop and think I’ve experienced something before. That’s when I really can’t distinguish between reality and the cloud-scape my mind likes to go to. Why does it play tricks on me like that?
The mind is a terrifying place. To some people, it stores infinite possibilities and all of their happy memories that they work to re-live over again. Otherwise, it’s just a trap: we’re the suckers of a mouse who let ourselves get stuck in there. Pieces of cheese never really sounded that appealing to me.
It’s a wonder any of us get out of bed in the morning. It would be so much easier not to. Instead, let yourself live in between the sheets and your dreams. Hide from the sunlight that tells Circadian you need to be awake. Some people mess with him, but they usually end up with cancer or some other nasty disease that we as humans try our hardest to control with our egos. Egotistical maniacs, doctors, never really seem to know what to do; life’s just a big guessing game. Like the weathermen, we’re 75% wrong almost always, even when the chance of rain keeps going up… and then it falls.
How are we supposed to cry? It is easier to sit and stare, like stopping and smelling the roses but instead acknowledging the numbness that fills the corners of your body. A body doesn’t have corners, does it? It has crevices that get stuffed full of the dirt from the outside world. We come out pure and clean, and then are made dirty from the moment the light hits our eyes. Light is supposed to be Heaven; what if we’re really in hell?
We make our own Heaven here on Earth; it’s the only way to survive. They can both be capitalized because they are interchangeable; if you read the Bible, He wants to make Heaven and Earth meet like a whispery kiss- softly, gently, so fragile in connection you’re not quite sure that they’ve touched. We’re one step away from feeling ourselves fall into the depths, like that dream we all have. You avoid the hole until you accidentally slip into it, feel yourself going down, down, down…weightless, clothes flapping around you, arms flailing, and you close your eyes right as you feel your body hit your bed: they snap open again to the bounce, and you’re not really sure how you got there, how the fall felt so real even though you’re now in reality. Which reality would you pick, given the chance?
Words flow easily from lips when your throat isn’t closing up against your will. Are you the one who is closing it, or is your body adapting to the environment it’s in? You want to go stand outside in the sunshine, letting the breeze whip around you and feel each hair follicle on your skin go taught in reaction to the air, not have to tamp them down in fear of judgment for simply wanting to show each piece of yourself in whole truth. Truth of your flaws, truth of experience, truth of memories. Truth… what an interesting word.
Truth is what we create in our head. Everyone has their own version of truth and what constitutes it- where it separates from the lies. Is a memory a truth or a lie? We can all be in the same place at the same time but remember differently what happened. Does that still make it the truth? As it seems, enough belief in one thing makes it true. When is something concrete enough to become a truth? Will we ever really be able to say that something is real enough to be absolutely true?
I live in the consciousness of my mind. The conscience forms all of who we are- the soul incarnate into a life form that gives meaning. Do we mean anything at all? What’s the point of person-hood? Because it’s more than just having all the parts: it’s a way of being. The walking, talking, breathing, thinking- it’s all expected. But isn’t walking weird?
Breathing is harder to do than most actions, the drama that exists around it. People stay awake to watch other people breathe. Stopping means sudden death. Or maybe not so sudden- a slow choking gasping clutching writhing heaving diving surfacing drowning drowning drowning. As long as you have breath in your lungs, you have a chance to do something better than right now. As long as the light stays in your eyes, someone can search them in only the most intimate way. And there, they’ll find you somewhere in the galaxy.
How can someone look at you like that? When life gets in the way, and passes by in useless days, waiting for things that seem like they’ll never come, how do you still have that person who looks at you like that? You know, like that. Like they’re trying to search your soul for the things you keep hidden away, to begin to clean out all that dirt from the crevices of your body with the sponge of their gaze.
Maybe that’s all we need to escape the existential- to draw us back to reality, ground us, keep us going. It’s the best kind of deja-vu; the kind that makes you feel alive. That keeps us breathing, gets us out of bed in the morning, opens us up to all truth. My mind is starting to heal, and I’m nibbling at the piece of cheese. Are you?
