Time passes, and strangely. Once a month was too much, a weekend longer than what a young mind could easily fill. Once a week was enough to change the world, or break your heart.
And now the days seem to spend so cheaply. There’s never enough, there’s never enough, but I suppose that happens as your designs get bigger. Once, an hour was enough just to be in the world. Now, being is not doing and doing must be done well.
I lose myself in trances, sometimes, and the hours pass all too freely. I’m too stubborn, I suspect, too willing to keep pulling on… something… that isn’t going to budge.
But every time I come back, something is a little different. The world is strange and new again. And for a moment I haven’t regrown the emotional calluses that let us, sensitive and deeply-feeling creatures that we are, converse with a world that is so hard and sharp. The metaphorical sun hurts my eyes, the hard surface of the ground cuts my too-soft feet. And though I’d like to pretend, I must admit, I do not miss the pain. I fear it.
And, of course, it’s the pain that makes it difficult. It turns out, when you really get down to it, when you break the world into little pieces and look at the process of a single action, or even a string of actions done in service of a single purpose… everything is terribly simple.
Everything you want, forever, for this is eden and there is plenty.
You just have to be ready to pay for it.
Did you forget, for a moment, how much it hurts just to be alive? Do you remember, now, what makes it worth it, what it is exactly you’re paying for?
Somehow / I lost my way / and now / it’s clear to me / all that I fought so hard to keep / is / all I had to leave / (is this the way the world ends?)
Oh, but I’m being melodramatic, but what else are you supposed to be at this time of night? When darkness hides us from the world and the world from us, and we’re left alone with ourselves?
I’m dying just to hear her name, but I’m terrified of what I would do with it. The price of action is so much higher in the moment it comes due than it seems like from far away.
Last time I got close it burned. It howled and screamed and I could barely hold myself together in the face of my abject, inexplicable terror. I wanted to turn and run, to put it out of my mind and forget.
I was hours away from home, in a strange little town in New England where I felt completely out of place. Holed up in a hotel room, slowly going insane trying to justify to myself what the fuck I was doing there.
I thought for a long time it was just me wrestling with doubt. After all, it is the kind of thing that demands it - driving somewhere, out of the blue, because the image of a girl said the name of a town in a dream, which happened to correspond to a real place on a map. Just south of a certain major city, she said, and there it was.
It took me a year to go through with it, but it wasn’t doubt that kept me away or made it so difficult to stay once I made it. After all, what’s the risk? Ultimately I ended up spending a couple days in what turned out to be a very nice little town, with some nice hiking and good food.
When you spend months of introspection and meditation, slowly coming to terms with yourself and healing from a soul-shattering break up - when, in the course of that journey of self-discovery, you come upon pieces of yourself closely kept and deeply buried, feelings and memories of sensation, things precious and powerful and ultimately, just, good…
When you try to come to terms, and realize that this is love, this is the transcendent feeling that connects you to life, to a world outside yourself, and it all comes crashing through - the dreams of hands firmly grasped on riverbanks, of heartbreaking smiles, of … something. Painful and powerful and deeply entwined around the deepest parts of you where you’d forgotten to even look.
When from that comes the image of a girl, who gives you a place to find her… when you go there, and look,
What would you do if you found her?
I thought I wanted to, more than anything. I thought I was excited just to try, even if the whole thing was a fairytale.
But it turns out the prospect was beyond terrifying, when it really got down to it.
Most people, most things, they can’t really touch you, you know? They can’t really hurt, until you let them in, and even then. For the most part, if you’ve been alive for a while, you’ve got enough scars to not be surprised, to know what to expect when you let your defenses down.
But this was something that mattered to be, deeply, undeniably. Matters in a way I don’t really have a choice about. It wasn’t something I’d created, it was something I’d found. Of course I gave it form, life, something, in the process of just trying to think about it, but this wasn’t the image I was looking for, but the thing itself. And it was as close and fatal as the heart beating in my chest.
How do you deal with something like that? Something so deeply intimate, something so terrifyingly personal and important. But also a complete, abject stranger. Someone I’d never met, but supposedly had dreams about.
If it were a daydream, it would be easy and magical.
But in reality… if such a thing could even really happen, how would I begin to explain? Not, you know, the words, or how to start a conversation even. How do you reconcile the overwhelmingly personal nature of the situation with the complete unfamiliarity of a stranger? Of another person, wholly separate, who by no means is guaranteed to want anything to do with your crazy bullshit? How could I impose something like that on someone, how could I bring myself to even open myself up to include them in something I struggle to talk about with close friends?
But even that is a lie, a garnish on the simple and stark truth.
It’s terrifying to talk to someone who matters to you. To see yourself reflected back in their eyes, to know that way they see you matters, that the image they perceive is really you. To be so wholly in another’s sway. To be no longer, I, self-determined, but rather to be him, as seen by another.
I wasn’t ready for it. I still looked, I still pretended to myself like I was just going to stumble into her on the street and everything was going to be rainbows. But I knew I wasn’t going to find her, even if I couldn’t admit it was because I wasn’t ready. I mean, maybe it’s also because there was never anyone to find, or that whoever I’m looking for just wasn’t there at the time. But even if she was, I wouldn’t have found her.
I still lie in bed, and imagine, when I learned years ago how easy it is to see. But it hurts, and I’m afraid to try again, and fail.
Loading comments...