Itâs essentially like a dream, a dream I keep waking up from but canât seem to escape.
The connotation of the word dream always seems to be positive. Meh. You know how when youâre in a dream, youâre in one place, and suddenly a second or a minute later youâre somewhere else ââââ without moving, or knowing how you got there? Essentially itâs the same thing, the daily⊠motions I go through. Iâm here, and then Iâm there, I blink, and Iâm somewhere else. Iâm awake, and aware, but itâs all cyclical. It feels cyclical. Essentially like sleepwalking.
I blink, Iâm in the backseat of a car. Blink, Iâm in a classroom, blink, I feel the cold granite tile underneath me and the beads of shower water weave through strands of my hair. Blink, itâs morning. Blink, fuck this.
Itâs like a different kind of autopilot, like you donât have to tell yourself to breathe or blink âââ but all the synapses in my brain just have this fluidity where I am just devoid of any kind of conscious thought âââ I make my coffee, I put on my shoes, I take my notes down, Iâm sitting on my bed, about to well, go to bed, and well, I just.. I wake up.
Sure, Iâm awake, but before I sleep, I really wake up, like I literally get around to actually thinking, and I think âââ what have I done today that can be considered really worthwhile? And I get around to thinking about the burden of existence, stupid, ambitious and abstract ideas, just lying down in bed on the brink of midnight until the slightest peek of dawn escapes my blinds. Am I just a gear in the clockwork of this Earth? I mean, fuck, sure, that sounds important, but really it makes me feel so miniscule and both full and utterly bereft of purpose. Like, if by some weird voodoo magic, if I was written out of existence, the fabric of the universe would probably go haywire, but that would be just an incidental casualty, because if you really saw how my life panned out on a daily basis, it wouldnât have been much of a loss.
Blink, Iâm in front of a television set, occupied and restless ââââ and I feel like art imitates life and life imitates art and itâs cyclical, but itâs a nice, beautiful kind of cycle. Like the Ptolemaic model, or major scales moving only in octaves, the energy borne of circular motion âââ or⊠clockwork.
Sometimes, I feel. It doesnât matter what or how, I just do. Feel, like a verb. Through every single sense âââ I see the streetlights framing the grain of the road when I open the car window, I taste the simplest joy of ultra-processed death in a fast food takeout box, I hear that Mustang Sally bass line when Iâm really listening, I smell heaven in my linens when I take them out of the laundry basket. And I feel, I feel the unmistakable warmth of your breath when I donât realize, when the hum of air conditioning finally lulls me to sleep, I feel the crater on my pillow where your head used to be, and I bolt this consciousness. I take it back, free me from this sharp pain, and take me back to apathy, take me back to avoidance.
Because I used to move my finger from blemish to blemish, tracing some kind of system in your skin, and I used to tremble when you whispered into my nape thinking I was asleep, and I used to feel the singular focus and nature of longing, I used to melt and mold myself everyday to accommodate every crevice of the fractures in your heart, in your life, in your mind. The fluidity of desire, the fluidity of my personhood ââââ it was all gone, itâs all gone, now Iâm a rigid shell of who I used to be, moving in a gross, repetitive and predictable pattern, unrealized and more of a demographic than anything else.
I used to relish in delusion, in your supposedly underserved attention, while you relished in the affirmation of the heat of my cheeks, and an affectionate rush of blood and a faster pulse âââ of the state of undress, physically and emotionally. The dynamic and push-pull feeling of loving less/more.
Blink, Iâm tying your shoes, blink, youâre walking away.
I donât want you back. Iâm comfortable. Iâm realized. Fake it til you make it. Good posture makes you seem like a confident person, why the hell not, right?
My mother said once that time stops for nobody, or did my father say that? Or was it Jesus, or Buddha, or Pablo Neruda, or Chicken Soup for The TardyâŠ.
I donât want to embark on some soul-searching, Drops of Jupiter, manic pixie life changing trip to France or something. I donât need a fucking coming-of-age self-actualization triggering plot device. I donât need that. I donât need some sort of off-the-grid catalytic fissure in my life.
I want to be whole again, but I want to find it in the bottom of a good cup of coffee, or the froth of an ice-cold beer with a few who have stuck with me, through the rumble of train arrivals and departures âââ the cyclical life âââ I am slowly finding dimensions, eclipsing you, these brief moments of feeling, enjoyment, dare I say excitement. Someone elseâs car stereo. New cycles. Intersections.
I need to find the beauty in clockwork, once more, if not endlessly.
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