Eerie Yet Static
Posted on 2004-04-10
I live a sort of compressed existence. The movement of time is evident only in the variety of ways that nothing happens. It is eerie, yet static. It is like living in a world without sound or without distance. Only in this case, the silence that falls, falls everywhere and lasts for hours.
But at night my whole world falls to pieces.
Nothing has ever brought me to my knees like this before. I just stare, hard, as if I am peering through a filthy grating, peering into an incalculably deep space whose bottom may be just a foot, or fathoms away. And long breaths later the words spill out. They come quickly, like fingers executing a musical scale.
At this point it all seems too much for me, too heavy on my mind, and I just want to lower my head to my hands and forget. Here, in the sparkling darkness in my palms, my head like a small universe filled with random flashes..... I just want to find a way to escape it all - the anxiety, the panic, the fear.
But you can't quit the past. You can't delete it or even close it down, not really. And you can't sneak out on history. It's tales are much too trenchant, it's legends much too thickly layered, it's truths too adhesive, for anyone to escape it.
But perhaps in rare circumstances you can have the history that resides in you beaten out. You can be broken, broken down, into enough discrete pieces that it will fall away. Then you can try things. You can do things not prescribed for you by the accumulations of the past. You can try something else altogether. Like life perhaps.....???