i walked around the city today and waited for something interesting to happen to me. the people i passed on the sidewalk were bored and bundled up against the wind. there was an absence of feeling, a numbness that spread from the lower back like a chill.
i watched the faces passing by me, looking for signs of recognition or acknowledgement. few people comprehend loneliness in others; most of us have pulled the bright spotlight to focus within on our own problems. but those of us who look outwards recognize it in each other and feel the tightened bubble like negative magnets when we try to get too close.
I passed a woman not much older than I with her two sons. The children were dressed in school uniforms, the mother in casual clothes that probably cost as much as my monthly rent. The children looked at me as I walked by, the mother ignored me. there is such a tender sadness in children who observe the world, such an openness to pain, something not understood by adults, as we have learned to create a barrier between ourselves and the world we observe. I waved a little at the children, whose great wise eyes absorbed and felt everything.
i sat on a bench in the park and watched the world pass by in wind tousled colors, all independent of my body resting, my mind flitting between recognition and construction.
When i was younger I wanted to be a doctor. I wanted to save people, to fix everything that was wrong. I believed that if I could fix a broken body I could fix anything.
But I did not become a doctor. I didn’t learn how to reconnect tissues or diagnose ailments. Instead I learned how to fix letters into words, words into sentences, thus creating a world that was utterly unique and without fault. I learned to live inside of words instead of inside of the world. Perhaps for me the physical world will always be a mystery, and I will always observe it from the room of my mind. I am glad of it at times, for it gives me the insight of the outsider. I am sad of it for the necessary distance I have pushed myself into.
Though long it has taken for me to discover that my self-imposed quarrantine has made me into a stranger even to my physical self, I now know that I cannot survive by observing alone. I must adapt to my environment to survive, and so I must reinsert myself into the lives of the living. If not to reconnect with those I once cared for, then to create ties to other persons living beyond my apartment door.
it’s so hard to move. i’m lying on the couch, and i feel as if all the blood in me has sunk, longing to soak into the fabric and cushions. my hands are so warm and hot on my thighs, it’s such an effort to move my pinkie finger, and the movement feels alien to my heavy body. not like a trip, muchc more organic and less tingly. nothing seems to exist, or move; i could swear that the clock is ticking slower if i knew it wasn’t true. but i guess i could say that about a lot of things.
i don’t know why i am writing this. i don't know if there’s any point to putting all of these fantastic thoughts and notions into words. i used to write because i thought i was special, because i thought i knew or understood things that other people couldn’t, mistaking difference for ingenuity. How good I felt when a professor praised (or merely pointed out?) the way that I translated ideas, that I had a unique perspective. had i known then, could i have understood the challenges that this facility (and my possibly mistaken pride) would eventually present, would i have made more of an effort to assimilate? but i don’t believe that i would have, especially not then, not when i was finally coming into myself and learning to enjoy the abilities of my mind. not when i was taking pride in my natural aptitude for constructing and deconstructing ideas and theories, not when i was actually enjoying being a distinctive person. but i wonder now if i would be happier if i weren’t so much myself.
which brings me, now, to an idea i’ve long obsessed over. there is so much inside of me that is dichordant, i see them as great circles crashing into each other, neither giving, but clanging and bouncing away, and coming back again. it seems that one of them should win, that there should be one answer to each question, but somehow my mind evades such simple concepts and grasps at many possible solutions without ever choosing one. I am told this is called open mindedness. i find it to be excruciating.
back to the couch: i am slowly becoming. i do this often, lying still, my head flat upon the couch, my body lined up with my legs straight out and my hands resting on the tops of my thighs. I stare at the ceiling, the dips and slopes of the paint, the small waterstain near the wall. The print of a shell distorted by my position so that it hardly resembles a shell, it seems a pale ghost entwined in the dark. I have the light in the kitchen on, so the room is dim, and sometimes i light a candle but i never keep it too close to me as the flickering hurts the space directly behind my eyes. I can hear the street outside, and sometimes other tenants, but only for a little while. It is the calm reassurance of these familiar things that allow me to slip off behind those glaring observations to the minute, everyday events that come with being alive. First I can hear my heart beat, then I can feel it. My lungs empty, I hold my breath, then breath deeply, and I sense the oxygen mixing into my bloodstream, replenishing my body. There is a brief twitch in my right forearm, near my elbow; my arm jumps, and then again, and then it is still. I feel a tightness in my abdomen, and the dull ache in my left knee that never leaves me. I hear my stomach gargle and my anus tighten involuntarily. I wiggle my toes, stretching my cotton socks.
this started when i was young and had difficulty sleeping. I couldn’t shut my mind down: the harder I wanted and tried to fall asleep the more it eluded me. I often felt like I was chasing sleep, and could only catch him when I saw him out of the corner of my eye, never face-on, but as soon as I saw him I couldn't help but face him and try to catch him. I would eventually lose interest and explore another tangent of thought and in that way fall asleep, but I couldn’t make myself not think about wanting to go to sleep. My mother, at her wit’s end with my restlessness, researched psychoanalytical ways to help me fall asleep and we tried many with little return on our efforts. One night she told me to shut down the parts of my body, one by one, but start by tensing all of the muscles in my body, and then releasing them. So I would start with my toes, curling them very hard, and then relaxing and telling the muscles and nerves to be still. I’d wait for them to be quiet, and then move to the rest of my foot, up my calves, to the rest of my body. The first night i tried it I don’t recall getting up past my thighs. It was one time of the first times in my life that I became aware of my physical being, though I moved on to other techniques my mother taught me after a few weeks.
I remember, not so long ago, I found myself lying on the couch and staring at the ceiling, tensing my foot and relaxing it, letting the muscles be still. I tensed and released my entire body, enjoying the feeling of being meat and bone and nerve, of cloth on my skin, of a soft firmness beneath me, of cool air on my face, of small aches and twitches and irritations. Of being alive, and possessing a body that I often neglect. Of the amazing things that a body does, me unaware in my usage of the physical being that keeps me.
Maybe it is strange that I forget that i am in a body, that i am dependent on my body. i wonder if most people always feel connected to their bodies, or if they forget, like me. sometimes i look in the mirror and its just a symbol, that which is looking back at me, not something having anything to do with me. When i was younger i rarely looked in mirrors, and now i avoid them except when getting ready for work or brushing my teeth. i don’t know why my reflection startles me, i don’t know why i hate for people to take pictures of me. maybe because what I see as my reflection, my outward appearance to the world, to be completely different from what I imagine myself to be. It is incongruent to me why my face is what the people around me see as me when what i am is unable to be seen, only conjectured by the manifestations of my lips and hands.
