Have you seen it? That’s what it’s like. Dark. Tangled. A mess of limbs and faces and hands. It is the hands I can’t stop seeing. The faces are all contorted, they don’t even look human. But the hands. They are pushing and pulling. And reaching. What they are reaching for I can’t quite explain, perhaps don’t even fully understand. Where the light comes from, so I can see in this heaving, thriving, pulsing mass of bodies, simply doesn’t make sense. But I can see. I can feel. I can smell. How to convey the sense of smell with a digital blip on a screen. If I simply said it smells bad, maybe you can dredge up your own sense of what that means. Is it a rancid garbage heap? Or a dirty gym bag forgotten in the bottom of a closet for months on end. I’m not sure what that bad smell is for you, but this place smells worse than you could ever even begin to imagine. It has been rotting for so long it might as well be eternity. Time doesn’t stop here. It goes on and on, without any method to mark it. A moment stretches for all time. There is movement, but no space within which to move. There is no travel beyond the position. The sound is deafening. It is constant and so becomes unheard. With you every breath of the way. There is nothing to breathe. Every inhale is like being under water and every exhale is like pushing against a tank with your shoulder and expecting it to move. Can you see it? Can you smell it? Can you feel it? Can you hear it? How could I forget ….. taste. It is so dry that the idea of water is long forgotten and dust seems like the perfect drink, if only your tongue would stop sending signals to your mind, then there might be a moment’s reprieve from the taste of rot in your mouth.
Someone once said your life cycle determines your death cycle. I’m here to tell you it is the other way around.
From the moment we are born our body is dying. It has an expiration date. Our cells recover and regenerate, but only so much. They age and rust with every oxygenated breath. We are literally breathing in the poison that will eventually kill us. But without it, we cannot live.
Like pomegranate seeds packed together tightly. Or better yet, soap bubbles in suds. Each their own unit, but connected, sharing the same walls, the same whole substance. A big cloud of these bubbles all touching and floating together. Noise like a cocktail party, only no real music or conversations, just the hubbub of sound. Happiness, but more like contentment, but not really because it is the absence of hate, fear, jealousy, rage, remorse, guilt, shame, anger, resentment, envy.. no concept of sin, of wrong-doing… simply existing and being, and being complete by that existing. All connected. All accepting. No worry about the past or the future. Only the ever-present now. Lighter than air. The best words might be warm and home. An ever-present bubbling from centre towards the outer edge. Once reached, the outer-most bubbles break off and fall down to join. There is no sense of loss, no good bye. Simply an acknowledgement of it being the next turn.
But why would we ever leave?
To know.
To know what it is to touch. To feel. To cry. To laugh. To think and share and listen and be heard, to create. To run in the wind and dance in the rain. To fall in love and to have your heart broken. To have faith. To pray. To want. To need. To be entitled. To last. To win and lose. To ask and learn. To give, to receive. To give life, to take life. To fight, to hurt, to kill. And to die.
And we come back.
Oh do we come back.
We remember, but we forget. We learn the same lessons and learn new lessons. We watch ourselves from afar and forget ourselves in the moment.
But we come back.
Faith? No. I don’t have faith. I simply know.
A creator you ask? Oh. You and me, we created this all. I think I’ll have a long chat with the limbs department — why two hands and not three?!
The separation between you and me is the same between one of my cells and the next. If you take a sample of my blood or my skin or my hair, is that still me? Once you cut it away from me and look at it under a microscope and see the cells before they die, are they still me? Or once they’ve left my body, are they no longer me? What about the dead parts of me? Hair? Finger nails? What about my teeth?
What is it to be _me_ that makes me different from the chair I sit in or the tree across the street? Am I separate from the screen in front of me, or am I just using a very archaic form of communication by keying these letters on an actual keyboard?
Does what I say mean anything beyond being a pixel in a jumble of other pixels? It certainly won’t last. Unless perhaps I use ancient Egyptian hieroglyph techniques and immortalize it in stone for countless generations to ponder over. But even then, in the grand scheme of this great moving thing we call time, how much do those generations really matter? And more importantly, is it tea time yet?
