Today I ran away from the day old ramen noodles sitting next to my bed.
I went to the one place I knew they’d never find me.
I left my sneakers in my beat up Mustang and walked over the cracked sun-baked sidewalk
And laid down under the tree with beer bottles hanging from its branches
I felt bare and unprotected.
But it was nice there, solitary, in the silence,
With not even my thoughts to buzz my peace away.
Here, I can finally remember what it is to be a single part.
I
Am
A
Fragment.
Sometimes I’ll hear people complaining that their lives are too chaotic, that people expect too much of them, that no one understands what its like to be them. But when I lie here, watching the cicadas buzz in the trees, I remember the remarkable feeling I had for the first time when I was seven and happy.
I was sitting on my orange and red shag carpet, twirling the fibers between my fingers, when suddenly this immense feeling of insignificance washed over me. Not that sense of being tiny in relation to the rest of the universe, but the realization that we are all souls, billions of them, pulsating at once. We all cry and cope and love, and every life is its own…but what if I hadn’t been given possession of this fate? I knew, with no idea how to explain it to anyone, that any pain or despair I ever felt was, indeed, my own, but came to seem small when I considered that I could have been born as anyone else, anywhere else, with any other life, and that it was only by chance that I felt the way I did, in my circumstances. It was as though I was a single grain of rice in a vast cooker, and it was simple luck that I was where and who I was. Whenever this randomly occurred to me, I felt strangely connected to every other consciousness in the world.
Its natural to be self absorbed. Humanity is vain. But we are all laced together. We are all the same, and incredibly different. I am alone, here on my broken glass and cigarette covered haven, but I am also in good company, with six billion other hearts beating to exactly the same rhythm as mine. The pain I feel today could be theirs tomorrow, and their joy mine. Interconnected and ever-changing.
I have come to accept that feeling apart from everyone else is part of my condition. I am not better, just a little more obsessed with being aware of that elusive deeper meaning. To be in such an ordinary situation and to explode with that kind of epiphany is to me what we all hope for, whether we know it or not.
I went to the one place I knew they’d never find me.
I left my sneakers in my beat up Mustang and walked over the cracked sun-baked sidewalk
And laid down under the tree with beer bottles hanging from its branches
I felt bare and unprotected.
But it was nice there, solitary, in the silence,
With not even my thoughts to buzz my peace away.
Here, I can finally remember what it is to be a single part.
I
Am
A
Fragment.
Sometimes I’ll hear people complaining that their lives are too chaotic, that people expect too much of them, that no one understands what its like to be them. But when I lie here, watching the cicadas buzz in the trees, I remember the remarkable feeling I had for the first time when I was seven and happy.
I was sitting on my orange and red shag carpet, twirling the fibers between my fingers, when suddenly this immense feeling of insignificance washed over me. Not that sense of being tiny in relation to the rest of the universe, but the realization that we are all souls, billions of them, pulsating at once. We all cry and cope and love, and every life is its own…but what if I hadn’t been given possession of this fate? I knew, with no idea how to explain it to anyone, that any pain or despair I ever felt was, indeed, my own, but came to seem small when I considered that I could have been born as anyone else, anywhere else, with any other life, and that it was only by chance that I felt the way I did, in my circumstances. It was as though I was a single grain of rice in a vast cooker, and it was simple luck that I was where and who I was. Whenever this randomly occurred to me, I felt strangely connected to every other consciousness in the world.
Its natural to be self absorbed. Humanity is vain. But we are all laced together. We are all the same, and incredibly different. I am alone, here on my broken glass and cigarette covered haven, but I am also in good company, with six billion other hearts beating to exactly the same rhythm as mine. The pain I feel today could be theirs tomorrow, and their joy mine. Interconnected and ever-changing.
I have come to accept that feeling apart from everyone else is part of my condition. I am not better, just a little more obsessed with being aware of that elusive deeper meaning. To be in such an ordinary situation and to explode with that kind of epiphany is to me what we all hope for, whether we know it or not.
I wrote almost this exact same post on my blog yesterday, then decided not to post it; it's saved in my drafts. We are so similar, magnIlsemous. :) We must hang, and I mean soon.
ReplyDelete--MJB <3