As much as being booger-ridden is generally considered horrible, it does don a nice afterglow to mundane things like watching a movie or lying in bed. Or maybe it's just me, I feel positively dapper, sitting here, fighting for breath and pausing the incestuous Noir drama I chose for the night to write.
My life is spiraling out of my control, and there's no way to tell my good decisions from the bad without the re-affirming nods of a nuanced coven. But in the middle of it all, in my moments of rare clarity peculiar to aftershock and explorative, late-night episodes where everything seems to apply - I am sometimes swept across the board by an overwhelming sense of liberation. Free movement is intoxicating, this is how Archimedes must have felt like as he ran butt-naked through the busy streets of Syracuse, cheeks flapping in the wind.
The problem is, I am not on the verge of a groundbreaking scientific discovery.
Lying in bed this morning, I was struck by my newfound ability to miss the days of the week. Mondays are the same as Wednesdays, the AM feels the same as the PM, Fridays are no longer the holy grail of the week. Hours fall off the clock in perfect levity, unaffected by their assigned meanings in the grand order of things. I found myself thinking, this is the farthest out that I've ever gone. The veil has dropped and I have passed through, will I ever be able to go back to a time where time held sway? In this rare, naturally-occurring case that is impossible to retrace to its causative method, time itself unwittingly contributed to its own destruction. Perhaps if it had all happened in shorter bursts, it might have been easier to wind back the clock and find my way back, through it all, to a place with re-assuring gravity, plausible vector and the primitive lull of a swing. Perhaps, that too, is merely a booger-ridden reverie.
Now, I notice my small distinctions as I talk, my split-second quirks as I move and the irregularities of my breath with no stimulus to condone it. How it all is just a tad out of touch. I also notice how the surrounding zombie horde twitches at the whiff of fresh-meat, and people's deep-seated discomfort at the sight of an unknown entity watching them from behind a curtain, extending a perfectly edible limb out in an attempt to find middle ground, higher ground, any ground. What does the grass smell like on your end? What does it feel like on your bare feet?
Most people don't really want the burden of the first contact, so they selfishly pull the rug from under your feet in self-defense and reflexive malice. 'My planet', they hiss at the threatening unknown, 'not yours'. And I can't blame them. They prefer their familiar place and floundering frequencies, for in its waves they've made a home and bought a cuckoo clock that tells the right time at least twice a day. How dare you peek through for a whiff of pie, freshly baked and alluringly bare on a picture-perfect windowsill?
My search for familiarity pervades the smallest of my daily chores, as I recreate the things I've done before hoping to recreate that brief, intoxicating sensation of familiarity. Instead, I slip in my oversized skin suit and hit my head on a brand new edge. Everything is so much thicker than it used to be, wading through it takes more out of me than I have in store, and I'm not as nimble as I once was.
Stupid teenagers, they don't know their superpower of forging a home in unlivable spaces. Snotty-nosed little pricks, holding the skeleton key and trying to shove it in their bodily orifices instead, hoping it would unlock something deep within them that they can destroy and use to build a new, unfamiliar nest. To have their powers once more, for a day. To spend an evening with entitled, open-ended questions instead of crippling final answers.
Stupid teenagers, they don't know their superpower of forging a home in unlivable spaces. Snotty-nosed little pricks, holding the skeleton key and trying to shove it in their bodily orifices instead, hoping it would unlock something deep within them that they can destroy and use to build a new, unfamiliar nest. To have their powers once more, for a day. To spend an evening with entitled, open-ended questions instead of crippling final answers.
They never tell you what grief does to thought patterns, and how if it hits in just the right place enough times, it might short circuit a logic loop for longer than initially intended - a neural network transformed into a cabbage field with the ominous swish and flick of a misguided elder wand. The empowerment texts are easy enough - positive thinking, support community, putting the right foot forward. But what if you don't remember the right string of commands you used to move your foot?
What bothers me most is the constant feeling that I'm a half note off-tune, somewhere, and in the chaos of it all, I can't quite put my finger on which note is to blame. You lose your ear sometimes, walking to the sound of your own drum. It's in the fine line.
So I swing, trying to find the cockiness that would fuel this new place or the familiarity that would lead me back to old charted courses, and the motion sickness overpowers my senses - pushing me back into the chair. Sit, silly, you're going to hurt yourself.
