Opening the Box of My Existence
It’s not a midlife crisis, if I’m honest with myself. If it was, it would be an indicator that I’m only living until the age of 36 and that’s not the outlook I want on life. 36 is a nothing age. You’ve lived life, but not enough to truly say you’ve lived life. I don’t want to die at that strangely conflicting age.
Less than a month after I turned 18, all at once, all the time, I began to ponder and swaddle around the depths of my existence. As if a switch had turned on in my head. I started the Great Flood and was striking my trident into the ground. I would, at no whim of my own, think about my place in our beloved Terris. Our beloved planet that spins, everlongingly chasing after the grand sun in the sky as it runs towards neighbouring universes.
We are just a speck of dust on a beach. Life itself a near-miss miracle.
I’m thankful it didn’t miss. But turning 18 made me fearful. As if I had been hit with a sudden dart of anxiety that rippled my bones. Each little pimple and scar and fang and drama and isolation all felt so mundane. The entire existence of the pandemic felt so mundane. Like I was worrying about missing a bus that isn’t coming for the next hour.
Fleshy corpses, like those of humans or elves, usually turn to bone in 10 years. Solid corpses or plant-based life, like golems and faeries, usually turn to dust or to ‘seeds’ in 15 years. For undead life like me, it’s much, much quicker, at around 3 years. If I died tomorrow, in 3 years no one would know I had acne scars or rough hair, or maybe, just maybe, even a slanted spine. In 3 years, I would be just a soul, wandering Terris and completing my duty to the afterlife.
On a completely shifted tone, I went to the city of Yonindale, the nearest major city by me. The nearest downtown core. Ephemeral indeed.
The skyline reaches into the bluest depths of our atmosphere. Cars and buggies alike honk and blow sweet, thin steam. Light from the setting sun darts in between the buildings and streams through the cracks in the roads. Golems building up the side of an old parliament building. Cold pink streetcars hover across the sky and lower unto the designated stops. Old elves sitting in bus stops to catch their breath with charred wooden canes. The Starship Monument, visible from the centre of the street, overwatching the entire city. Its rings slowly turning around the epicentre like we rotate around the sun.
All this beauty. All this beauty, with a melody blasting in my ears.
My mind works in pictures and narration. I feel through film that I portray on the big screen of my brain. That is the picture of existence. There, in that moment, I am split. Humans might call it, Schrodinger’s cat. I feel as though I exist, but I also feel as though none of this is real. Like I am simply weightless. Like I am an energy floating through the air. Like I am in the human-promoted simulation. Everything becomes third person for just a fleeting second and then I realize my body is physical. I have hands! I have feet! I have arms and legs and a chest and a heart and —
I feel as though I have opened the box with Schrodinger’s cat in it. I too have suffered both halves of his paradox.
The downtown scene is such a disorienting place. But I would assume that much since I don’t travel there as often. I can imagine people coming to my little suburbs in Masadam-Yae with abandoned farm fields and highway overpasses feeling the same sense of etherealism.
No matter how much I crush myself with my own existence reminding me that life is as fluid as time and as fragile as a reed, going to Yonindale makes me remember how present life is. Life isn’t meant to be lived in the past worrying over soft regrets and poor memories. Life isn’t meant to be lived in the future, fussing over money and a guess-timated body clock.
I think this is why I’m a bad goal setter. Perhaps it’s why I’m more self-aware. I used to live life in the present, never thinking on the future beyond wild dreams and never on the past beyond a good meal. When I turned 18, I began to live life 3 000 000 years from now, when Terris is ash and the solar system is diminished to three planets and a little red dwarf. Coming down from the future back into the now is refreshing.
I still have things I think about, like my health, potential of kids, partners, and even writing, that I have to look a little into the future. But I feel as though dealing with the darkness that is my crippling sense of existence, is just a grounding away.
For anyone who’s read this far, I bid you do these things sometimes. Go outside. Physically touch some grass, or some concrete, or a tree, or a wall of thirteen-year-old graffiti. Take a whiff of the smell of freshly cut grass as they spew their chemicals of fear and warning to one another. Take a nice, long, slow breath in. Breath out. Smile, even if you don’t want to. Remember that you exist.
— Heleza
