Why am I not dead yet? I laid in bed in the hospital, refusing to believe in the ceiling and trying to see straight through to God. Ever since I was young, I felt the presence of his spirit and higher consciousness, though even now I don’t have the words to describe how I feel. Like someone holding my hand to lead me along a path I couldn’t see. More than once I’d been led astray, allowed to see the promise land through a rosy mist or smoke scented by burning comets, only to be pulled back by the overwhelming gravity.
For that reason I wondered if love was present in this feeling, if I knew God or if God was cruel. Would God have allowed me to push myself into dire situations knowingly? To end up again and again straddling the edge of the universe between my consciousness and the consciousness of transcendence. To disconnect completely from reality, but not in the way that describes life and existence as meaningless. Perhaps to know I would have an experience of seeing the edge of the universe as if through the shadows of peripheral vision. I would not be the person I am now.
It was easy and calming to believe that all of this was part of a plan, but I was still blind to my path and expected only to see who I was in retrospect, as if looking through a rear-view mirror, driving off to destinations unknown. However, what did that mean for me now? It all seemed so pointless for this was one of so many other instances where I almost fell off the world, tumbling or driving into an airless, peaceful vacuum.
For the moment, I could feel the essence of the universe draining away from me. Like lifeblood or air sustains us, I could feel all that slipping away. I couldn’t breathe, not from some violent choking, but through the abandonment by all of the atoms in the universe, who left my lungs deflated and my blood still.
Above my body, at the point where flesh divided me from the air, I could feel tingling. Intrinsically, I knew it was because my nerves were unhappy, trying to alert me to the loss of feeling in my limbs. I could remember dimly that alpha particles flowed easily through everything in the universe. Here they were now, inexplicably present at the edge of me. I liked to think that my imprint in this dimension among the alpha particles proved I existed, but if I did exist, it didn’t matter.
It didn’t answer the question of why I was still here. Why I was singled out by the universe or fate to be dropped into the stream with the strongest current and told to swim. I felt as though I was a joke of the universe and that powerful beings loved watching my efforts to stay alive. Maybe it was the path I’d chosen for myself because I knew I could handle the stress and the work. Maybe other people watching (as if I was an actor on TV, who didn’t suffer and was entertaining; who wasn’t a real person) chose the path they thought I could handle. They would never put their self where I was; they were content and happy to be cared for by time and existence.
Was the reality of it all that the world pivoted on an axis — maybe many axes — and one of those was me. Was I powerful enough? No, instead I felt as though all of my power had been robbed, like I’d be chosen for some great task, but then left to the bare minimum of my own experience. It was a passive-aggressive kind of relationship. The universe wasn’t trying to kill me per se, but it would let me go out for a drive without telling me the car did not have working brakes. Like it wanted to scare me. Here’s the edge, it says.
For a very long time, I could feel these two distinct realities, the one where I could feel the ground and the one where I couldn’t. In one I had been given control but in the context of the universe I was powerless to stop chance and probability. There would be points where I could die, where I could look up into the universe and know absolutely nothing matters, but the knowledge of that didn’t change my insight into either reality.
Even more so, my existence and ability to control the first reality, the one where superficial stress and long to-do lists lived, seemed a way to hold my mind hostage. Often to the people around me, I was a slave to their personal perspectives, perceptions, and experience with me. Though I knew who I was, they defined it; they set the border between me and the universe. I was the presence of others which separated the two realities I lived in.
Perhaps it was a kind of cross-hair of fate that lined up with my position in the universe, a gun or an arrow drawn back in potential energy that equaled the potential of my own existence, and for each kinetic outburst I would be pushed a little bit closer other edge.
However, those were not mine to understand and, although I’d been to the edge so many times, I would never look down. It would be just enough to know that I could lose my eyes and effortlessly fall backwards if I wanted to. As easy as falling asleep and waking up in a room you don’t recognize, as easy as giving up not just a task or project, but semblance of self and the paint that validates existence.
Here, in the reality where there was at least some oxygen left, I was waiting to feel like I would be re-accepted or maybe that I could accept reality the way it was. Come back it seemed to say, leading me down a new path, down the dark spaces and through endless roundabouts in my mind.
I was a hero, I supposed, if being the chosen one, the one who was chosen to take the full force of the world’s experience, would eventually mean I was to undertake a hero’s quest and save the world. But what are heroes but those society have chosen to glorify and who would do all the shit no one else can take? Someone who would sacrifice themselves for any kind of person because that is what society demands, whether they respect their own existence or not.
Maybe that was why; it was all for other people in the first place, the same ones who would ground me forever in this reality, to their beliefs.
