Portals
Sometimes I feel surrounded by small portals: the internet, my cellphone, even some people. But this concept of portal has more to do with escaping the real, an impulsive and desperate way of dealing with reality, by running away from it. Like we do with most things.
However, I haven’t always seen portals like I do today, and this is my attempt to get closer to what they once were for me. They once were energy sources that distanced me from everything that resembles what is real. But then I ask myself what my conception of “real” is and the conversation I stablished with my subconscious gets longer.
I used to worry more about this when I was a kid, especially in my phase of detachment from my imaginary friends. Something inside of me insisted that I needed to get out of this kind of portal because it forced me away from the real. I think what I saw as “real” at the time were my parents, my limited responsibilities, the friends I didn’t have and how I really felt about those.
For some reason I believe that neither my portals nor my “real” has changed significantly over the years.
Today I woke up with a sore throat and went to have some water in an especially curvy based glass that I have here at home. The light of a lamp went through the glass I had in my hands and found the small pool of water that was left inside of it.
I saw a portal, in the imaginary sense of the thing, what people project mentally when they hear that word. I saw the refracted light form several circles, one inside the other, with colored beams. I tried to imagine myself putting my finger through the circles and appearing somewhere where this small fraction of unreality would have the ability to take me, Narnia, Wonderland, or something in between.
I tried to move the reality out of my mind and decided to do what felt more logical at the time. My body wouldn’t go through that little pool, so I closed my eyes, prepared my throat, and swallowed it. I tried to absorb the idea poetically. I had swallowed my portal, so, in a way, even if I couldn’t get into it, it would always be a part of me.
My imaginary friends have changed their titles, today they are characters, tales, and stories, because this way, apparently, they can be as imaginary as they were before and as close to me as they’ve always been, and yet, less frightening for those condemned to live only in the “real” world.
Now a days I try to find portals between the folds of the pages I leaf in the subway, returning from a long day of internship. I try to hypnotize myself with songs that muffle the noises of existence and with the surviving raindrops that flow on the top of my skin discreetly, the ones that were able to cross the cracks of the bus glass, as if they were also trying to find a safe place, a portal, where they could flow in peace.
I see the “real” from afar and get annoyed by it and those who are content to have it for themselves, as if it is enough. The “real” is mechanical and illusory, it makes you believe that life is practical and separated in steps, makes you think that imaginary friends are less valid than those who work and declare income tax.
The “real” keeps you from seeing portals. And in the end, for me, nothing is more truthful than the things that allow you to get out of the automatic trance that the system imposes and see through the gaps of the clock and the lines of the routine, see inside what is not seen from the outside, projections of feelings that allow you to resist the “real” and smile despite it.
Originally published at http://lisraiss.wordpress.com on March 11, 2023.
