Whenever I look at my reflection, it takes me a while to register that the face I am seeing is my own.
There is a strange sense of detachment that I carry with me. And not just from the rest of the world. It’s as if some version of my self is playing out his life while I watch from a distance.
The way I described it to the therapist was like this —
What seems to have happened is that at some point, I put my life on auto-pilot and then forgot all about it, and now I’ve suddenly woken up and I can’t find a way to turn it off.
It’s impossible to really put a finger on a date and say that’s when it happened.
It just did.
“Are you sure it’s that you can’t turn it off?”
She does that, you know. She does that a lot.
Makes me doubt myself and then my thoughts get all out of whack.
Something about this tells me that she may not be a very good therapist.
When I was about eleven years old, I saw this woman crying at the mall. I remember watching her slump onto the floor and just break down right there. Her friend stood over her shoulder trying to console her.
I wanted to help her, to go to her and tell her that it was going to be okay, but there was no right way for me to do that. Her life was not for me to know.
That was when I understood what it meant to be a stranger.
I still think about that woman sometimes — about that brief moment when our lives entwined just long enough for it to get etched into my memory forever.
It makes me think about how there are experiences outside of my own that I will never know, about the insignificance of my own perspective which is incapable of every fully realising the nature of our disconnected consciousness.
And it makes me feel so fucking small.
Don’t you feel like that too, sometimes?
I had a friend who loved outer-space as much as I did. We spent hours exchanging half baked facts about the universe and passionately debating the implications of scientific theories we barely understood.
He was a lot smarter than me. A lot more popular too.
It never really got in the way of our friendship. It was simply time that did.
We fell apart after a while, but that’s just how these things go.
Today marks his sixth death anniversary.
When I found that he had passed away, it was through a mutual friend.
All I knew about his new life was from his social media posts. He had still been as smart and as popular as I remembered.
Some parents said that that was what really killed him in the end. That it wasn’t the rope around his neck. It was the thoughts inside his head.
If you’re too smart for your own good, how smart does that really make you?
When I think about the indomitable human spirit, I don’t think of the triumphs of our explorers, adventurers and rulers, or about the great cultural movements that have shaped our society.
What I really think about is our infinite capacity for greed, I think about bloodshed and the years of war and strife, the never ending persecution and exploitation of the society’s weakest, about different iterations of the same man with the same promises being elected into the highest offices time and time again.
Our rivers run black and smoke fills the city air.
To think that our first instinct is supposed to be self preservation.
There is something terribly twisted about the way this world works. I try not to think about it, but sometimes — and when I least expect it — it creeps up behind me and wraps its hands around my neck ever so gently that by the time I notice it, it has already begun pulling me into the void.
Have I discussed this with my therapist?
Boy, wouldn’t she like to know.
A co-worker once told me this — when I say the word ‘now’ and when you register it, are two different moments but there is this an unspoken agreement concerning the intended meaning of the word.
While he was telling me this, all I could think of was the countless times I’ve found myself at loss for the right words. All the arguments that could’ve been avoided, had I chosen my words more appropriately.
That is why I began leaving my words in public spaces.
I think of it as my little act of rebellion against the words that I was seemingly always at a loss for.
I painted walls and wrote on bathroom mirrors, I left messages on doors and notice boards. Sometimes a word, a poem at others —pretty much whatever that came to mind.
Did it make me happy?
It’s hard to say.
Was it cathartic?
In some sense of the word, I suppose it was.
At the very least, it felt like something. And once it started, I just couldn’t stop because I hadn’t felt anything in a very long time.
“Are you still with me?”
Having given up trying to pick out my apartment building from among all the others, I walk from the window to the bookshelf.
“Sure.”
“So why is it then, why can’t you turn it off?”
I slide my finger across the titles, trying to look as if I’m searching for something.
“Nothing comes to mind,” I say, shaking my head. “What do you think?”
“I think that we should come back to this at a later time.”
“Good thinking.”
“Do you want to talk about your art?”
“Most people would call it vandalism.”
“What do you call it?”
“Nothing but a thing.”
I watch the world from a distance; a blue rock, hopelessly lost in an endless universe.
This is the farthest from earth that man has ever been.
The footsteps on the lunar surface remind me of summers spent on the beach, collecting seashells and building castles of sand. I close my eyes and imagine the sand between my toes, the ocean rumbling as the waves hit the shore. A voice calls out to me from far away — it is getting dark, it says, I better get back.
In that moment, for the first time in many years, I find myself longing for home.
