Shaken Loose

I have something to say and I don't know what it is. Perhaps it's just that contained intensity that comes, sometimes, and batters itself against my inner walls where the dust hangs heavy and shards of glass and stone from long ago crunch emptily underfoot.

I'm not writing this for you. I'm not saying this to you. I don't know who you are. I've never seen your eyes, never heard your voice, all my life I've spent wrapped in my own flesh and all I can see is that pulpy gelatinous mass that clogs my irises; all I can hear is the whisper of the cilia inside my own ears.

I don't know where I'm going with this. Sense has been torn loose. Meaning has been torn loose. You, my dearest audience, have been torn loose. Do you know that sometimes when I am sad and I write about it people will instant message me or text me with hugs, just from this? Just sometimes, not all the time. And did you know that sometimes when I write about something that I think is funny people will do the same? They think I am upset.

I know there is an audience out there. I don't know what you get from this. Nothing, I think, from posts like this one.

I have no story for you. Today was a difficult day. I will speak as plainly as I can: I don't know where my feelings come from, I can tell you three stories for any upset. Here are six stories:

Today I was working at the Pan and it was overcast. It has been so dark so often lately, and though the morning started off well I was inexorably pulled downwards. All I wanted to do was go home and curl up somewhere safe. I was disgusted and afraid, and I shot that in every direction around me.

Today I was working at the Pan and my blood had just started. When I was younger I could tell when my period was starting to the hour because I would feel suddenly like the sun had come out from behind the clouds. Today the sun just didn't come out, or if it did the clouds were merely toying with me. I hated everything and wanted nothing to do with the world.

Today I was working at the Pan and I haven't been taking good care of myself. I've been drinking lovely tea and eating lovely chocolate and it hit me in the afternoon like a hammer to the skull. There was nothing in the world that loved me enough to make anything better, and although looking back I know there is a lot of love aimed at me, nothing in the world could bridge the distance and get me to believe it-- or at least, not enough. I wanted to be loved hard enough to change the world and I was instead left desolate.

Today I was working at the Pan and went for lunch with CrazyChris and Freedryk. We talked soft-apocalyptic vs hard-apocalyptic scenarios and it was lovely- Freedryk knows of what he speaks. He was optimistic, when we were talking, and he argued against CrazyChris when Chris said it would all go down-- and listened politely but skeptically to me when I said that whatever down meant, the world was sure to change beyond recognition. Then suddenly, at the very end of lunch, he said: yes, it will have to change completely. I know the world is ending. It's been echoed back to me so often lately-- Paul started it --and it clatters around in my head. And I love the world. I love the infinity of topsoil in Iowa that feeds our demand for bacon hamburgers and goes down so deep and so rich it seems like we could never starve. I love the people who wouldn't dream of being able to recognise a single edible plant, let alone grow one themselves, and who sneer at the people who work the soil-- how precious a system is that, how impossibly and awkwardly high it rises? I love freezer peas and lettuce out of season and the luxury of eating only my very favourite parts of an animal. I love tall glass towers that mirror each other in an infinity of improbably fused silica and air conditioned commuters. I love the bustle of traffic and the way the city beats, as they say, like a heart, the way it pulses with life in so many diverse and complicated ways that we can't really imagine it. I love so much, so much, so very much about this world. We are a product of our environment, whatever else we may be, and so we will all slip away. As with anything we cannot hold this moment.

Today I was working at the Pan and I was texting with the Writer. He's just got a TV and has spent the better part of two days playing video games. I am reminded so strongly of the years when I slipped away into the alternate world of Otherspace and I was there for hours and hours a day-- first I'd only be on in the evenings, then all the day when I didn't have classes, then in between classes from the bank of computers at UBC, then finally I didn't bother to go to classes at all. The easy escape from reality seems to me like it should be wrong, somehow-- total transport to another world means you're turning your back on this one, and isn't that morally abhorrent? Isn't it a renunciation not only of the terrific burning glory of this world we're given but also of our own potential, when we are completely fed up with our own position, to change our lives so completely that we could never imagine going back? Isn't it a settling-for, a lowering of standards, a darkening of the whole tapestry of the world that could be so bright and brilliant? Or is it just that escapism doesn't receive me in her impossibly soft arms anymore, not reliably, and so I look in enviously from the outside? Is this because my life is good and demands everything from me so there's nothing left to squander on, not imagination, but a simalcrum of somebody else's made-up life, or is it because I can't really believe in anything outside myself anymore? And how can I trust someone who may well walk the dark paths that I walked? And how can I trust someone who hasn't, and doesn't know? And how can I sort this tangled knot that tugs me so strongly towards fear of I-know-not-what?

Today I was working at the Pan and I was in love. I wasn't going to do this anymore; years ago I promised myself. I said 'never' and so it's happened. There are no answers and no words, and the brightness of it has scoured me empty inside. I am afraid of the rest of my life.

Those are my stories. I work with complex systems. Things happen for many reasons. I don't believe in one single absolute reality. I merely act, as we must, as if one exists. Tiny things can change outcomes, the proverbial butterfly flaps its wings here but what about all those other butterflies, the leaves deflecting tiny gusts of wind, the stray glint of sunshine on a piece of jewelery bouncing back into the atmosphere? We can't think about it well. We can't talk about it well: we either speak as if a thing had one cause or, if our good sense intrudes on that too heavily, we give up. I give up. I don't know the reasons for things, whatever those things are, nor do I know what will happen. I don't know why I feel like I do; I don't know anything about tomorrow.

I'm just here, lost, in this one moment. I came home and collected some hugs and Angus left and I went out into the garden. My garden is lovely with promise right now, tomato buds in evidence and nasturtiums popping up and the zucchini seed-leaves unfurling. Some basil has even reared its head through the cold we've been having lately. There's only so much to do, though, and them I am done-- rattling around the house, pacing and typing until... something. Until whatever happens next.

I have nothing to say to you. All these words and that sledgehammer of awareness will never come down on your ribcage, splintering what's there into a million pieces and replacing it with this feeling at this moment. Of course we wouldn't want it so. Everyone is so beautiful as they are, such complex knots that the awareness I can tease out myself is nothing beside some of them. I guess that's where I am, then, staring at those compelling but so distant sparks.

I guess I'm lonely.

I guess that happens sometimes.

I guess that's gonna have to be okay.