one hour
However it may turn out, this piece is the product of a single hour’s worth of writing and editing, which took place from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. on May 3rd.
I’m doing my best to stay away from grandeur, I really am. It seems impossible to avoid, though— for me, at least. It seems that no matter where I turn, I am unable to separate the cogs from the glorious machine that we all get ground to meat in. No matter how big and beautiful I become, I would still have to get up to take a piss. There’s a blunt sort of humor in that, the spiritual version of getting stabbed with a branch. I’ve been told it hurts like a motherfucker, but Mateo was laughing even though there was a chunk of pine in his shoulder, so there’s gotta be a little bit of comedy to it. Maybe the big joke is that he ate shit on a snowmobile, but let’s be honest. We all know that we’re the jokes here.
It’s alright, though. It’s fine. Whatever. It doesn’t matter that we’re the laughing stock of Heaven if we can feel the sun on our faces. C’est la vie— we are doomed to live in dirt, as we came from it and shall return to it shortly. Your scheduled programming of non-sentience will be back real soon as long as you don’t switch the channel.
Make peace with it. Shake hands with it. Take a damn picture and put it on the mantle— whatever gets you to slow your roll. You’re not going anywhere faster than God wants you to, in my humble opinion. Anything that can soothe your creature soul, get you to appreciate that out of every life form in the universe, you’re lucky enough to have your feet on this ground and be breathing this air. It’s none of my business how you run your life and how you justify existence as long as you’re existing, but I hope you’re at least being honest about your existence.
So are you?
Are you telling the truth about your life? And by truth, I don’t mean being unnecessarily cruel about yourself and your accomplishments and I certainly don’t mean divulging details to strangers or pouring your heart out online all the time, because I fully believe in privacy and the power of a good lie. I mean to yourself. Do you think you’re anything more than something that is ultimately very easy to kill? Do you think you’re less than an entire universe?
In the end, we’re just bodies. That is something very difficult to come to terms with. I think in an earlier post I described the body as a focal point for a larger concept to be filtered through, a boat that you explore an ocean through, but ultimately it’s a flawed metaphor. The ocean is inside the boat. Your consciousness is a small infinity contained within a finite space. When I wrote that metaphor, I thought the ocean might’ve been representing other people’s perceptions of you, but it’s still wrong. Their concept of you isn’t refracted through your body like light through a crystal— it’s contained within your body, because they cannot imagine you without your body. You don’t have to look at yourself as often as everyone else does, I suppose. And so, we are left with our bodies and our bodies only.
Sure, a body can host a brain that has an incredible world within it, but that brain belongs to and relies on the body. You can psychologize it as much as you want, splitting things up into egos and ids, but there’s no point— ego, or what the brain wants, is the id because your brain is in your body. It’s all your body. That’s all there is. And we store things in our bodies like the rings of trees, layers upon layers of what we ate and how we’ve been injured recorded on our bones. Evidence for the jury that’ll dissect us when our civilization collapses.
We transcend death by leaving remains. When he died, the only consolation I had was knowing that he was inside me. I had eaten parts of him, and now he’s in me, and therefore not dead. He’s not dead, do you understand? Not yet. Because I’m not dead. And they cremated him, but I’ve got some of his skin and blood integrated into my very cellular makeup now. He dies when I do.
They’re probably going to cremate me, too. I always knew this was going to end in flames.
I’m so tired of it all. I’ve always thought that part of understanding came with how the concept was communicated— word choice, infliction, intonation, all the other little ways that a voice also becomes a way to explore an ocean— and I wasn’t wrong about that, but communication is an exhausting thing. Who won’t have to be told? Does that person exist? In my heart, this has become a planted seed.
That’s something new to me— desire. No, not desire. I’m abandoning my precision tools in favor for something bolder, something with weight. Articulation does nothing but put a sentence in finery. Let me say this, instead: I want. There are pools of light resting on my carpet, crescendoing and sharpening as the clouds move out of the sun’s path, and I want to lie in them. There are books laying on almost every flat surface I have, and I want to read them. There’s tea I want to drink, people I want to talk to, food I want to eat, music I want to listen to, things I want to write.
I used to put myself above want, considering it the root of all suffering, but I’ve given up on that. It’s not like I want unachievable things that will only cause me pain; I want little things, things that are too exact to be considered a need but too small to be put in the societal scale of “want”. The things we phrase as “I need a Coke right now” or “I need to journal about this” are wants, but we phrase them as needs to absolve ourselves of responsibility. It’s not my fault I want this— I can’t help it, we say, but we can. Why deny ourselves joy, though? If it’s in reach, why would we not reach for it?
Have I reached for it?
Let me simplify. I am scared of my own refusal to comply with others because most of the time, everyone else is telling me to do things that are good for me. I am scared I am denying myself joy. I am scared of being misunderstood and finite spaces and that one day, I’m going to drown in this damn ocean. Most of all, I’m scared that our bodies are subject to an entropy that could happen any second now.
The cherry blossoms outside are pinking, getting closer and closer to rotting.
Do you understand? I’m sorry. I don’t know what to do with you. I’m not used to being listened to. I’m not used to making myself