I
I saw a flower one day by my friend’s dorm building. It was blue and round, and it poked out of the grass near the sidewalk. It will die when the weather changes. I wonder if it knows that. Maybe it won’t. Who decides that?
Sometimes I get this sensation in my head like I’m just waking up. It’s like I blink into a different version of my own existence. In that moment I’m suddenly aware of myself from the outside. Questions flood into me, like who am I really? Or how long have I been around? How did I get to this perceived moment in time? I look at my skin and I feel like it’s new to me. Sometimes I feel invisible and get scared. Sometimes I am contentedly alone in all my senses. Sometimes I wish I could float to wherever I was before, like if I tried hard enough, I could stretch into whichever instance of “reality” I wanted.
Some people say that life is meaningless. That there’s no point in doing anything, because it doesn’t mean anything. We’re marching toward death from the moment we’re born and that’s reality. Every minute of life is a disgusting nightmare. Every consciousness subjected to it is being hurt and to experience life at all is cruelty. Maybe it’s pompous to disagree, or obtuse to believe otherwise. I think, fundamentally, I will never agree. I’m trying not to be proud or resigned or indignant that anyone else has concluded otherwise.
Some people say that there is a reason for everything. That we were created to do something, somehow, and benefit existence around us. Truthfully, I am uncertain. I disagree with this side too. Things, objects, life, opening, closing, noises everywhere including silence, I don’t profess to know any purpose for any of them. I only know the vision flowing into my brain through my eyes, and the chemicals, and the thing that is maybe a soul inside me saying that I shall act, and so I do, or I will not, so I don't.
I’m not afraid of death in itself. It’s already claimed so many things I knew of, or enjoyed, or found myself attached to. Something I would or wouldn’t like to experience is just a feeling. I do not think I would like to be stabbed, though I am curious if it burns, aches, or stings. I would not like to drown, but sometimes when swimming I catch a sensation in my lungs like I have inhaled beneath the water, and in a moment of confusion I wonder if my consciousness restarted. I would not mind to see death come to take me, but I would be disappointed if it came before I ran out of things I’d like to do. I don’t find it selfish; I enjoy pleasure.
I think, when death comes for me, and I am ready to go with it, I will look at it and touch its face and push it into myself. I think that physical remnant will slip back into the elements, and I will go somewhere else, and if we really were just chemicals, then the chemicals will go somewhere else and what was left of “me” will be something new then.
If I give birth someday, I think it will be like an interesting moment in my existence. Like getting surgery and touching the removed organs, or finding an animal or fruit you never knew existed. This other person would be a creation of me and another, and the air I breathe, and the food I eat, and then it will not be, because the cells will grow more and more until I and another are gone, leaving only the new.
Maybe I’m disconnected from pain, and any tears I shed for anyone are just a chemical reaction my soul will have already healed from by the time a droplet meets my cheek. I’ve moved past it, like a kind of understanding that I don’t actually understand. The universe could tell me that it’s going to wrap my consciousness around and around itself for the rest of time and I would probably nod and continue on the way.
I don’t think it has to be so complicated. “I” is only as much as itself can understand. I drink unhealthy soda because I like the way fake flavors taste. I stand in a Wal-Mart playing with gel umbrella handles because my fingers push into the squishy material in a way that feels good. I love someone, and someone else, and more and more forever because there is a warmth and safety in my body that I like to feel. I am content to defy the lonely emptiness that is apparently all life has to give. I only have two hands, but there are other hands I would like to hold. There is a pain I would like to defy, and it pleasures me more to selfishly enjoy myself in its face.