austin, texas
october 21, 2024This is all so strange. Voices from minds escaping through bodies and I'm so scared of the fall. Tripping over my tongue, my thoughts tumbling, brain trembling. Somehow I'm everywhere and nowhere and dying all the time. My head feels loose and everything is too slippery to grasp. I don't know what I'm saying. I don't know where I'm going but I'm moving in endless trust. For now I hold myself between the clauses of sentences waiting to be spoken.
I want to grab life and shake it all up until the sediment settles down between the big rocks and I can walk barefoot upon the passage connecting here to now. A million colors of heat splitting from the sun to keep alive the spaces they dance upon. I'm finding myself unable to express these things of the spirit through language. They're purely somatic, lay me down supine straight spine like a book whose words got up from their paper graves to dance out their meaning.
I trick myself into thinking I'm spending my days well by connecting my activities to a goal. Training my body for a race, training my mind in buddhism and steeping it in emptiness, training my hands and ears to play instruments. It feels good to do these things, to have methods of passing the time. But still I see right through it all, I see the emptiness, the flickering dream playing itself out and I feel like a phantom of experience.
Soul suspended in superposition, I become the door slamming in my face and then I am the snake in the stream, free and fleeting as the wind. This city quakes from the energy it sustains, it sends signals to far corners of the world saying it is the place to be and people come to find that feeling. A city that pulls people into its web and they weave intricate impossibilities with threads of intuition. There is something happening, these people coming from far lands and meeting here, conversations altering consciousnesses and disturbing the first field.
Feeling like I never began and never end. Like I'm a tapestry hung loosely behind all of humanity, swaying gently and watching it all play out from a place beyond time. I feel like I don't exist and have no need to. I wonder if there is anyone who knows the extent I push myself. I wonder if it is enough, if I need to be stronger and smarter and function better, focus better. Certainly I could at least focus better. The dead lights sure have been fooling me lately. I wonder if my words will ever matter to anyone else, if they'll ever be known. Is that why I do it? Why do I do anything at all? To eat and to move and to see if I can. All I want is to move and write. Maybe read too, when the writing dries. And I want to talk to people who will not interrupt, people who are better than me, people I can learn from. People I can observe and be inspired by.
I've had the same sticky notes on my desk for a year. I suppose they're still fermenting. It has felt like a thousand years in this body. The people are working to combine all of human knowledge that has been found over thousands of years. Knowledge must be stored somewhere. Is that why this body feels so old? What happens when it's all been fit together?
Flowing with nuanced movement. This feeling, it’s a blanket disguised as comfort that I can't take off. Wraps me up and traps me in and I don't even try to pull it off. I sink into the bed and my body is an anchor dragging my mind down into its depths. Cavernous body of water drowning within itself. When I finally stop running and rest it feels like a strange death. Make me ancient again. Testimony of trust as I fly through the ether. I've become petrified by the dogma of routine. Always I run again. The bridge of time is only strong enough to carry one step before it falls behind my feet. The faster I run the faster it falls, the more I experience the less it matters. Things used to mean more than their function. Why am I heavier than my body? Still carrying the corpses of my past. Lay your burdens, build the fire, exhale the smoke. I become nothing and thus become everything.