THE SHORELESS SEE

 

People come and leave boxes. We unpack and move them from one seeming place to another. Dishes seem dirty, then they are washed, but that process is as impossible to comprehend as why a black hole’s accretion disk seems to align with the black hole’s equator.

It's funny when people talk of the me or the no-me and it sounds as casual as a chat about whether to get Peri-Peri chicken at Nando’s. And yet maybe it is the most mundane and ordinary subject in the world. It just seems that what is happening is not communication. The bodymind character (lol) that seems to speak of this is not talking about the same thing as the ones that seem to listen and imagine they understand. But it’s all a world of phantoms and ghosts; no one is talking or listening. After all, if they were, what could even be said?

There are really nice sleeping bags and all sorts of upscale camping gear. Which is funny, as the people that come here for the retreat at most hike no more than a few kilometers away from the nicely apportioned comfortable cabins when they say that they are “wild camping.” But everyone is camping in the wilderness, whether you appear in the midst of a concrete and steel and glass city or the middle of a forest. The wilderness is only the story of your untamed mind, the empty vastness that dreams you into being and is not even any such thing.

People write me everyday; they are in an imaginary queue to talk to no one who knows nothing. Michael Markham wrote, “All of your beliefs and opinions will be shredded on the cutting room floor and all of your precious memories will be spread out into the open sun. They will shrivel up and be blown away by the dry desert winds and your entire life story will slip into insignificance.”

That’s not what they want to hear, it’s not what they imagine, but it’s as it is. No one can imagine the very end of the world, yet this is that, and not even that at all. What world would end, and for who? What’s left here of this so-called Miranda thingie doesn’t feel like someone thinking or speaking or doing. It’s a boat untethered from its moorings in an intangible storm, floating aimlessly, deeper out to sea, and the land where it had a story of a life and identity and feelings and beliefs and ideas is not even seen on the ever-receding horizon.

Sometimes someone from my apparent past writes me, and it seems like a character in a beloved novel I read in high school talking to me as if I was another character in that novel. Yet the book is written in invisible ink, and even what appears now erases itself like waves lapping at the swirls of footprints of laughing children who were there in the sunshine and now vanish with the fading light, echoes of their laughter in the misty tears of eventide at the edge of everywhere and no where at all. ♥