1/28/08
Often, over a respectable stretch of days, I find my body to be encompassed by these happenings, these undeniable surges of consciousness and wide-eyed wakefulness. It is an experience utterly dominated by introversion and a sort of electricity that shuts down all ties to familiarity. This demon or spark or godsend infiltrates from the marrow of my bones and seems to heat my blood and start my skin aflame with anticipation. It is an incendiary phenomenon, to have a mind witness all that is known and done and right in itself being pushed to the very edges and corners of perception. A stage is cleared. What are more unparalleled are the thoughts that pass, whispering like cat-eyed strangers, teasing my hackneyed senses with aromas of the unknown and the indescribably desired. Slowly at first, but with an ever-so-subtle nudge of urgency, these murmuring notions take heed of my deepest intrigues and grasp at the slippery fingers of falling fascinations. These intruding thoughts force all of my attention away from my colorless world and focus it onto all that I have ever yearned to know and to be.
I believe an example is necessary. During this latest experience (for lack of a better word), I was sitting alone in a coffee shop, with my iPod on shuffle and a steaming latte in my hands. The perfect environment, I had previously construed, to begin research on a self-chosen topic for a school paper. The topic, having to do with communications something or other, led me to believe that, for the sake of the report, it was as good a time as any to observe my surroundings. It was crowded. Many people sat alone or coupled off or in groups, hunched over laptops, buried in books. I am not sure what set it off. These ‘experiences’ are epileptic for me. Not a cycle but a triggered liberation. It may have been the heat from the latte burning my tongue or a rush of wintry wind from an opening door or it could very well have been prompted by an accidental touch or a fleeting glance or some completely internal source all together. I will probably never know. What I do know is that in an instant my mind and body, usually so content to read what I am given and hear what is played and touch what is closest, seemed to have melted away. Had this happened in a dream or another world I am sure that wings would have burst through my coat and carried me off. But sitting there, wingless and fidgeting now, I felt poised to jump right out of my skin. My organs were surely too big for my body, and my blood was shining so brilliantly I thought I could see it illuminating the passages of my veins. I began to crave the knowledge hidden deep in unexplored subjects. I was an addict, writhing and thrashing about for a fix, yearning for an injection of inspiration or stimulation. I was Alice. I had swallowed the pill and was suddenly a giantess. Too big for the room, too big for my town and my clothes were too tight and my music too dull, it all came so fast. Yet to the untrained eye, I may have been daydreaming, or pondering my research. My actual physical being portrayed nothing of my twisted essence.
It is times like these when it occurs to me: I am not human. I am not like you, and you in turn are nothing like me, or any of them. In no way can I be generalized; I defy all stereotypes and subsist too intensely to fit in a graph or along a grid. Every fiber of my being is screaming for a catalyst to change the pace and direction of my existence. Nothing is real.
When these seizures of the psyche reign, I feel agonizingly alone, and yet I know that I would not have this experience shared if it were possible. I have figured out that one must look internally for all they have truly absorbed throughout the years, and it is only then that concepts of death, religion, love, human connection, and the forever deceptive sense of ones self lay exposed. I can not possibly be the only being to undergo these revelations. Embrace the shedding of all skins natural and normal and let your fingertips shake and your breathing quicken with the anticipation, the restlessness, the electricity inside you.
