Awakening in the Middle of the Night

1:1: You hear the phrase “electric city” a lot. Like the city is one organ, a living, breathing, thinking thing. The flow of people, like blood, or water, or something rushing between the space behind your eyes and right in front of your brain. Reminds you of a sort of feeling you get when you’re comfortably sleepy, fluid that cushions your mind and protects it from worry and the assaults of the constant headaches.

That’s the moment to live for. You don’t feel it in the city. The city sleeps. It leaks, it sweats, rivers of heat and oil and the ever-present feeling that something in your life isn’t quite right. What is it? Why do you feel that? You have everything you could ever want. Ungratefulness comes to mind.

But deep down you know it’s not ungratefulness. Something under your skin moves, not you but nonetheless connected to you in some way you can’t understand yet. Your dreams feel much more real than the haze of a life you lead.

Haze. Nothing has a consequence anymore. You find yourself somewhere else in the blink of an eye. You never thought you’d be here doing what it is you’re doing now. It’s not reality, it’s something shitty, a bad headache, a bitter taste in your mouth reminding you that you haven’t brushed your teeth in, what, two days? You know better than that. You start to sweat.

There was a time where you felt none of this. Quite some time ago, almost a year actually, you felt a coiled spring, or a spiraling tower, burst from your chest and split the clouds. Even as it came from you, it was many miles away, looming before you, a dark castle to be conquered. Reclaimed? Maybe you were just supposed to visit. Take one last look at what you had created before nodding and moving on, pleased.

You’re far from pleased. Discontent, saddened, and very, very confused. You take some time to wonder what it is you’re trying to say before you move on.

But there is no real “moving on,” is there?

1:2: There’s a whole list of things that get you thinking. Daydreaming about storm clouds enveloping the entire world. People you’d rather be without. The persistence of your parents, how they’re everywhere and nowhere. Hallucinations: pale, humanoid figures stalking a nameless someone in the grass; lights in the sky where there should be nothing; deafening roars from the maw of a demon in the dark hallway at 3 am that you have to take to get from your room to the kitchen.

What’s missing? Has it ever been there? Did it leave you with the stone tower that leapt from your very being? Is it something simple, like hunger or the need for physical contact? Is it loneliness or inadequacy?

No, no you’ve never been that sort of person. That sort of melancholia is reserved for other times. This is something else that you can’t attribute to a physical malaise or bad feeling.

Suddenly you remember. You want to leave. You want to pack your bags with everything esoteric you can find in your room, anything that will increase the aura of mystery around you, you want to stuff loose, light clothes for summers and dark jackets for winters because of course you will be gone for years. Maybe forever. You want to go back to those mountains, the ones that harbored ruins thousands of years old, or the steep hills in between two deserts, the lush paradise of a logging town you remember to be called Cloudcroft. You want to travel alone, underneath the world and as a part of it, bare to the wind and sky and dangers that you could care less about. You want to meet new people, you want to bleed, you want to live.

That’s it. You want to live. You are not living, you are not happy, where you are now. You suddenly feel like crying for as long as your body can support. Not suddenly. It has been this way forever.

It’s almost... nostalgia, this intense wanderlust, this longing to leave and experience the world around you. You’ve never been able to articulate it this clearly before. A breakthrough, a fist, no, no, a gentle dissolving of the veil around your head that’s been there for as long as you can remember, into what it is you really want your life to be. It returns now, a thick mist of dizziness and headache.

Maybe it’s just a desire to live your life the way you want to, regardless of whether or not you make mistakes.

1:3: You could leave at any time. The window next to you lacks a screen; if you wanted, you could pack a bag very quietly, open the window, sprint until you’re out of sight of the property you live on, and pick a direction. Maybe you want to drop those books off, the ones you borrowed from your friend.

That one book! It captured your imagination so intensely. It spoke of traveling, just traveling, what you want to do. You kept it to yourself for as long as you could and were shot down by reality, the words of your friends, or the lack of words. You’ve always known you could never leave. You’ll always be here. Always in a routine, a machine, scratching at your skin and pounding on your own skull because certain noises trigger air raid sirens in your head.

Clouds outside. You want to cry again. Hopefully, whenever the day of your death comes, you get to see clouds. There are so many different kinds! It seems almost impossible to you that in the entire history of the world, there have never been two alike clouds. All different.

Even more inconceivable is the notion that somewhere, floating over an impossibly distant world, is a white, enticing, benevolent cumulus cloud identical in every way to the one outside the window. It is equally far away, to you, sitting here, writing this. It has shifted some since you last looked at it. Do you want to laugh? Cry? You don’t know.

You will leave someday. Maybe you will wait for some excuse to excommunicate yourself and take off. Maybe it will simply be a choice, a certain day turned out to be the right one. You can’t tell, but you know this much. You will leave someday.

1:4: Time flows around you like syrup, or maybe you’re being pulled. Perhaps you’re racing to the end of the race only to begin again at some point. You can’t tell, you’ve never been able to tell which point you’re heading to, and now you’re hurtling there without any sense of gravity or up or sideways.

There is always down, and darkness, and coolness, and the night, and quiet, and tranquility. There is also always light, and sterility, and harshness, and starkness, and conformity. There are false meanings assigned to the most basic of elements, the presence of light and its absence. False meanings come terrified minds eager or desperate to assign any significance to everything. The notion that humanity is alone in an unfeeling totality kills.

1:5: Instruction is necessary. The education comes not from reading but experience, from the dousing of oneself in a fine spray of everything that exists.

Imagine diving under the waves. You surface. There is nothing around save the undulating peaks of the cerulean waves. You dive again. Light vanishes around you and it seems the darkness itself accepts you, an alien to this realm, it seems to beckon, you are crushed by pressure and the air is replaced by brine and fluid that kills you swiftly. But you keep swimming, keep diving. There is always more. There is no light this far down underneath the veil of secrets but still you know and still you seek and still you see. You are brushed past by things with teeth and things with eyes and some things with no eyes or teeth but many legs or none of these but many years, millions of years, ancient sharks that haven’t surfaced since the asteroid fell or vast worms with expansive minds stretched out thin over the water. They acknowledge your presence as an intruder and do nothing because there is nothing you could do to them. They are the true elder gods, old things, dark things of power inconceivable. You dive past these beings worthy of worship and idols of meteoritic stone until you reach the ocean floor. The abyssal plain stretches before you, the bones of whales strewn across the world’s tomb laid bare by shrimp and crabs and lampreys and fins and beasts of unspeakable origins. You climb across the silt and stone. You reach a trench after much time and no time at all because no thing measures time down here, only by the death of the leviathans and the hunger in their gullets. You sink into the trench past moray eels miles long and dark squid that regard you as scraps of meat from a sinking mammal. They are not far off. You sink until you are falling. You are falling. You fall.

Now imagine the billions of stars in the galaxy. Imagine the habitable worlds in orbit around them. Imagine their oceans. There are so many gods.