I have a reoccurring experience--I watch the world through a one-sided window. I watch the Other Side. I sit in a small room--everything is dark and out of focus. Vivid and focused are the things I see beyond the window--out of my little box. I watch things move. There are people--I think they're people. They speak words and sometimes I understand these sounds. These people--I can watch them for days and days. Each movement is painted in expression and emotion and thought. I wonder if I look like them. If I live like them. If they can see me behind my window. I can make the scene in front of my window change too. I can create anything I want and put it out into the Other Side. I can make my private world come to life on the Other Side--things they can only see in their dreams. I wonder what Reality means. It's a word I don't fully
understand-it's so limiting. So contained and forced and false. I've come to realize there are two of what is defined as "me"--two of "me". One is here, right now, in this broken-focused, dim tunnel, dim box. Sometimes I close my eyes and then I am in the Other Side. I become movement, and emotion, and thought. I become unaware. I become people. In which state am I free? In which state am I a prisoner of my own nature? Sometimes I meet others when i'm in the Other Side--other's who, like me, have a dimly lit, out of focus box. A window. A blurred sense of the ridiculous meaning of Reality.
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I see in montages. A gritty stack of fast flipping scenes that run through my head like an old film strip. I covet that pale light that reveals the face each passing moment--en
abling sight. Look steady out at the Other Side and watch that same light kiss the surface of every thing. Sight--proof of Reality #1. Then, if I were to continue on with proofs--sound, smell, touch, emotions…but even still--all unverifiable. I decide. You decide for you. Which is it. The Other Side--the moment, the movement: the chaos un-separate from our immediate sense of Reality. Maybe it will be the the little box--removed and observant, and still: Reality always questionable. In either state of self, the mind is never truly free of our own doubts, judgments, observations, emotions.
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I'm in an old barn.
The structure, neglected, is slowly settling itself back into the earth--decaying naturally, despite it's manmade birth. The walls and beams and glass windows are blanketed in golden, dusty earth. The light breaks through, softly, and leaves warm lacings where thick shadows cannot stifle it. Instead, the darkness feeds off the shadowed corners,
impatiently awaiting the sun to retire. I stand in the midst of all this--choosing the sun's lacings to the heavy embrace of the shadows. Out the windows--the flicker of a filmstrip being projected--the sky becomes the screen and a slideshow begins. The pictures, also covered in golden dust, flash continuously. I watch. There's a drum beat at every flicker--it's deep and round and sounds like the breath of Earth. The dust begins to settle on my skin--it's cool and salty, but warms with the nimble work of the light. The film moves faster across the windows--the images expand across to the walls now. Faster--and the pictures, translucent, dance across ever surface, overlapping and now moving, spinning around me, moving to the floor, to the celling. The barn begins to become translucent with them--fading into what is now a dusk-set sky. The ground, slowly evaporates--the colors of the earth blurring up like paint strokes, fading into the ever darkening sky. Around me, I notice the dust has weaved an intricate, thin veil which is draped over an invisible sphere around me. The images, more like short film clips--now just a steady stream of overlapping motion--of faces and places new and old, recognizable and not. The ground is gone, all for the small patch supporting my body. It is now a deep, dark blue and everything set against this sky is iridescent--silver and wispy, including the images. The drum beat becomes a brilliant, crystal chime--elegant and not sharp. The dust veil is becoming thicker. It's rapidly enclosing me--obscuring my view of the images and of the silver wisps and of the deep blue expanse. The veil has completely enclosed me and I realize I am suspend in a silver nothingness. It's bright. I am nothing but a bright light--my hands, my feet, my entire existence: nothing but a bright, silver light. Pardon my abrupt ending--but I think I'll remain in this silver webbed space for awhile. Have a pleasant day.
