fiction

Fragments

A little bird lands on the path in front of me. Nothing else but a puzzled glance, a few brief hops, and then back into flight. I pause for a moment, but my eye quickly loses the bird in the distance. The breeze ruffles my hair just a little. Or,

Inhale the musty odors of old books, eyes closed. Just for a moment, you understand. I open them, and for a moment my eyes meet hers, dark pebbles framed in brunette curls. A smile tugs at the corner of her mouth and she looks away. I smile faintly myself, my mood lightened, and a little gleam in my memory. The curve of her lips, delicate. The secrets in her eyes leapt between us for just an instant. A darkling gaze that I won’t forget. Or,

The discomfort of the seat, the stifled hot atmosphere of the theatre, my senses forget themselves, dwelling only on the figures in the light wrapped in darkness. There’s a joy in their tragic motions that I share, a love of the shadows and the nuances and the subreal. They’ll dance their slow drama every night, each performance a unique duplicate. For me, this moment alone satisfies. For them, it all lies in the instant, a stumbled line, a missed cue, a stolen glance. The mistakes of an actor lie forever in the performance, inseparable from it.

The fragments that make up memories, the experiences that make up people, are not unique, but they are beautiful. Each person in their own realm of photocopied moments assembles them a new way, putting their own captions on the pictures, creating a whole. Here is where the soul lies, within these fragments.

One of mine:

A soft kiss is beautiful.
In the moment before the kiss, there’s nothing else in the world,
only warm breath across your face and a slight tingle.
It feels a little like static electricity, but it’s mostly anticipation,
released in a small spark, which like saliva,
moves between you and I.

“Five days, leaving me wanting more.”

life

Moonlight

There always seems to be such a very big gap between the things that I daydream about and my everyday life. I do not have any real fear of the future, or of change, or of dying without achieving anything by which society will supposedly measure what sort of a person I was. My fears swirl around living a life in which my dreams are more pleasant than my reality. Where the what-ifs and the might-have-beens take up more space in my memory than the things I did. So I am afraid of dreaming about things that might never happen. Things like being an author, since it is so easy to imagine never ending up as an author. In some ways the issue is that all I’d have to do is do nothing and my life would end up living itself and being empty and meaningless.

I first realised reality was utterly devoid of objective meaning a little over four years ago. For a little while it would overcome me, until I hit upon the realisation that reality didn’t need meaning. The whole concept of meanings, values, representation, is entirely a constructed entity. It stems, I suppose, from the nature of language, and symbols more generally, in their habitual way of assigning order to things. Things isn’t a particularly good symbol itself, I should have used a word more like “entities” or “objects”, damn. So anyway my point, or my realisation, was that the whole idea of things holding meaning was not a native expectation about the world but was tied up entirely with the construction of symbols and languages. So the objective meaninglessness of reality is just a ground state. Without the minute vibrations and movements of subatomic particles the temperature of the universe could reach absolute zero, or, if the temperature of the universe was absolute zero, subatomic particles would cease moving and perhaps cease existing, or, you know, another interpretation of quantum mechanics along those lines. Likewise without thought the universe can reach a state of absolute meaninglessness, or, without meaning, thought is impossible. So I’m not in a void of meaninglessness, because my thoughts are creating a meaningful reality. It’s a subjective reality, and it’s not necessarily externally valid, but the upshot of it all is that I can find for myself the ideas that I want to hold, the thoughts that I think are worth thinking, the beautiful moments that I want fragmented through fading memory cells. From here there is no chance at all that I can become permanently unhappy because it only takes sun shining mutely on my face or wind pressing against me like a lonely animal, and I’m back immersed in the pure wonder of it all. This doesn’t stop me from being unhappy at times. It doesn’t make me feel any better when I am unhappy. In fact existing is pretty much just as beautiful in any mood, it’s just that a lot of moods tend to block out the good bits of existence and focus on the ugly ones.

So.

The problem is that I am afraid that I am going to fail to meet my own standards of how I think I should live my life.

It haunts me when I imagine the myriad ways in which things could actually be other than how I think they are, and those ways are always the sorts of things that would hurt terribly.

Peace.