london
I am lying awake in bed, listening to a tap tap taping that could be the rain or one of my housemates having sex. I tell myself it is the rain, because it rains pretty often, and it has been raining hard recently.
I can't sleep. Maybe it's the fact that I have had too much coffee to drink today, but the minutes feel like hours feel like days: time really has been getting the best of me. So here I am, lying awake in bed, with nothing left to do but listen to that sentence spin around in my head.
"On a scale of one to seven, how happy are you?"
Posed to me in a questionnaire about gender issued in my Human Sex and Sexuality course, I was fairly certain that this question was a distractor, that it would have no effect on the outcome of the survey, but the question sits in my hypothalamus, like shrapnel left to infect the wound that is my psyche. It's implications pang through me at the most arbitrary of times. As quickly as they come, they go, leaving me in a state of shock, uncomfortably numb.
It was an hour ago that I finished watching a movie. During the film, I was suspended in a plot full of intrigue and violence, the discourse of vengence and justice, among other cleverly interwoven tropes. So suspended was I that I was able to lift the veil of disbelief, feeling something for the characters, for their struggle and strife and shortcomings and success, temporarily substituting it for my own.
At its conclusion, I was struck with a waning feeling, the warmth the film had bestowed upon me was fading like the last coals of a dying bonfire. I cleaned the coffee table, bringing in to the kitchen the dishes and debris left by my negligence and lethargy over the course of the day, loading the lot into the dishwasher for more delayed action. I went back out to the living room to grab a few more remnants and a water glass.
I placed the glass in the sink, and turned on the tap. I stood still as the water flowed into the cup, and my mind went blank. The coals burned out. There was a surreal silence permeated only by the tap tap tapping of raindrops and the oceanic sounds of a nearby wet freeway. The silence was deafening all the same, signifying the feeling of anxiety on its way.
I was still immobile as it first hit me. As I write now, I have to light a cigarette to try to find the words to describe the thoughts that followed that first silence. It was as if I had it figured out for a second. I grasped what I feel like I constantly yearn for, some kind affirmation of everything. The water poored over the edges of the glass as I stood dumbfounded, grappling with the ubiquitous totality I thought I could only dream of.
And I don't know if it's my brain or my soul, my mind or my body, but I couldn't accept it. Rather than having my reality upturned or reaffirmed, it simply passed through the moment. And that was the moment. No, moment is not the appropriate term - because the sensation was both timeless and confined. The revelation did not occur, but it flowed through me as I stood still staring at the kitchen sink, painfully aware of everythings transience.
I think I felt infinity, and I don't really know what to do about it.
I can't seem to find my number within the confines of this scale.
I can't sleep. Maybe it's the fact that I have had too much coffee to drink today, but the minutes feel like hours feel like days: time really has been getting the best of me. So here I am, lying awake in bed, with nothing left to do but listen to that sentence spin around in my head.
"On a scale of one to seven, how happy are you?"
Posed to me in a questionnaire about gender issued in my Human Sex and Sexuality course, I was fairly certain that this question was a distractor, that it would have no effect on the outcome of the survey, but the question sits in my hypothalamus, like shrapnel left to infect the wound that is my psyche. It's implications pang through me at the most arbitrary of times. As quickly as they come, they go, leaving me in a state of shock, uncomfortably numb.
It was an hour ago that I finished watching a movie. During the film, I was suspended in a plot full of intrigue and violence, the discourse of vengence and justice, among other cleverly interwoven tropes. So suspended was I that I was able to lift the veil of disbelief, feeling something for the characters, for their struggle and strife and shortcomings and success, temporarily substituting it for my own.
At its conclusion, I was struck with a waning feeling, the warmth the film had bestowed upon me was fading like the last coals of a dying bonfire. I cleaned the coffee table, bringing in to the kitchen the dishes and debris left by my negligence and lethargy over the course of the day, loading the lot into the dishwasher for more delayed action. I went back out to the living room to grab a few more remnants and a water glass.
I placed the glass in the sink, and turned on the tap. I stood still as the water flowed into the cup, and my mind went blank. The coals burned out. There was a surreal silence permeated only by the tap tap tapping of raindrops and the oceanic sounds of a nearby wet freeway. The silence was deafening all the same, signifying the feeling of anxiety on its way.
I was still immobile as it first hit me. As I write now, I have to light a cigarette to try to find the words to describe the thoughts that followed that first silence. It was as if I had it figured out for a second. I grasped what I feel like I constantly yearn for, some kind affirmation of everything. The water poored over the edges of the glass as I stood dumbfounded, grappling with the ubiquitous totality I thought I could only dream of.
And I don't know if it's my brain or my soul, my mind or my body, but I couldn't accept it. Rather than having my reality upturned or reaffirmed, it simply passed through the moment. And that was the moment. No, moment is not the appropriate term - because the sensation was both timeless and confined. The revelation did not occur, but it flowed through me as I stood still staring at the kitchen sink, painfully aware of everythings transience.
I think I felt infinity, and I don't really know what to do about it.
I can't seem to find my number within the confines of this scale.