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I had a bizarre moment last night. I was struck suddenly by a feeling both great and terrible, enormous but so decidedly unimportant and small.
It's 2:00 AM, and I'm sitting alone in my car, eating my lunch. My mp3 player is on shuffle, and "Sleep" by Imogen Heap starts to play. It's a relatively slow, contemplative little piano and voice piece... very mellow and atmospheric. It's very dark and quiet outside, but I've moved my car under one of the lights in the parking lot so I can, you know... see my lunch. I'm admiring the lovely color of a Rainier cherry, having described their color to someone very special earlier, and suddenly I just feel horribly emotional. I think, fuck, this is it-- this is all life is. It's sitting in the big dark in a small circle of light, just enough to see the lunch that you're eating alone as a gigantic corporate logo dwarfs everything around you. To be mostly blind and alone, to have nothing to share with anyone. To be so terrifying small in such a big universe, and to not even be able to appreciate the vastness of stars because of all the city smog. And so, instead of trying to pretend you see something spectacular, instead of running from that song, from that circle of light, running and running to the first house you come to and banging on the door until someone answers it, someone you can share your lunch with and talk to and feel vaguely human around... instead of doing that, you just have to admire the red/cream color of a cherry. Because you can't feel human right now. Because you can't be yourself for the greater part of your short and precious life. You simply aren't allowed. It makes no sense...
But... as bad as that sounds, I also took some small amount of comfort out of it all. The fact that I could be alone and lonely and still marvel as something as simple and stupid as the pleasing color of some fruit, that I didn't need the stars to reflect on the universe, that I could still be enamored with the things I found within it, even things that are smaller than myself....
There was something good in that.
It's 2:00 AM, and I'm sitting alone in my car, eating my lunch. My mp3 player is on shuffle, and "Sleep" by Imogen Heap starts to play. It's a relatively slow, contemplative little piano and voice piece... very mellow and atmospheric. It's very dark and quiet outside, but I've moved my car under one of the lights in the parking lot so I can, you know... see my lunch. I'm admiring the lovely color of a Rainier cherry, having described their color to someone very special earlier, and suddenly I just feel horribly emotional. I think, fuck, this is it-- this is all life is. It's sitting in the big dark in a small circle of light, just enough to see the lunch that you're eating alone as a gigantic corporate logo dwarfs everything around you. To be mostly blind and alone, to have nothing to share with anyone. To be so terrifying small in such a big universe, and to not even be able to appreciate the vastness of stars because of all the city smog. And so, instead of trying to pretend you see something spectacular, instead of running from that song, from that circle of light, running and running to the first house you come to and banging on the door until someone answers it, someone you can share your lunch with and talk to and feel vaguely human around... instead of doing that, you just have to admire the red/cream color of a cherry. Because you can't feel human right now. Because you can't be yourself for the greater part of your short and precious life. You simply aren't allowed. It makes no sense...
But... as bad as that sounds, I also took some small amount of comfort out of it all. The fact that I could be alone and lonely and still marvel as something as simple and stupid as the pleasing color of some fruit, that I didn't need the stars to reflect on the universe, that I could still be enamored with the things I found within it, even things that are smaller than myself....
There was something good in that.