The time when I am most afraid is just before night falls. The sun is setting, the day has finished, and this inevitable silence begins to prowl throughout the house. Everything seems to change. All begins to take shape of a form that is both unfamiliar and dull, losing any significance it had just a few hours earlier in daylight. I become aware of ever possible sound. The breeze flutters the cotton drapery. The foundation of the walls speaks softly, slowly, of its age. The tread of someone’s footsteps outside. The whistle of smoke mushrooming from the neighbors chimney. It all is incredibly frightening.
Is this it? Have we all been born into a silent world, a world where there exists a hierarchal struggle between the human experience, reality, dreams and truth? Are our souls forever confined within this hostile world where indifference precedes the mercilessness of human nature and thought?
I know I am here. Now. Awake. Asleep. Yet, my sanity still appears to be slowly slipping through the slivered cracks of the floor; the floor I trust will hold me when I choose to awake from this reverie. When I breathe, breathe these thoughts, my body becomes as lifeless as the mound of sheets I so coldly lay upon. This place, this tired place, withers away; like a train, I see it getting smaller as it pulls away. It is here, in my bed, where life’s absence of meaning seems to remove any reason for living.
I believe life to exist. Although, I am unable to prove it does, or does not. This thought that my reality has limitless tangents, in which I dictate the direction and perception of each stream, is solely secluded to my own mind. So why must I abuse such freedom with doubt and uncertainty? It is a human fear. The fear of thought. The fear that passively accepts the mundane actions of life and leaves little room for subconscious contemplation. Perhaps it is this fear that is the key to the essence of existing; existing in a missing world, missing to me and to you.
Everything begins to slow down. My thoughts quiet but remain bellowing inside my body as if it has only this one moment to speak to me. All that is left to do is lay beneath the quilts in this bed and stare out the window into a deep blue sky that has swallowed the sun for another night. Tomorrow seems unimaginable, illusory, a dream that seems to end before it has started. All becomes out of reach where I am no longer burdened with the everyday struggle to be without having to ask. An experience that feels both make-believe and awfully real. Perhaps I have reached a level of true helplessness where even the nightmare of existing, without questions and expectations, becomes increasingly intriguing.
For now I will forget the mysteries of life, my place in this universe, and retreat to a soft slumber. A slumber that takes my frightened hand and guides me to a place where fish walk on land and we all drink tea on tree branches. It is a place that is marvelous and peaceful; a place that feels more real every time I visit.
