Part 1: Egg

It’s strange to possess this kind of energy again. Sertraline to acid, acid to blood, blood to body — I feel it. I have energy again — a stubborn, prickly energy to which I’ve granted full reign. There I go, moving. Climbing. Handholds have been carved into the mountainside for me.

It seems, now that this energy possesses me, that I have become annoying. 

My family and my girlfriend are my triggers. Their presence relaxes me — laxatives for consciousness — I spill sounds and songs. Without intervention, I would never stop, but I understand that to others, repetitive noises don’t bridge the synapse gap. On Christmas Eve, I was particularly annoying. Maybe it was the excitement leading into the holiday, the cool weather, my break from work. Whatever it was, they snapped. My family informed me that I had to stop. And so with everything I had, as sense fought impulse, I realized I must retreat to my imagination. I found the champion of unreasonable stimulants was unreasonable fantasy, so I coaxed my energy into the egg.

So dreadful the drive home. The inevitable entering of the den, a regain of control, impulse like ions in the particle accelerator of my brain, shutting down for the night, time to slow down. I take my time settling into my windowless room. My pills working inhibitors overtime, mortar to brick, saving my social psyche, but at a cost — near inability to be alone. Alone or away, prior to pills, had no difference. Now, I longed for the sun behind the clouds to beat into my face, to make me sweat, to make me uncomfortable. It’s this realization that has made me dread my family’s “We need you to be quiet” — it’s bloodless delivery, soft cadence, a hand on my hand. I must be quiet which means I must be alone, so in closing my eyes, I attempted to find my Great Observer. I dimpled my tongue as language melted to noise. Boiling and boiling — I evaporated my thoughts over and over and over until I finally fell still. My jaw released my tongue, and then I was there, floating within the egg.

The egg protected me. How easily I floated there. Thoughts of all kinds bounced off the shell. There was no effort required from me any longer. 

The egg was not perfect, however. There were cracks for sure. I could not see where, but I knew. Some thoughts drifted between the cracks. I guided them out. At this seeping volume, I could handle anything, and I could handle anything with compassion. It was a lovely feeling, but not — I realized — sustainable. Encased in amber, I was frozen, now asleep, dreams like atoms — casualties of entropy — unable to reach me.

I have not tried to locate the egg again. I am too afraid of granting too much power to the Observer. How warm the albumin made me feel. How easy it would be to stay eternally unborn. To give up. It could not be worth the risk.

It was familiar, however. The feelings were not new. It was an unrefined, yet pure indifference. A recognizable, womb-like nursery — I could freely exist, weightlessly, blamelessly. I had no one to care for, not even myself, and nothing to do; nothing was what was expected of me. 

I was a child. 

The balancing act of my youth — I could effortlessly state change from a habitual, love-of-life excitement to the distant egg. I passed to and from as needed, like channels through a membrane, high concentration to low concentration. What was it then that carried me against the gradient? 

Eventually, though, the integrity of the egg was jeopardized. I was growing. I could feel cracks as my body rubbed against the shell. Amniotic fluid seeped into the void, replaced by air that carried the keys to consciousness. Insecurity from doubt, worth and worthlessness, anxiety and anger, pain from pleasure — they entered my space. I could hear as the walls expanded to their limits. My mind and body, too large to live, contorted to the shape of the egg. My knees pressed into my lungs, and I lost the ability to breathe. It was then, in this lethal fetal position, I accepted I would be born to the world and its impurities. Another passenger for the unkindly knowledge of life, I will live on.

I clawed at the shell, fought, until I was able to feel the outside. My fingers poked through the cracks, and I widened the exit way until I was spit  out — ugly, naked, and weak — surrounded by eggshells like shattered glass. Here I was, world. Here I go. Be careful where you step.

A decade later, when I found the egg again, it took weeks of reflection to understand why it felt so familiar, and why I was able to project my consciousness there so easily. I know I won’t have the same transcendental ability ever again — that is only achievable with childlike innocence — but I know I can come close. I have hope. I found a piece of peace and took a bite. Suffering is familiar and inviting. To try something new — to enter an unknown — is terrifying. I must accept the help from those who see my pain as close to the way I feel it. Have that conversation, make that call, take that pill, read that book, take that step, enter that place, feel that feeling and realize…hey, this is familiar, too.

Part 2: Lizard

Under a hedge, an egg moves. Teeth marks line the inside of the shell like tallies. A tooth nicks away part of the membrane, and sunlight bleeds onto Its translucent skin. It writhes, bites helplessly at the hole, until finally it emerges in soil. The dirt freezes its limbs in place, but it does not want to move. The lizard sits still, absorbing the dampness, like moss along the riverside, it exists. Its black, bulging eyes adjust enough to sleep.

Hunger. It scans the brick path that lines the perimeter of the house. Heat rises above the orange brick, unsteady the surface seems. Hunger. It follows the soil under the hedge leaves, dripping and steaming and alive, the hedge paints the path taken. Hunger. An ant reveals itself. Out of the weeds between the bricks, it crawls. It waits, it crawls, it waits. The ant analyzes the heat, alive as well. The ant moves deliberately but unpredictably like smoke curling up above a flame, connected but detached, as if avoiding the heat waves themselves using the heat’s unpredictable nature against it.

The ant — it waits, it crawls. It waits, it crawls. The lizard darts from the dirt, a root from the soil, its first pursuit at life. But the heat knows and takes advantage of the rookie. The heat knows — in nature, it is instinct above reason — and the scolding brick path singes the lizard’s limbs and the lizard feels sticky against the ground like food. Hunger. With desperate leaps, the lizard moves into the shadow which grows where the sun kisses the roof, alive, swallowing the heat beside the house. 

Afraid, the lizard rapidly searches for where the soil connects with the shadow, but it doesn’t. Instead, a drum rhythm approaches from the south. The gate swings open, and the lizard — without the experience to wait — darts toward anything. The anything, in this case, is a door, swinging open, and a shadow darker than the rest rises overtop of him briefly and disappears under a foot now one step inside the house. The lizard scurries behind it into the home.

I have a gift. The gift of empathy. But it is an empathy toward inanimate things. A receipt crumpled on the dash of a locked car; a final green bean pushed off the plate into the trash so close to completing its journey to consumption; a candle forgotten on the metro as the doors slid closed behind me  — all the same they could make me cry. 

I grant these things individuality. They are individual, therefore, they are worthy of feeling, and more so, worthy of my feeling. This isn’t a bad thing, though. I may feel sad when I don’t need to be, but this is a gift. I find myself always working toward deeper relationships, deeper understanding. Everything deserves to reach its destination. I cannot stand the suffering of others; rather, I cannot stand for it. I must do something, at the least. I am filing that receipt, eating that green bean, and lighting that candle at home. This is how I give meaning to life, by giving meaning to everything around me. Purposeful.

Why, then, is it so difficult to give myself meaning? 

There are even villains that I feel empathy toward. I cannot help feeling bad for them. A serial killer in an interrogation room crying, the cocky point guard losing the championship, — all the same, I can’t help but feel sad! So why do I find it so difficult to feel this way about myself?

It is my days alone that are most often suffered.  There is nothing out of place, no one to feel bad for — except me. And in these moments I thrash against this thing inside me which is tugging me from below. Waves of doubt and death overwhelm me as I spend my time alone bobbing, above and below, an endless floating away. 

The ground is always cold. It is unnatural. There is no moisture, but the condensation under the refrigerator. That is where the lizard sits. It awaits gravity’s gift: the precious droplets that form above its head. 

The concrete below stares blankly. The walls too tall, too slick to maneuver. The lizard does not attempt an escape for the ground is too unfamiliar, the lights so synthetically bright, and it so scared, so scared. It is all unfeeling. It all offers no response to its movement, its curiosity. The lizard decides the world is metal and nylon and rubber and mimics this soullessness by lying still and still alone.

It is adventure that heals, but an adventure as fragile as the word can carry.

A drive to the grocery store without my wallet. A ten minute stretching session. Or even a good stare at the summer moon in the backyard just long enough for my thighs to feel sticky and my hair to matte itself against my forehead. Really, anything capable of making me feel less corpse-like which, in turn, distracts me from my aching loneliness.

This time, my adventure consists of a super fizzy drink from the garage refrigerator. 

I jerk the covers off my body and lurch my feet into the air and onto the floor (violence and momentum are key to escape the coffin). Each step I take is like a tree being shaken after the first snow. My naked branches are being exposed. A “What are you doing here?” is capable of felling me. I enter the garage and the light flicks on. In the fridge, my savior: a glass-bottled sparkling water to make me feel alive. I pop open the bottle with a flathead from the toolbox and immediately take three quick, deep gulps, letting the bubbles burn all the way down. 

This proved to be an introspective ritual as I began to think about suffering. The only noise to be heard was the carbon dioxide escaping the bottle and the carbon dioxide escaping my lungs, and like white noise, this was just enough to present these buried thoughts at the forefront of my mind because although barely audible, at least it wasn’t silence.

I am not worthy of suffering. This thought was born from my unhappiness, but a firm unhappiness, unshakable even in moments where I should be happy, or even in moments where I am happy. The unhappiness persists, a constant, and because of this, I feel I am not worthy of suffering.

This thought is self-propagating, a coefficient against my unhappiness. It feeds it, but it, already satiated, gorged, and growing in size, disperses to new habitats, stealing from other sources of my energy. Why am I, who has it all, allowing myself to suffer; rather, not allowing myself to enjoy anything? I notice a shriveled up carcass of a lizard poking from under the fridge door. It is alone, it has no food, no natural light, no family, no dirt, no water, no life, nothing. It is deserving of suffering, and I somehow feel jealous of its cease of existence. It has nothing to prove, and no one to prove it had suffered.

I am obsessed with the thought of my life on paper. An audit reviewing my experience versus my feelings — the verdict a harsh and resounding “Selfishness!” confirming that I don’t deserve to suffer. I sit on this thought for a while until the motion sensor light of the garage shuts off, and I’m suddenly blind. I inhale, focusing the air into my brain like a bubble expanding from my thalamus outward, squeezing these bad thoughts out until I’m blank like the room around me. I stand, and the lights flick back on. 

The lizard moves solely on instinct. It searches every inch of the floor before climbing objects, more unlikely to contain any sustenance, but necessary. It only pauses when the lights flick on briefly, an involuntary shock from the burn of the bricks days ago.

It searches until the energy it felt could no longer bear to be lost. It crawls into the center of the garage, a point that would be considered most vulnerable to predators (away from walls, away from cover). It thinks of luck and it thinks of compassion and it thinks of the burn of the bricks until its body decides it cannot expend any more energy on thinking, and so it thinks of nothing.

Today’s adventure takes place at the beach with a friend, and while making plans feels like Atlas’s earth, accepting plans I can more easily force myself to do.

And so, here at the beach I decide to roll my towel into a pillow and lie directly in the sand. My back chars as the rays of the sun penetrate my chest and fill into the sand beneath me burns and burns and burns until it doesn’t, and then I flip over. 

After a day of listening to the waves and a deep appreciation for my friend, we decide to head back to his apartment. He fits the key into the door and pauses, and I notice he is staring at the “Welcome!” doormat in front of his shoes. I begin to ask if something is wrong, when I’m interrupted by an unsettling bang.

“These guys are always trying to get inside,” he says, and then I see, as if circled by the “o” in “Welcome!”, a lifeless baby lizard. He swipes his foot across the mat, and the lizard disappears from my view, its gray skin disappearing into the stone floor. 

At this moment, I am disembodied, transcending two forms. One hovering above the lizard’s carcass. Time speeds as its body lies on the stone then collapses into sustenance then skin and bone where it’s rejected by even the ants that traverse the stone. I can feel a tightness in my throat and a twitch in my nose and I can’t help the tears that drip from my face. They pour onto the dried remains, and I stare, longer and longer, as the sun sets and rises, until the weight of my grief dissolves the creature into nothingness. I sit and cry and hope my tears — like a storm over a desiccating shrub — revives the lizard separating this overwhelming dread from my being and snapping me back into flesh.

Instead, I’m told to come inside, and my body carefully steps over the welcome mat as it enters the home. As the door closes, a rubber band sting settles in my stomach, and I am back, solely, in the apartment.

I drive home consumed by thoughts of the lizard. A creature so indifferent to my existence — so indifferent to its own — caused me so much sadness. It passed without suffering — without even the knowledge of suffering — yet it occupies an office within me worthy of sovereignty. 

I pick apart the scenario: the arbiter, the existing, the observer. The arbiter has deemed the existing unworthy of existence. And, simply, it is done, and it dies, and the observer is left to suffer, for he had no say. But the existing, it was just a lizard. It never felt. It never thought. It only acted on instinct, moved then stopped, over and over, until it was fed and satisfied, able to rest. The only thing it was capable of, was existing, and that it did, until the arbiter decided it didn’t. 

But existence! It is enough! Alive — the lizard, like me, exists. How different are me and it? So who am I, who is anyone, to arbitrate existence? Compassion rarely exists in nature. Hunger above all, but compassion can exist within me. And now I realize, compassion is the key for preserving existence, the one thing in common between man and lizard.   

Compassion! — the medium for the lizard’s soil plunge, the moonlight nap, the burn of the bricks baked under the sun. The link between a life of suffering and a life of love — compassion for all and everything and me the same…maybe me especially.

The car ahead of me on the unlit highway made its exit, and as the red lights disappeared behind the trees, I was swallowed by an endless blackness. Deeper inside of me a lizard sank. How desperately it wanted to live, and how easy it would be for me to unplug the eclipse, drain the darkness with sunlight, and let it exist alongside me. It, an inconvenience, sharing my sustenance, sharing my existence, but it, alive, trying and trying to swim up and up and up and up and up…

The garage light clicks on above me as I enter. I notice the lizard in the center of the room. I bend down, and my head’s shadow surrounds its body like a puddle. 

The lizard is neither worthy nor deserving of suffering. It has simply suffered. 

I reach my hand toward it with a strange tenderness. I extend my fingertips, and a natural warmth begins to wrap itself around the lizard’s body. I pause. The heat pours over the lizard like melted chocolate. My existence mingles with its as I press my finger — impressionless — into its side with a sweetness. The lizard takes a quick step away.

Alive! I quickly rest my hand on the ground in front of the lizard and brush its tail with the other. The lizard leaps onto my palm, and relief settles over me. I turn and open the door.

The stinging, pale light of the garage is replaced by the smooth glow of the moon, and I allow its dimness to tune my vision enough to see the lizard in my hand. How small and how afraid. I abandon my bitterness.

Do not worry, little creature, I shall carry you outside my home.

Part 3: Sun

I think to myself, A month an hour.

Blue-light. Copper veins pumping energy into screens emitting blue-light. Through my lens, through my pupils, onto my retina, absorbed by cones and rods churning blue into blood through my brain and through my body like venom from viper fangs. 

My clock winds back one month. 

I can feel the effects already. My brain is expanding, pushing into my eyes so that my eyelids don’t fit right. A blankness occupies my mind in recollection. My tongue is dimpled at the edges like squeezed clay. I am being molded into the shape of my surroundings, forced into overnight poses, dry at the joints in the morning, contorting and cracking and exposing my gummy center. 

Nine hours of work, nine months of my life.

In the evening, I read, yet even then I sit perfectly still with my elbows on the table and my feet flat. My head is tilted back — an attempt to reset the hours of craning over monitors — swiping the words through the barely open slits of my eyes, peering horizontally onto the pages. Like springs, I stuff words between my brain and its cage. But I cannot hold this pose long. I am restless, so I lie in my bed, twisting my head to get it to fit right on the top of my spine.  

Four hours of missed sleep, four months of my life.

My time awake is a journey upstream. Rock to rock, distraction to distraction, I cling to the surface to breathe and forget the ticking clock. But eventually time peels me away from the stone, and I drift along in the current, a cognitive glide, until I manage to hold on once more. 

But the clock keeps ticking. It is not possible to see how much time remains. I can only guess how many months have been torn from my timeline as I ever-approach the fray.

It cannot be said, however, that I swim with the current. There are moments where I let my limbs go limp, and my fingertips brush against the smooth stones, and my breathing freezes in the cold shock of the water so that when I close my eyes, I am not alive, not dead, but water itself. But always, and always with a gasp, I find my landing and carry myself out, and sit on the stone — even stand — until I know I am alive and I am capable. 

Because of the month-losses I must endure from necessary activities, I have grown to possess an aversion to risk. I must limit my losses where I can. I concede to the law of suffering — eventually, I will suffer, and subsequently completed pursuits heighten the chances of that suffering. Every car driven brings me closer to a crash. Every step taken onto a balcony brings me closer to a fall. Every medication taken brings me closer to a withdrawal. An unending avoidance of living in pursuit of living longer. 

Here is my purpose: I am a prophet for anguish; not to inflict, not to nourish, not to exemplify, not to save, but to soak in the flames, steel wool ablaze, a burning bush clinging to the charring bits and pieces of nastiness from the world, so that others do not question the loveliness of creation. The sea has parted for me. Collapse — in a whisper — collapse.

* * * 

It is almost eight in the morning. The air has not yet grown heavy, and it stays that way a little longer than usual. There is a peculiar feeling — before the sun’s beams have reached the surface, before the dew has lifted from the grass, and the gnats take a bit longer to fly — when I know winter is approaching. I can take advantage of my sweaters and the slower stir of households and enjoy the undisturbed air of the morning.

I take a couple moments, and let the cool oxygen introduce itself to my lungs. My tongue goes dry after a few breaths, so I close my lips, feeling the prickly saliva seep back through my tastebuds. Finally, I get into the car. 

In silence I take to the road. The empty Sunday streets make me feel a loneliness I often search for during the week. The tire rubber kicks asphalt with a brown-noise hum. I sink into the sound. 

From under the weight of my thoughts I slip out of the car. The cool air crawls on every exposed surface of skin. Seconds stretch to their limits, stuffed with sensation like time capsules — insurance on the unmemorable — I can dig and dig and dig until I hit tin where I can crack the seal open, down in the depths, and feel the intimate wrap of the cool air around my ankles, listen to the friction between the palm leaves, blink the spots from my eyes after long, bright mornings… There is nothing that occupies my mind but the cold.

I realize the clock is frozen.

My body begs to stay in this moment. My heartbeat rises as I trek through the church parking lot. 

How come, how come, how come.

My body protests against destination. Every step like lifting my feet from of the tide. 

How come, how come, how come, how come.

My body freezes in front of the church doors. The metal door handle tingles against my fingertips — a last ditch effort to savor the stillness.

How come, how come, how come.

I pull the door and thaw the hands of time.

The main wing of the church building is under construction, so service takes place in an annex. Since there is not enough space, chairs are set up in the courtyard. A tent shades these seats on brighter days.

I spend a moment in the back of the church as the piano awakens the congregation in a forte. The voices of two singers join its chords. Admittedly, the music is my motivation to come to mass every Sunday. It pours through my ears like a chilly gust of wind, I often find myself with goosebumps. The combination of music and silence and ritual moves me into a meditative thought where I can focus on singing and healing and answering. There are 3 weeks of construction remaining, so I decide to take advantage of the outdoor seating.

The door takes two tugs, and I am sucked through them like an open airlock into the winter air. I seat myself at the shade’s edge. I can barely see past the glass reflection through the annex windows, so I opt to close my eyes and try my best to make out the cracked voices of the speakers. I manage to catch a couple phrases, but the waveform speech blends into noise like a bedtime story — I sink into the numbness.

The simple rise and fall of the congregation does not move my muscles enough. I bob on the surface of consciousness.

How I wish I could stay in this space forever. The tightrope walk over the going and the gone. A moment in purgatory, impossible to hold, not quite awake, not quite asleep, an ever dripping titrate ebbing me into a pink slumber. Let me stay drifting, drifting…

I awake and bounce to my feet, late to follow the ritual procedures. 

It takes a brief second to realize my teeth were chattering. The stygian shade under the tent had made its way through the last of my vessels. It was then I thought to head back inside. But yet again I could not move. Part embarrassment, part sadness but equal parts me — I could not move from my spot. I could imagine the families watching me sleepily ignore the cues to stand or respond or sit or kneel. Staring through the one-way mirror glass of the annex like an experiment. Look. Look at him pass.

I forced my teeth closed, a feeble attempt at looking unbothered, but my teeth felt brittle as chalk. I pressed my chin to my chest. 

It was then I noticed the break of the shade. Light had survived the day’s grayness and slipped through the space between the tent and the roof’s tiles, stamping itself above the shade like milk froth over coffee. I could feel the white tendrils reaching into the blackness, pulling at my shoes from the depths, beckoning me to mix bitter and sweet into something neither, something needed. The congregation sat, and I moved my chair into the sunlight and let the warmth embed itself within me. 

Brush against canvas, it coats every surface of my skin. 

The sunlight and the frigidness, a perfect accompaniment. The equilibrium sizzled through my body. I could feel it all dissolving — the blue-light, the numbness, the exhaustion, the shame — from ice to steam, but positioned in between indefinitely. 

I understand the simplicity of creation, day one. All born will be healed underneath the sun, my healer.

In perfect juxtaposition, I invite the sunlight into my pores. The choir from the speakers blend into the breeze and into me. The gear train of the clock of my life unwinding, unwinding until I am new. Amen — in a whisper — amen.