Uncharacteristically I had set a morning alarm for myself these past few days. Today I woke up a couple of hours after it had went off with no recollection of snoozing. I’d been on a streak of three consecutive good days but I could tell today was not going to be one of those days no matter how much effort I would put in.
I lay in my bed for a few more hours, only half covered by the empty duvet cover; kind of chilly with goose flesh but too depressed to be bothered to pull it over myself. I hate these early morning hours of tossing and turning, unsure whether I’m half-asleep or half-awake.
A thousand half-formed images buffeting me every time I turn from one side to the other; a simulation running in my head of every possible course of action I might take during the day, none of which I would take, and unnecessarily taking into consideration the unexpected and unlikely; interspersed with thoughts of self-loathing and all encompassing doubt.
Blue, blue, blue in a lighter and darker hue, but always it is–blue. If I try and grab hold of one the many thoughts without fail every time it spins me around and shoves me against the same impenetrable wall of hopelessness. I’m surrounded on all sides before my mission has even begun.
At roughly 0730 hours I finally kicked the duvet off to the side, got up, stretched in the darkness and had my customary first thing in the morning: a cold shower. One of life’s consistent small pleasures and usually the highlight of my day. It makes me both alert and calms me down. The racing thoughts hadn’t actually gone anywhere of course; they were just distilled into the one overpowering thought of despair, one huge block of BLUE in the middle of the room that I couldn’t possibly ignore.
After opening the curtains to get a better look at the blue block in daylight I saw that it was raining outside and I almost forgot all about it. It was still there but all my thoughts, good and bad, were weighed down by the rain like the lightest of feathers that became wet. No breeze could lift them up and blow them in swirls around me anymore.
I don’t know why rain has this effect on me, but I love it. I love rainy days. I dream of moving someplace it rains often; a consistent light rain, not a passing monsoon season. When it rains I am incapable of worrying about anything, I am awash with tranquillity and I find myself occupied with a single purpose: to pay attention to the rain.
I knew I had to get out and walk in the rain, so I wolfed down a bowl of outmeal for breakfast, grabbed my umbrella and headed out. To passersby it must’ve looked like I was beside myself for I couldn’t help myself from smiling like an idiot for the entire duration of my walk. I love rain.
After three quarters of an hour of wandering around the neighbourhood I stopped at the local supermarket. Not to buy anything, I didn’t take my wallet with me, but just to sit down for a while and pay attention to the people in the same way I had paid attention to the rain on this lazy Sunday morning. But since it was a Sunday morning not a lot of people were there so I wound up mostly staring at the ceiling and admiring the store’s cable management up there.
Before I left there came to the checkout a heavyset late middle-aged man, with graying locks slicked back with his natural grease, and he struck up a conversation with the cashier lady who was in her early thirties and seemed to have a passing familiarity with the man.
I wasn’t paying attention to their conversation until I heard a change of tone in the cashier lady’s voice. The older man had some personal trouble and was getting it off his chest. The cashier lady responded with attentive sympathy and hollered a “cheer up” as the man was taking his leave. He left a different man than when he came in.
This probably sounds like the most banal thing imaginable to you but I was astonished. Astonished I say! I immediately thought that had I been in her shoes I would not have had the m4d sk1llz to react in that manner. At best I would have tried to question the man in a manner-of-fact way to offer some quasi-rational solution to his problem. Most likely I would’ve been stumped and just ignored him.
If I couldn’t have offered care to him I doubt I can offer it to myself; I am unable to provide this kind of care to myself and I am not as self-reliant as I’d like to think I am. And I am undervaluing people such as the cashier lady. Up till this point I had thought their antennae was broken when it was in fact listening to something else entirely, and I’m not convinced it’s all noise either.
Is this emotional perceptiveness something that can be cultivated?
My reality consists of objects, ideas and my own self-will (or the nagging feeling of lack thereof). I may acquire objects and ideas by using the world to my advantage but my will doesn’t interact with the wills of other people. No clashes, no conflicts, no mutual goals, no shared experiences, no intertwining of any sort, no meeting. I don’t live in a social reality at all. I live in unreality. Who’s I? Nobody. Without a body there is no life. I think in order not to exist.
I have a cautious desire to know what it is like to construct a shared reality. I have lost myself in a lack of relations. What would it be like to allow another life to enter my world and allow mine to enter theirs? If and how would it alter my perceptions? alter the I who is perceiving? The thought of discovering scares me.
Despite my best efforts I cannot distance myself from this cold and detached way of approaching, but never actually fully apprehending, my own desire for a meeting with another, and I feel like it undermines the genuine sentiment behind it and I despise myself for it. This is not just a vain curiosity: I wish to know if I can become something more or am I confined till death into being who I am because I have a deficiency.
Maybe life doesn’t have to strictly mean other humans. There’s plenty of life to be found in the world. But as I’ve gotten older I feel like I’ve gradually lost my sensitivity to the finer points of life and with it my ability to enter into a relation with the world of things. That’s what I loved most about my brief psychotic episode some years back. The world was filled with potential encounters everywhere with anything. And every time I’d have a meeting I would after the fact get a powerful creative urge to immortalise it and petrify it so that I could enjoy it later as a thing.
What choice do we have but to settle for what is not as fulfilling?
“It was a light spring shower on a Sunday morning.”
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