“Searching for Lost Pieces of Self”

Mid-sentence and crowded by a familiar stranger, something clicks over. The fear is back. The sweat percolates just below the blank space between each collar bone, in the narrow valley between rounded temples. Rising and falling, the rhythm of the sternum picks up as the heart races and breathing becomes silently short and swift.

What am I thinking? Do I make any sense at all? Am I  being stupid? Maybe I’m just a know-it-all, a dork, focusing on a naive piece of my past plastered over my present. Will I ever be able to escape the years of name-calling and bullying that were subtly waged against me? I was helpless. I still am. Am I wearing any clothes?

Breathing to a thousand images of self-humiliation that bind my innards in a helpless knot, I just want to vanish, for everything to go away for me, for the world to stop knowing me and for I to stop knowing what I know.

A blank space waiting to be filled writhes in transformation and is softly, intimately glazed over by transient intent. The cursor moves. Stroke by stroke, my world is translated.

If only it were so simple: to capture and immortalize fleeting feelings, ever moving and adapting, encrypted by overwhelming daily encounters with someone familiar. I want to evolve this blank slate into my personal strata of meaning, where I wrestle with emotionality being cut open by glances, turned on by words, shut down by patronizing pats on the back; toward turning or not turning from dead bodies, and the inner self that both nudges me forward and kills me with self-deprecating doubt. Organizing my overextended self, much like dreams and nightmares do each night, maybe I will reduce my three-dimensional perceptions to something easier to cope with.

I skimmed an article in wee hours this morning, when the sun had yet to peak from an Eastern horizon, about how our three-dimensional reality may just be a two-dimensional one, where the world we perceive is like a hologram, and information may actually only exist in two-dimensional flatheads.

The tension between possible perceptions often throws me off balance. I’m constantly recovering from a clumsy trip in what appears to be three-dimensional space; it’s something I never quite give in to, but spontaneously incorporate into interpretive dance for anyone watching.

Sometimes the world makes me want to hide away from real-time interaction where I actively suppress screams for help, fears and desires, masking the depth of my breath with shallow suffocation. I hide from the allure of moving bodies that encapsulate peeping minds, until I breathe freely in solitary space and fill the blank slate with my secret history.

I know that all histories are subjective and mine is no different, providing only a reflection of my story which ascribes meaning to a world that possibly lacks any meaning. As a purported Homo sapiens sapiens, I invent a world and convince myself and others of its realism.

If only it were so simple — to fill these blank spaces with something beyond words, beyond symbols of meaning: a translation of something delectably perplexing and palpable.