Anthology of the Self - Entry IV
Dead Faces & Hiked Places
I’m not alive and I don’t even know what it means to be.
There is no singular I.
There is no defining point or experience on which I can be established.
I’m a composite of creations, a reptile drawn towards matter
Beyond which I am fog.
I am a consumer who eats lives, a parasite of dreams.
I'm a jaded mess who drinks the electric milk.
I’m fat from it, maybe a point of praise, but flesh isn’t substance or mind.
There’s no cutting emotion from this way of being.
Still there's a longing for an intangible something.
There’s nothing to react to it, this is just how the fog gathers.
The wind flitters beautifully through cloth, but is ultimately fleeting.
It’s not how the cloth *is*.
It’s all just fleeting clouds.
Occasionally memorable shapes with no means to linger.
Yet the clouds keep moving towards something.
Warping, twisting, dying, swelling.
I’m flesh made of food and mind made of dreams.
I is a stolen substance that thinks it is.
It’s asinine to pick a single fish to reel in while the salmon actively migrate.
I don’t want one fish. I don’t want one dream.
One is plagiarism, many looks like “I”.
I can’t define a Rorschach in flux.
It’s just fucking stupid.
Yet, in being nothing, it feels like I can’t be.
My lived life is fog, clouds, fish.
It’s occurring within miasma, contextually sub-fiction.
I feel through dreams, communicate through dreams...
...and I fear through nightmares I never dreamt.
It’s impossible to reckon or feel through my own.
No amount of making or meditating creates blunt visibility.
I write and live in the creation of dreams for another. Suffer for someone else.
I knew I wasn’t the physicality, but I don’t think I’m the mind either.
As I mime, I seek sometime where I’m in this paradigm?
My accomplishments must be through a screen to feel real. To be claimed.
It’s a pernicious state to be one who acts with abundance for no windfall.
Life passes by, but it’s not mine.
I’m dreary eyes watching the mind and body churn.
Naught but an observer to my own reality.
I communicate and move thoughtlessly.
It’s easy to think the real I is sleeping somewhere else.
I have no friends, just experienced voices and faces.
I’ve been nowhere, just seen pictures.
I am a vicarious entity, a tired one.
Death is just bedtime for the meta-framework.
Credits roll for the different I’s performed.
The movie’s too long. I can’t remember what happened back then.
If the self performed can’t even be mustered again, was it ever even me?
Was it ever really something I loved and cared for if it won't linger back in?
How can I be what I was if all that remains is spaces and faces.
But those faces, too, are dead images.
They’ve grown up.
Space is all I have. Locales of existence.
The physical, the mystical, the digital.
I’m not an I, I’m an eye (regarding space).
Space is the opposite of people.
It’s static, even as it mutates, because it isn’t exclusively physical.
It’s in the feelings, the dreams, the sounds.
Spaces, maybe more so than people, are alive because of this.
Space knows what it is.
It’s always been definable by the observer.
Tangible non-carnal purpose.
At least regarding the physicality of people.
Behind the eyes, I imagine they live, reminisce.
Or maybe they similarly can’t put a pinpoint in things.
Maybe they’re all glazed eyes to a world of lights and jade.
But maybe they have found their continuity, now definable without the vicarious.
Or maybe they all suffer in a pitch-black silence and don’t ask why.
“That’s just part of me”.
It hurts to know my stomach is only so big.
That it’s impossible to taste every dream.
I’ll never learn most of the souls whose dreams I had the pleasure of tasting.
I can’t pass my days with the most beautiful dreams...
...and the most tortured nightmares.
I think we’re all hikers in the snow.
Behind us, near endless footprints.
When we meet someone, we give them the prints under our boots.
When we’re involved with someone, we walk the same trail for a while.
But sometimes...
the footprints we’ve left behind us are the only thing we’re recalled by.
And sometimes...
others want to pull us back to those first prints where we met.
To circle us back to the impression we made.
To halt the speed of our dwindling adventure.
But of course we don't want to let them down.
It’s far too warm to walk hand-in-hand with someone for a change.
So we oblige, but in the infinite blizzard, we can’t find the spot again.
So we circle and spiral for days, sometimes years.
Seraching for a self which has long since been snowed over.
But maybe we don’t and we keep walking, with new people as they come.
People can often be a beneficial company.
When they know more than we do in some regard.
When we hold hands long enough that our boots begin to look similar.
The footprints behind me keep fading...
But those I walked alongside will still be there...
Somewhere out there.
That only will ever know me by the prints we shared.
And it hurts, because it almost starts to feel like we never shared a path at all.
Because I’m not the footprints. I never was the footprints.
I’ve always been the shoes.
But no one ever saw the shoes, just the impressions it trailed behind it.
The impressions that eventually even the shoes can’t recognize as their own.
I mourn for those I left behind. For those I call by their past prints.
For those who think they know the shape of my shoe.
For those who saw my footprint wrong.
For those I will never get back.
For those whose footprints I loathed.
I do all this, ponder all this, succumb to all this, knowing they don’t know me.
Because even if they didn’t know me, it’s warm thinking they did.