Separation

It feels like I'm paralyzed. Like my mind is frozen. Like I'm in a crumbled statue in Atlantis watching the fish swim by, unable to cry out to the world about the treasure that surrounds me.

The fact of the matter is this: my mind is so tangled and twisted and knotted and it feels like nothing ever gets out. Everything cancels. The functions of thought overlap and destroy each other and all I hear and feel and live is static, soul-crushing static.

We're in the music hall now. Winding stairs, an enormous, empty lobby with a small bar, the whole nine yards. At this point I'm just an edifice. Dad was complaining about being late. Whatever. The seats were damn near empty when we arrived.

They played Mozart or Bach or something. I wasn't listening too hard. My intertwined neurons had yet to converge on a probably coherent thought. What matters now and always it to keep fighting. Fight against the knot-makers. Fight against a reality and a society where the brain traps itself in an unescapable cell. What is there to do? Nothing one fleshy tomb in eight billion can.

Music ebbs and flows. I forget who I am and dissolve, let it replace me as we become one homogeneous nothing. A combination of waves. The most unique and yet least interesting arrangement. The music becomes frantic, and here I am half-dazed thinking I see another me.

My mind begins to escape from my body. The music seems to separate me from my soul. It picks up; I panic. Here I am sitting a row or two out on the balcony, looking at myself and my ethereal twin. I feel like I'm watching my future play out.

I can feel my body getting anxious. I twitch and try to get comfortable, but the music is trying to pull me out. Come closer, it says. I feel like I'm between two realities, like I'm both man and ghost.

Intermission hits and I wake up. I get as far away from the balcony railing as I can. The ghost is trying to pull me over, but I resist. I am alive.

Back to the seat now. We've been here for what feels like forever, and I'm not sure how much more I can handle.

The ether pulls me closer. My soul is watching the shadow of my body jump towards the music. It's getting harder and harder to resist.

I begin to wonder how I got here. I've been here long enough to question why. Why this soul? Why this body, with a brain that obliterates its own thoughts?

I'm about to follow the ghost. Follow my destiny. I can feel my hands beginning to lift. The music is gone. Has it always been gone? The rest of the hall begins to fade. The gilded sculptures, the ritzy crowd, the calloused hands of the musicians, everything blurs and melts into colors. Then one color. The entire world is just a deconstruction of one amalgamation of color.

I can't tell where I am. A sound akin to a metronome or a cuckoo clock begins to fill the color. As I listen, reality begins once again to reconstruct. I find myself back in my chair, and everyone else out of theirs, clapping. In a daze, I walk out of the hall.

Why was I chosen to defy my fate? I am back now to the quotidian ambience that describes my essence and scrambles my psyche. The design of it all is frustrating.

My mind wanders to itself. The twisting vines that constrain my free thought concede, just for a moment, to ground me. The apparition has all but faded, but my mind still escapes its cage when the probabilities align. When reality collapses on itself. But I'm still here. I am alive.