To Whom It May Concern:
If you’re reading this, than I can safely assume you are in fact the ineffable, formless and unending force that guides all reality. Hi.
Before anything else, let me just say: kudos on the Universe. It’s really quite impressive. An eternal waltz of colorful majesty encased in an unfeeling void. Its grandeur can only be matched by its delicate grace, the limitless sprawl of its wonders by the unforgiving black that expels them forward. Its patient movements and bounteous hues often rewarded by collisions of unimaginable ferocity or their light devoured by the very purity of darkness. It’s a grandiose example of harmonious contradiction, of laws and exceptions. Of course you haven’t let my kind evolve a whole lot in the last few thousand years, so we’re only able to pick up a tiny bit of this. Since our sensory perception is roughly on par with a bucket of bread mold, we picked a bunch of nearby stars and pretended they were pictures of crabs and centaurs. I don’t get it either.
It’s also worth mentioning that everything that follows is really just said for my own benefit (though I have yet to figure out what that could possibly be). I presume that you already know everything, so you’ve read this and shrugged it off before, well… everything, I suppose. So I’m sorry in advance if any of this comes across as pedantic or ignorant.
Lately I’ve felt a bit like the universe, minus the dignity and splendor. It often feels as though my life has turned into a huge series of enormous contradictions. Every attempt I’ve made, sometimes at the behest of others and others mine own, to choke the stagnation that’s been threatening to swallow me whole has led to nothing or failed to even begin. Yet giving up is thoroughly more difficult than mustering up the willpower to try again. The intimacy of human connection continues to allude me in spite of numerous attempts, which may or may not be just as well. Affection tends to confuse me, as I feel I’ve done so little to deserve it, let alone keep it (I happen to enjoy an extreme version of a condition we made up called the Porcupine’s Dilemma; see below, in the unlikely event you’re not familiar with it)*. And yet at times the loneliness is so crushing I could probably find myself pleasantly comfortable at the bottom of the Mariana Trench.
I can think of only three people in whose grasp and touch I’ve felt genuine solace or safety. This provides an endless buffet of guilt for me, since I’m so ass-headedly stubborn and distrustful when it comes to my own addiction to misery (which many frequently mistake for enjoyment) that so many of those in my inner-ring, alpha specimens all, have given so very much to try and cure me of it only to find a hopelessly, infuriatingly uninterested patient.
My world, tiny as it is, feels as though it’s forgotten I’m still here. And if it hasn’t, it’s trying with everything it’s got to drive me out of my tiny little mind. And the guilt at even the thought of sharing any of this with anyone is so overpowering that a relevant simile probably still hasn’t even entered the grand ether of thought that I’m pretending is a thing for the sake of this paragraph.
I realize that balance is your sole, for lack of a less mortal word, concern. Positive and negative in equilibrium, without beginning or end, all things in constant impermanence, is how it all must be. I’m just asking for a little bit of clarification and insight. If my insignificant purpose in this grand motion is, in fact, meant to nothing more than a series ironic of pratfalls, it would helpful to know for many an eventual decision-making. Well, just one, really.
Thank you for Shakespeare and cinnamon
*An old joke that begins thusly: ‘How do porcupines mate?’ The answer that might have been funny one time a thousand years ago: ‘Very carefully.’
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock