entropy

You’re laying on your back in a green field looking up at a blue sky and that white goal post. You’re aware of the tall oak trees in your peripherals that seem to ground your body just when you felt you could float away into the abyss of the azure stratosphere. There is a soft breeze and you can hear the rustling of leaves and the distant clamoring of children playing in the distance. There is a void in the air. Your breathing has been short. You’re on the brink of a thought that has been scratching at your frontal lobe the entire day. As if crossing a road in front of a moving vehicle- you are suddenly hit. Blindsided with a wave of warmth that permeates throughout your vessel, filling your veins with a contradiction of equal parts anxiety and elation. Goosebumps have formed over the entire surface of your skin and you are chilled to the bone. Your white flesh looks foreign and you look to your hands for clarity. This shock of feeling starts in your gut, and slowly moves its way up to your chest and into your heart and rests there for a few seconds before taking up permanent residence in your throat. This is now a ball in your esophagus and you start to get dizzy, your mind is running like mad, faster than you’ve ever experienced and you attempt to inhale to calm your mind. Managing a breath, you begin to exhale and strings of white silk pour from your mouth in cognizant surrender to the universe.. the silk leaves your mouth as breath and floats up into the same sky that started all of this.

You’re eight years old. And you’ve just been acquainted with existentialism for the first time, ever. You’ve never felt smaller and more alone in your life. After a few terrifying minutes of traveling through universal space, you are starting to understand that there is no answer and there is no end and that you as a being with a fleshy body and a soul and a mind- you will also eventually end. You desperately want to cease the train because it’s too painful of a feeling to let yourself keep riding into the darkness. You don’t have a light and mom and dad are eons away. The ball in your throat is throbbing now and all you desire is to forget. But your body is being hurled at light speed in any and all directions in the cosmic darkness and the tangibility of objects has left long ago, leaving you with little framework to ground with. So you close your eyes and reach for anything at all. Your hand is met with a cold, smooth handle and you pull. The brake works and the entire ride rushes to a stop, forcing this spell to break and shatter like glass. What metamorphosis occurs from the shatter is a crystalline helix of swirling nirvana permeating your being and filling your veins.. replacing the anxiety with that of ecstasy.

Your elation overrides how petrified you still are, and you find this feeling to be the most beautiful happening you’ve encountered in your limited years on earth. It’s the same sensation as in a dream when you realize for the first time that you have wings you never noticed before, and then you remember that you can fly, and not only that, but you are in control. You are liberated from your self prescribed boundaries of childhood. Something just clicked deep inside of you and you understand that age is both an anchor and oblivion synonymously. You decided then to acknowledge the years of adolescence you had ahead as a gift with an expiration date and that just made being eight years old the most fantastic pleasure imaginable. You’re in on a secret that you can’t share because it’s impossible to translate consciousness. This leaves you feeling very alone, yet strangely at peace with it all. One day you will meet someone who feels this way too, and looking forward to that day is enough to keep you going.

In just one second, an ocean of possibilities come flooding into your kinesphere and you’re both stricken and boundless in this purgatory of not knowing which path you will take first. If there was only some algorithm to figuring out which direction to choose in your young life, which one provides the best possible outcome, to true happiness, true fulfillment. But you won’t find out until many years later that this very predicament is what gives life it’s preciousness- that you will never be able to live out a trillion realities as the human skin you were born into. Your existence is a microcosm of cells and genes placed in infinite space and time. It means nothing, and yet this very nothingness is how we prescribe value and emotion to every. single. thing. This void breeds emotions we get to experience. Passion, love, guilt, hate, envy, self-awareness, depression, nirvana. Relationships now become sacred because you realize that you and a thousand other people you’ve been exposed to have manipulated your life course, leading you to your present day, and this moment right now.

The entropy in it all is hilarious, and cruel and endless. And if you think about it too much, you’ll cry. You’ll lay in bed with your knees pulled to your chest and experience being on the brink of remembering something that will never transpire. It will drive you insane. An itch that will consequently never be satiated. And you have to turn your not being okay with it, into action. Because the reality is that you probably don’t have that hundred years you were told you’re entitled to. People you love will die, relationships will end, you will be irrevocably hurt and you will hurt others. You will be tainted and strained, humiliated and broken before you’re reborn and it will be maybe harder to swallow than this feeling.

So you get out of bed and you start shaking your body ferociously in movement, wanting nothing but to expel the numbness out of you. You start to jump up and down, and dance as wild as you can for a silent audience. A sweet breeze sweeps through your open window, swaying your cream curtains in undulation and brushes past your cheeks. There is a faint recollection of a dream, where you’re soaring through the air, flying high above your small town ascending higher and higher into oblivion until you can barely breathe. This lack of oxygen paired with the cold wind on your face offers a catharsis you’d been sequestering for years. This snaps you back to the present moment. You look at your reflection in the mirror and you’re 25. You open your mouth and violet silk rolls off your tongue, in deep exhalation. You remember that moment when you were eight years old laying in the grass looking up at the blue sky and you laugh. You grab your shoes and a jacket and you walk out the door because you owe it to yourself to get the fuck outside to that blue sky and grab your life back.