What was she doing in there with all those corpses? Just needed to climb out a window in consciousness and into another time. Wanted to climb into a moment that has passed, yet suspended forever three levels down in the base of her brain. Always spinning, never still. It was a time of immense sadness; but sadness is a heavy kind of joy. All the feelings of a lifetime compounded into this one moment: crossing the highlands in the night sky. Immobilized. Frozen back there. Wide awake while the other passengers dozed, haunted by the sad sweet music of their driver’s choice. The driver – he knew that she was awake but intimated that he was driving alone, self conscious as to appear unaware, he seemed to keep one eye on the narrow road – dash, dash, dash – and the other slightly outside his field of vision, out of perspective, somewhere in the midst of these strange Philistine love songs. All the way back they rode through the silence, she never taking her eyes off the driver’s finite silhouette and he never once letting them wander.
But he knew. Or seemed to know. She thought that somewhere along the road some awareness had passed between. Whatever had brought them out into this lonely night had marked them – kept their minds wandering – in this tiny old rattlebox in a very unusual time and place. None tried to put his finger on it; too engulfed in the intensity of their individual experiences to try and make any sense out of a shared vision. But she saw it trapped in the torpid outlines of the others’ sleeping faces flopped to each side – were they only pretending as to avoid confusion? But some movement of the divine stirred her to sit up ramrod strait and take up her cross, to follow what moved her to its logical end.
Sitting there now in a business meeting, it all seemed to have all been a dream – whatever was indicated in the calculated movements of the eyes, remaining half focused on something greater than the tiny sliver of reality within the lines of the road. Why didn’t he dare? In the end, this feeling drives us all crazy – it’s the incredible loneliness of our ultimate separation from all other forms of life.
Che paura! Most of the time we can ignore it by distracting ourselves from the clarity of our existence; in time the pungency fades – call it forgetting. But there come these moments of such supreme knowing and grace when we seem to merge with the beautiful beings around us completely and seamlessly, and there is a common perception of something we can’t put our finger on. The other shoe drops. We were waiting for it, but we didn’t know.
And it is following these moments – in the minutes and days and years that stretch out the life ahead of us, that we acutely feel the absence of this wholeness: the loss, the desolation and finally the despair of our numbing singularity. We live side by side on parallel paths with millions of souls – sometimes even sharing the same bed – and never really meeting but for a few spine–tingling moments of absurd misunderstanding, brushing past each other like two marooned ships on a foggy night. Folly feels divine. It’s chilly. This acknowledgement of our limitedness and the boundaries of our physical being is never shared, though we sit side by side with the same heavy hearts, confined within our skins of deceit. Pretending to be amused.
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