A day when the phone doesn’t ring. Not that this is a measure of anything, much, save for the busyness of the friends and family who make up a lifetime of communication and contact. One can argue how many of those people would call if they knew, call if they wanted, but one must respond to the vine-grasping inertia of proximity and visual resonance. How we are ultimately these silly biological tethers to limb and eye-socket and bloodflow, or at least locked therein while trying to elevate the scope of our mental reach and capacity. And that as long as we are trapped in separate skins, it is oh so hard to ever feel truly sufficiently surrounded.
Every second alone is a waste, in some ways, and yet the way of the introvert is to prefer this low-risk expenditure of time to even that which makes us feel most elevated, most transcendent. The high-flying antics of sharing and absorbing, of the mutual vulnerability of nine nightbound souls, inhibitions unlocked by mutual expectation and the dark of the sky and the possibility of youth that so many of their elder peers will lose over time, they themselves becoming those elders in the name of wisdom or safety. What a cosmic magic to be able to position oneself eternally in relation to this transitional time, ancient insect in the eternal amber of crystallization, getting perhaps just a bit older and lonelier as the ongoing rent for all this connection. Every human being so raw, so yearning, so similar in the basic bonds that make us all what we are. Tomorrow we will go box ourselves up again, gird our armor anew, but the impact of lines jointly crossed will never entirely fade.
And yet why the preference, in a world of true apparent universality, why the preference of some to others? No wonder some could cite Huxley as utopia, cite individual taste as sheer irrationality. How marvelous to not demand or expect or hope for more from one than another, to merely breathe and be and take solace in any incidental mind/flesh/voice combination and the wonder of that amalgam’s interest in one’s own. And yet, such is not the way of this incarnation. We are trained and developed, crafted and honed, maybe even irreparably and impenetrably predisposed, to like some more than others. To foster and cultivate vast imbalances in how we perceive others, to weep over the absence of one while tiring to the point of vague nausea over another. How shallow some of these distinctions, how cruel, and somehow still inescapable. An irrationality as deep and undeniable as sexuality itself, as time in its plodding passage, as the unpredictable mortality of our fickle casings.
We are, all of us, lakes, presenting an image consistent, horizontal, reflective, and opaque. The simplest manifestation of surface tension, a color or outline of our surroundings, silent and still. And yet what life teems below! What cataclysm the response to any stimulus, movement, disruption of the surface! What depth, what invisible capacity and precipitous absorption may be undertaken! Woe to any who presume the careful balance of the waterline cannot be disturbed, is sufficient to hold even the lightest of breaches, the smallest of pebbles.
Come. Wade. Splash. Skip not the stones upon the level, but rather slam them down. I am tired of reflecting, weary of mere surroundings on display. The water’s fine and there is much to be explored.
