The Mind I Am Designing is Strange, Dark, and Beautiful

September 25, 2020

Though it is still September, the slight chill of October is already in the air. I can feel it early in the mornings and late in the evenings on the tips of my toes and fingers. Sometimes, some strange sights and sensations visit me, like fragments from another lifetime, pieces I have collected, first hand or not, of standing by rivers, dropping marigolds into them, the smell of incense, looking at temples lit with golden lights in the evening rain, staring at a strange path that went through the woods as I sat as a little girl in a white frock in front of my dad’s old scooter, laughing with a sister close to my age in a wooden house at a hilly place where it rained too often, as a man stepping outside my office onto a road covered in autumn leaves. I think of this vast field covered in reeds under a pale blue sky and two black horses waiting midst its windy sinews. They are my medium.

Loneliness accompanies these visions beautifully, without shattering the substance. But, in my room, loneliness floats around, sometimes like a dark shadow and at times, like the stillness of my heart, ready to listen. Anytime now. The orange light of the dying afternoon filters through a crack in the window and falls on the Kafka sketch on my wall. I believe one of these days he would speak. I stretch out my legs on the bed, trying to gather more sleep into my mind, to still it. But I am always thinking.

One of these nights, I will give myself up to the sky. I will say, this is me. This is what you get. Uncover me and see for yourself. I am surrendering. And the stars will zoom in around me and the clouds will wrap me up. I have nothing to carry that is my own and so I am in everything. Never have I felt so infinitesimal and so cosmic. Except that night on the roof.

In the darkest of nights, I have little to say. I leave myself to a prayer, if it could carry me all the way, if I am not heavy enough. I have caught myself in the mirror many times. When I see myself like that, I am touched and afraid. I would rather not.

I grow tired of the world. Words too at times. But only now, sitting at 12:25 AM, writing away, I can recall the beauty in everything. No. I have not forgotten strangeness and fear. I remember them. Like bones remember the flesh grimacing and sliding atop them. I know the potency of my mind. And I am afraid, I bow down. The mind. The neuroplastic monster. Madness. The psychedelic time machine. The dark sky, forever creating itself. Terror in a box. Tied fists. Blank.