Much of my life feels like strolling down sunset-lit beach all by myself. In the horizon, I can see crowds of people tending and minding their own businesses; mostly busy entertaining themselves. Their cheers and their scream of amusement reached my ears, but otherwise, their conducts are isolated from my own activity. Within the confines of my reality, they’re just background, a cacophony of noises.
My solitary activity is interrupted with some occasional accompaniment of assorted loved ones. We walk, talk, laugh with each other; just generally try to make the best use of our time together until we part ways. Either because the other party has other matters to attend to or because of the ultimate fate of our transient existence.
Beyond the presence of companions however, my journey is also sometimes interrupted by a certain visit.
While I am walking down the shore, leaving footprints after footprints upon damp, seawater-soaked sand, without warning, I was reminded of something in the past. Pieces of trauma, bits of painful experiences from time long gone, long beyond my means to change. Times where we were young, where mistakes were made from all parties involved. Reliving those memories made it seem like I was back there again; my mind travel itself into the past, transporting my whole senses into experiencing the feelings that I had when it happened. Outside of that, knowledge of the painful facts of the world also arrived, reminding me of the seemingly impersonal and uncaring nature of existence. As those memories resurfaced, drudges of black wave suddenly burst out of the sea to drown me down.
While I am down there, all I could see are just dark infinite space with no beginning or end. Even with nothing resembling a destination, my body continues to descent indefinitely, drawing further and further into the center of the abyss below. All the while, my breathing feels stilted, grasping for anything resembling anything an air within that space. Meanwhile, the surface of my skin feels chilly as if a breeze of freezing air is constantly blowing through them.
My entire being screamed in that moment, wishing for an escape out of that predicament. Unfortunately, notion of escape is reserved toward external threat, not for the predicament of the heart. Freedom from oppression may be something to be strive for, but freedom from the body is a delusional dream.
Then, after some time, the black ocean disappeared just as sudden as it came. My body sigh with relief as it happens and I rejoice in being able to feel the warm of sunlight once more. Every once in a while, the people around me ask what happened to me. There comes a time where I can describe that drowning experience, but there also times that simply discussing them is too much for my poor heart to handle. In the end however, no matter how I try to explain, confusion and bewilderment is the result. Understanding requires more than information, but also a lived experience. It can’t just be read or heard from somewhere, nor it can simply be related by connecting it with our past that approximate it; it truly needed to be experienced by ourselves in our subject of empathy’s body. Feel it, as their heart feel it; not just ours.
And so the cycle goes. My long walk would occasionally interrupted by the visit of the black sea. After drowning for a while, I would resurface as if it never happened. When the people around me would ask, my answer would either be silence or a half-understood explanation, depending on the circumstances.
As I experience this cycle, I sometimes wonder, which one is my “reality”? Is the black ocean that confines me all by myself is merely an occasional trouble to my happy daily life, or is the sunlit beach that I share with my friends is truly a distraction from the ocean? Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that they are both equally valid part of my existence, but the paranoid part of my mind keep thinking whether the black ocean is my “real” one. Biologically speaking, the human mind would often put more weight into the dangers and the pain all around us because they are a potential harm to our wellbeing. Much as joys and laughter is the reason the for existence, dangers is what can cut them short.
Despite having full acknowledgement of how my value system becomes what it is today, it is unfortunately beyond what I am capable to change. The curse of knowledge can sometimes be a reminder of how the vast construct of the universe is beyond what our meager human body can exert power over. The construction of my mind is as just as imperceptible to adjustment as was the various circumstances that led to my birth; the invisible hand of fate moving forward to a grand destiny with no hope of my input being a part of it. Yet another facts of life I can’t escape from, much like the black ocean.
Being trapped in this cycle while being surrounded by cheers of laughter from all around me drove me mad sometimes. Is as if their joy is a cruel mockery of my circumstances. It made me wonder whether or not there’s a defection within me, or if the people around me can’t simply see the truth, laughing about like fools who don’t see the impending disaster awaiting them. Despite that, I couldn’t help be envious of them. The burden in my mind, while providing me an insight of the world, it also makes matters complicated. Sometimes, the correct way forward is the simplest ones; the one that does not require the baggage of intelligence in order for it to be realized as the best course of action.
Having said all of that, I wonder to myself on what to do. The temptation of suicide, while tantalizing, is also scary in its own right. A mere cut to the finger can be a pain no human being should ever endure, let alone a pain so powerful it would take away our remainder life. After that… what comes next? Heaven? Hell? Black ocean that spans for eternity instead of momentarily? The possibility is too much.
Too much pain to keep living, and yet too afraid to end it, all that I can do is to walk forward.
Perhaps…perhaps… there’s an escape somewhere.
Fiction Realm 