When I was 15 I decided truth, id, ego, and all the rest was a spiral staircase.
(to be precise, it was a large, wrought-iron spiral staircase where the king of the penguins lived, ravelled and moistly trapped inside my head. I still imagine the penguins running around along the paths of seemingly random neurons, loosed on their respective missions of furious activity. Very unlike traditional penguin behaviour cometothinkofit, but the imagery still feels right. ish.)
I'm back there now, midway up the staircase, slightly higher up than last time I turned around and decided that EVERYTHINGISTRUE, but still barely at half-mast.
Everything is true and that which makes the truths we choose to believe in truer than others is WHATTHEFUCKEXACTLY?!?
Maybe it's the ability to balance ourselves, tottering on the gaseous remains of what the mundanes believe to be The Great Order (ie: The Way Things Should Be), and leaning out into dust particles of the cosmos that only chaos-theoreticians really believe in, to balance ourselves so that we can take great joyous leaps...
..to where?
Maybe the serenity in that balance, the burst of confidence that a morsel of Truth imbues us with, however temporarily, is just the means.
I like to think so. I like to think the means is ever-important, but that the end - that of reaching out an E.T.-esque glowing, swollen finger to the Cumulative Human Tear, is a part of the end.
At least the one I'm going for.
Maybe I should've been a doctor like mummy wanted, and left it at that.
Appease my need to heal, and forget about the Great Societal Wrongs, and settle into my off-white-plush-couches and batik draperies.
But I can't and I won't, and frankly physical foibles don't interest me nearly so much as the pangs of the human ego.
I have no conclusions left about that ego, though. All the truths have flown and I'm back at the Primordial Step One, though I think it's the first step of landing 3071, rather than 3070 that I was on last month.
I think I'm deciding that I don't know anything, again, for the three-thousandth-and-something'th time.
Purely for the purpose of being able to look up again, rather than race along with my head down.
Today I know who I am again, because that vague inkling is newborn and not-yet-so-wrinkled-as-to-be-unrecognizable.
Maybe all these furious epiphanies are a waste of energy.
Maybe all this over-thinking-silly-things is a blasphemy on time.
But I've got a handful of precious seconds left entirely to me, and I will do with them what I can only believe is Yet Another Truth.
I will live as I believe, and that's so much fucking harder than believing in god and religion and sex and love and whateverelse that ITHURTSITHURTSITHURTS sometimes, and I get so damned tired sometimes and I know I'm overdoing it,
but maybe, just maybe
it will be one of those carnival differences that I believed in as a child, that might make a tiny, glorious, difference.
If buddha can do it, I can sureashellfuckingtry.
*MY* way. Because as far as I can tell... Yours isn't working any better.