PANDORA
12.6.20
imagine you’re graphite
and you’ve just been graced with erasers fingernails
that’s what it feels like
it feels like anxiety, like worry,
worry which is paralyzing.
Now, worry about paralysis.
Imagine your body becoming foreign, even hostile. Legs you’ve known so long and well are somehow there, but living out their life without you. Poof. Gone. Like magic.
Which… at least in this one instance is far worse than logic. Leave it to magic to re-fracture and re-numb the limbs after a perfect night. A few second’s disruption, and it was unhinged again. Like it had never left at all. That’s magic’s attitude. No harm done. As if it was as simple as a few minutes paralysis.
Shocking? Truth is not fully explosive, but purely electric. You don’t blow the world up with the truth. You shock it into motion. Or in my case, the pleading hope for motion to stay.
I can’t think of anything more alienating.
—
Edit a few days later:
It’s hard not to look back at that with optimism.
I know, old me would scorn my UN-realistic, unsympathetic cheeriness. Hear me out though; I’m a breath that doesn’t mind repeating itself. Living proof that sometimes you plan a funeral, but a birthday party shows up instead.