He
wakes up in a haze, figments of his dream still swirling throughout his
mind. Stretching his arms and scratching
his head, he ponders the meaning of it all.
They were blackbirds he had
dreamt of, but they had been flying slowly, almost as if they were moving
through honey. Not that there was any
toil or strain inflicted on the feathered creatures, simply just…slowness. Like time had simply decided to decelerate,
right before his eyes. And when he
thinks about it, from his dream’s point of view, he must’ve been in that honey,
too, disembodied. Never in his dreams
was he fully human, simply a mind. An
ethereal spirit drifting around for observational purposes only.
Blackbirds, though. Weren’t they supposed to be a sign of bad
luck to come? He had read that
somewhere, from where, it escapes his mind.
Anyhow, the thought mildly disturbs him as he slides from his bed (was it
there at all?) and climbs into the shower (perhaps this was just one of those
dreams where he woke up, only to wake up again, and again, and again). After the shower, food and work. After work, procrastination and bed. That was his daily routine. Perhaps something would happen sometime
today, something blackbird-like, and life would lend itself to be something
more, maybe even chaotic, for a moment.
He supposes its inevitable, but is disappointed that it has not yet
happened.
In fact, if he’s truly honest with
himself, a bit of chaos in his life might bring some pleasantries. For one, it could give him something to
stimulate his mind with, the same mind that simultaneously spends each and
every day being both exceptionally overwhelmed and terribly bored. Overwhelmed because of all the thoughts, of
course. And terribly bored because,
despite whatever he’d think about, he could never reach satisfaction. Thought was his life, and life was a
thought. Nothing less, nothing
more. Dreadfully infinite yet enormously
limited. Just like the world, and all of
its questions, and all of its answers, and all of its answers that would never
be answered, and all of its answered questions that weren’t really answered at
all. Infinite. Immeasurable. Boundless. Interminable.
In fact, if he’s really truly honest with himself, he
thinks too much. There once was a time
when he was twenty-three years old, and someone had asked him his religion. I am a
solipsist, he had replied. Because how could I ever truly know if the
outside world exists if I don’t? How
could I know whether or not you are truly asking me this question? Are you even standing in front of me? Do you exist?
How can I be certain that you are truly asking me this question, or if
you’re simply a figment of my imagination?
Or better, how are you to know if I am but a figment of your
imagination? What if life is simply an
illusion? Did you know that the earth is
always changing? What if even the ground
beneath my feet simply doesn’t exist? What
if everything around us, if there even is an us, doesn’t exist?
His response had cost him a job, to
say the least.
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