Inside an outsider

I haven't posted on here in about two years now, so forgive me if I am out of practice! I had a bit of a dark spell recently, so this is my way of conveying those feelings through a character.

In a world of perpetual darkness, I have finally come to find a light.

Darkness not of a physical kind, but an emotional, mental darkness. The feeling of complete isolation, from family, friends... the rest of the world in fact. Left alone with my own thoughts, none of which are comforting, but all are destructive. I feel like I have been mentally tearing myself apart from the inside for so many years. And not because I was locked away from the world. I did not grow up feral, or in a hostile environment, not on the streets, not in a care home. I grew up with a family, a home, pets, overall decent surroundings, with promising results at school. Yet these factors do not form some kind of secret recipe for successful well being and a positive outlook on life.

In a life so abundant, filled with people whose lives were also filled with events, chores, families and careers, it was difficult to ever feel I was a priority. In a world where humans have long since become more than hunters and foragers, lived together in nations not packs, there is so much to give yourself to. Life is not just about finding food, mates, fathering and raising children and watching out for predators. The world has changed. Now food is readily available, without our needing to lift a finger; mates can be found at any time in our longer lives, sought out online, or even bought for a price. Finding a mate is no longer a permanent state, we can have one, two, several, hundreds... or indeed none. Predators have changed. They are no longer sabre toothed tigers, wolves or bears... we have by and large eradicated major threats to our survival. Instead we turned on each other. Our enemies no longer arise for territorial reasons, nor very often in our quest to protect loved ones. Our enemies now are merely each other. Someone who is strange, somebody who excels better than you, somebody who hurts others, steals from others, graffiti places of importance. With modern technology we even have the ability to express hate for those who we have only heard of, but never met. Not only that but then we feel we are entitled to project these views of strangers into the world for others to see, and have the audacity to assume we can control whether others will want to think the same of this mutual stranger.

In a world where communication happens all too often with tapping fingers instead of vocalisations and gestures; where the entirety of one's emotions is compressed into 180 characters, and where “I love you” is not a sacred bond, but thrown around, for jovial emphasis, to appease somebody or even just make the shut up. It is wrong perhaps to assume that former generations “had it better” or that our modern life is “inferior” or “deteriorating”, but it is right to say that I have never felt like I belong in it.

But every now and then you see another fellow outcast. Somebody who gazes forlornly, with confusion, at what was going on around them. They see the smooth, flat screens that supposedly substitute the feel of a book in hand. The sweeping fingers across indifferent glass faces could never match the feel of paper, worn with the love of its pages avidly, indulged in a world that is not their own. 

I feel I live in a book sometimes. But I did not write the characters. I may from time to time choose my settings, influence the plot lines to a degree, but what a book needs is amazing characters. They draw a reader in, make them empathise with their plight, make them cry for them when they face a death, a carefully concocted plan by an anonymous author. I do not know these 2d characters around me. I do not see the depth in the eyes, lost in inanimate objects that feign humanity. I do not sympathise with their recently updated status on social networking sites, claiming to be separated from somebody who I never knew, and quite probably would not related to. I do not cry for them when I see passive sentences, quoting deaths across the world as statistics. The world is more connected than ever. And more than ever before we are by and large completely indifferent to the sufferings that we now have no excuse to be ignorant of. 

I do not know at what point people stopped believing in souls, purity, and true love. I do not know how people believed these things to be analogous with self-interest, vanity, and impossible prospects of perfection. The striving to always improve, surpass expectations, without ever, even once, considering whether where they are, in this moment, in this place, is actually enough to be a life. 

I have never stopped believing in such concepts. I believe that if we all avert our eyes from domineering media, wrench ourselves away from consumption, reckless behaviour, alcohol and drug infused actions, endless hatred of the unknown and abandonment of responsibility, that we could all find some way of realising who we are. Find somebody to love, in every animate sense, through touch, through loving embraces, kisses, holding hands as we walk somewhere. Living through feeling. Feeling love, real friendship, experiencing true peace as we watch a sun go down through our eyes and feel above all the enormous guilt, that we could ever be so blind to so much beauty in pursuit of a faux reality. 

I realised that I had become part of the world that is so often taken for granted. I felt completely disposable. I dove once into the ocean, saw the fish, dolphins, coral and other beauties that lay underneath the surface. They live a passive, indifferent life to ours, knowing that attention will only really be given to them by the few sea fanatics; unless they find themselves caught in a net and put into a glass box, so others can see and judge them. Tap the glass because the reverberations do not come back to the viewers, only the viewed. The stars above look down on us in fascination at what we have done to the world. They have waited patiently above us for thousands or millions of years, altering as required, but rarely drastically changing. They peer through the stratosphere, and wonder what we are doing, what our end goal is. They know that the city folk cannot see them, because they believe their own lights to be more important than the twinkling of superior beings. The country folk may muse through telescopes to catch a glimpse of a shooting star, an eclipse, or some other dramatic event above them. They acknowledge and excitedly photograph fallen meteors, and use pictures as supernovas just to amuse the background screen of their computers.  But they have no concept of the process that made them. And they have no respect for the stability of the long existing stars. Consistency and reliability are no longer factors that many deem to be important, and so they watch and know that they are seen, yet simultaneously invisible. 

I walk through a crowd, in the open air for all to see, hundreds of eyes glance over my face a day, but it is known to none of them. Recognised by none of them. Cared for by none of them. But in an eerie sense this puts me on a par with most of the beautiful things in this world. Gives me a bond even with the brightest of the stars. For this reason, I suppose I cannot be discontent. 

But there was a day, where I sat, assuming my general invisible status to the world in a coffee shop. You see, I still take the time to respect the care of coffee bean harvest, and its journey across seas, through grinders and presenting itself in a mug for my own pleasure. I take the time to marvel at the craftsmanship and love put into locally baked goods, savouring the subtle flavours, whilst others robotically spoon feed themselves over a newspaper composed of android apps, and I know that their food is required only to sustain them through their indifferent day of working a job that is at either of the polar opposites: excruciatingly awful and mind numbing, or all consuming, above their home, family and friends. I gaze for a while around the room, admiring the distinct smell that lingers in the air, and my eyes land on somebody. A fellow gazer. 

Our eyes locked, and a second passed, half devoted to the surprise that anyone else would be as interested in their surroundings as we were, the other half took in the life that sparkled behind, the eyes that hadn’t been eroded by lights of tanning beds, television screens and camera lenses. Eyes that knew how to communicate, without a single word, spoken or typed, ever being said. 

They got up from your seat, for a sinking moment I thought they were about to leave, ending that flurry of feeing. But they picked up their coffee cup, and crossed the room to me. Years of faceless exchange had not tortured them into conventions of detached communication. They didn’t ask if they could join me, just sat in front of me, at the other end of the table. Close enough to touch, and the thought did not scare me. About time that there tables for two were occupied by two people, rather than an individual with a pseudo-partner in the form of a laptop. 

They introduced themselves, as did I. They commented on the book I had in hand, they said they were also a fan. I could tell by their hands that they had thumbed through many tomes in their time, they did not have the pointed stylus like fingers that gave them away as a modern type. I knew already that I would want those hands to hold mine. As we talked the conversation flowed, not in the disjointed way that messages do, where all attempts at discourse seem wasted. It was comfortable, enjoyable. Their face had faint lines already around their mouth. The kind of mouth that had sat up once with friends and talked for hours, the kind of mouth that had laughed and laughed, and the kind of mouth that I knew I would want to kiss forever. 

The minutes fed through to hours, the laughs and stories we would exchange built a connection, which I knew right from the start was my small link to something familiar. It was a single, fine silk thread, a peephole in my cloak of invisibility, but it didn’t matter. They had seen me. I existed. 

We knew we would never really belong in a world where 2d screens showed 3d films, where voices were synthesised before they were aired, and where dances mimic robots, like those which many had become. So I knew that meeting them was not throwing off my mask, or crawling out of the shell I had hidden myself away in, but what it meant was I had brought somebody behind my mask, into my shell. I let them under my skin completely, and it was insatiable. 

So in a world of continuous darkness, I came to know a light. Out of isolation and confusion, I had found one of my own. An outsider who found their way around the perimeter of this alien society to meet me; and together we could sit and watch that which we could not be a part of, but would nevertheless look at. But mostly we looked at each other. At every imperfection in our faces, every crease in our clothes, acknowledged every slip of the tongue that we uttered, and we loved each other all the more for it.

Reviews

[Gary H]

'I feel I live in a book sometimes' - we all do. We are all part of someones story whether we enjoy the experience or not. I think you have lots of ideas here, maybe a paragraph for a story that could unfold if you should want it too.....