I’ve become significantly more reclusive as of late. Maybe because now I don’t find myself in a city surrounded by people, or because I no longer feel the need to interact so frequently. And in this state of reclusion, I’ve begun to ruminate in my thoughts. I search in an almost cyclical way – plunging into a vague and abstract part of myself that I have never been acquainted with before, surfacing only to see if the exploration has made any concrete difference. Realizing with every dive that nothing is more truly and frustratingly foreign to me than myself, but knowing that there is no one else I’d rather be discovering so intimately. I feel like I am unearthing new layers, and as I go deeper, I move farther from the tangible world.
This is a strange mental space to be in. A purgatory state, like the moment after I make a drastic decision that I haven’t had time to process. When I’m coming down from the high that marries itself to reckless decisions and have not yet familiarized myself with the repercussions. That space of quiet apathy between hedonistic bliss and crippling regret, where the memories are raw and clear like a film in a movie theater. Clear enough to relive with a blatant accuracy, but could also be nothing more than a figment of an overzealous imagination. A purgatory state, like the precursor of an action. Like the moment after a decision is made to act, but right before the action is actually performed. A moment of meaningless suspension where time ceases to exist and I am trapped between mind and body, somehow disconnected from both.
And in this disconnection, my body moves and interacts with the physical without my consent. There is no decision to act, and yet there is action. I watch my form contort itself in ways that are familiar but distant to me, I watch with the irrelevance of a mind torn from its body and plunged into the throngs of abstraction. And the body, without a guide, treads through the motions with nothing more than the muscle memory of a life barely lived. I monitor myself like an experiment. I’ve locked myself in a house in the middle of the New Jersey suburbs and have prodded and probed inexhaustibly, waiting for some reaction or response to make me feel. I’ve picked and poked through volume after volume of thoughts, opinions, memories, to find nothing in particular. And in this process, I’ve stripped myself of the excitement of autonomy leaving nothing but pure indifference.
I have been living in this space for an eternity. And as I plunge deeper, I dissociate more permanently from the physical world around me – as if my mind has become violently inhospitable to the experiences my body fights for. Maybe because my thoughts and choices are all half-baked and over-easy and too incomplete to be anything more impactful, substantial, significant. I watch myself slowly unraveling as time goes on. Maybe once I fall apart like a ball of yarn, I’ll be able to build myself again – this time with a little more emotion. And a lot more lust for life.
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