Outside the box

I think maybe the real tragedy in this life is that we can never, no matter how many drugs we ingest or books we read, see the world through someone else’s mind. There is no door leading into John Malkovich’s brain. The mind you’re born with is the one you’ll die with, regardless of how you change or grow. And you modify, detract, mutilate, sculpt or otherwise reimagine your corporeal entity any which way from Sunday, and you can find religion and watch a documentary and live in another country but you’ll always still be you. You never get to see what the bus looks like from the under the hood of the stranger sitting next to you. The closest we can possibly come, if ever coming close, is to communicate, is to reach and ask someone, “What do you see? What do you feel? How can you have come to be?” And when you consider the staggering multitude of answers that can come washing in from every corner of every kind of existence available to be communicated with, you’ll understand why this world is disgustingly, heartbreakingly, jaw-clenchingly beautiful. I keep asking, I keep seeing.

And I won’t say I haven’t been hurt, or that I’m not hurting, but there was this quote in No Country For Old Men about how in order to fight the evil, a sheriff has to be complicit, he has to agree that he is part of the world where this evil exists. Well I want to see it, I want to know it. Even the dark parts. Even the hurt. Even what tears your mind to shreds while you’re curled up in the fetal position in the bathroom of your apartment, alone, at 3 AM because of a lost oppurtunity. Even the heart-pounding nausea and dread that comes with those moments when you remember your own mortality and the shortness left in your particular coil. Even the… I’m digressing.

Here’s what matters: getting as far as I can away from where I started. I don’t mean physically. Not just NY. Nor the U.S. I mean stretching my fingers to see what my wingspan is, stretching some more, stretching until it feels like my tendons might snap, and then taking off.

And it saddens me that I could never climb into your mind, and live a day inside you, so that I could see it all in a way entirely outside of myself. Sometimes it crushes me. That I never get outside of this mind of mine, that I’m not allowed to be anyone else but me. And I can change me, and I do, quite frequently, And I’m still me, no matter what color my hair is or what my weight is or what color reigns queen supreme in my closet. Because I’ll still only ever have this frame of conciousness

I’m not entirely knocking myself here though. I happen to think I have an excellent sense of humor, and a very good talent for finding and loving those things in this world that are absurd. And I do love them, I do. And to me, this is what matters. Because I can’t put all my eggs in the basket, so I try to allot worth carefully in this life, here, now. If there isn’t another shot I don’t ever want to look back and say, “I should have cared more.”

So I’ll leave myself open to it all, to everything, though sometimes there’s so much stimulus that my head pounds and my nerves recoil in shock. Though I walk around with a perpetual lump in the throat or bursting out laughing inappropriately, I will not write off anything or anyone. Because I would hate for that to be me. Because no one is the supporting player in their story. And because even though I think it’s really truly sort of tragic that we can’t ever get to see the world from any other perch but the one we’re resting on, I’m going to get as close to outside of me as I can.