It hurts to be just one thing.
To be fitted and painted with ever more lonely pieces by the assembly line of personhood. So many appendages attached that my arms can no longer bend to hold another person. I only bump into them on opposite sides of this whole absurd construct I call myself…
For what do I need all these attachments? For armor against my joy? Protection from the visceral, the real?
Why must I be just one thing? One lonely speck that lays claim to so much empty space teeming with imagining? To bank accounts, houses deeds, histories and specialties, hobbies, and even a name? All this fills up a buffer, a separation, a void between what I call myself and all other things. Property and properties, the things closest to myself, I swear. Other people? Nature? Matter? No.
I am just one thing. Born and crafted and perfected to be alone and do what the lonely one does: squirrel away and fluff themselves out. Out into the shape for which there is space… Filling up a part of an invisible whole that thrives and thrives off the painful existence of lonely things like myself. On its products, it’s salves, and it’s perpetuation.
But why? Why must I remain just one thing? I know, all know, of brief commodified moments and long politicized movements where we did not have to be just one thing. Where we could meld and feel together and for a moment not feel the horror of the empty space—the gulf—between us. I am just one thing, melting at last! In the concert, the rally, the powerful emotional and driven experience of the crowd! Now I am a crashing wave, a weathering rock, a piece of the world!
And it used to not be so painful to do this, did it not? I had the pleasure of festivals, debauchery, communal works and sharing… I was not always such a lonely thing. But without that connection I am seething with energy, begging to overflow as a rushing river sweeping its way to the coast, hoping to get lost in the delta and the ocean. Ready to have my forces harnessed in the promise of the fulfillment—of a tiny fraction of my need. And then I am separated with the pebbles and the silt again, longing for another wave to carry me; broken down me. When in my heart I wish I was still a member of a boulder or a cliff face.
Such a strange imagining, and now the vision fades.
