shadows of ourselves

"you should write about some of the things hiding in the back of your mind."

so it is. matches is rather bad at hiding his emotions...he has never been the type to distance his mind from his feelings and be able to truck on through an entire day without feeling those tensions pulling and pushing upon his insides. it always seems like the stomach, doesn't it? that sinking, depth-charge of a feeling, which can quite poetically be accompanied by a large scoobydactylic (scooby-doo-esque) swallow, a throaty bass note that plunges down into the darkness (like, zoiks, scoob). it does feel like dropping a large weight into the body of water that composes your consciousness~ being chased by some phantom with a chill touch and the happiness-wraithing vacuum of a dementor (from those most popular of novels).

but those times, those aren't really the back of the mind, are they? those are dispersed like a packet of sugar in iced tea; swirling around and clinging to large clumps of concentrated coldness. which could be said to be a problem of matches'....the inability to set aside these personal concerns and focus on the present. but those still are not the sediment that must be scraped from the back; the forcefully ejected thoughts that clutter the floor of one's unconsciousness. no, those feelings are all too conscious, and thus they are a world apart. how does one dip into the well of the unconscious, scavenging for sparklies in dark caves with no light to bring out their natural form?

normally in such a case, antimatter would find the best recommendation to be, meditation. letting all the thoughts breeze through and past you, without judging them, and then finding out what remained once all the winds had died down. but there's no time for that....no time! at least not at the moment, because this was supposed to be the beginnings of an epic writing session in which some sort of storyline would be conceived. must. not. stop. he would rather keep his fingers flying on the keyboard; hashing through these thoughts like an explorer ravaging the jungle with various bladed and sun-flickering tools. these thoughts, archaeological, are ancient relics...only to be navigated to by way of savage temples and winding corridors. what a word, corridor.

here; there is one. death. the most-and-least revered of thoughts; the grand poobah of them all. every so often, when m is drifting cozily off to sleep, this thought will rush upon him like michael turner trying to prove his mettle whilst the big man is out with a fracture. obscure, admittedly. frenzied, is the point. it causes a panic, a peril; matches wants none of the peril (but can't he have just a little peril? no, it is too perilous). for some reason, sleep occasions the downing of mental defenses. this can be observed in any dream, where one imagines oneself to be an age that is already bygone. mattress, age 8 or 9, is a common dream theme...and it is not a jarring situation, not a dislodging thought, not in the fuzziest. foggiest? certainly it is foggy. that's the thing, though; it seems just as likely to the sleepy mind. there is no connection between reality and the dreamscape. and because of this, the rational approach that we would normally have toward many things, well....it absolutely vanishes.

pondering death when awake is heavy, but not overwhelming. in dreams, it brandishes its full intimidation...it becomes present, apparent, saturating. dreams where death is impending due to anything, but most notably sickness such as cancer, are ab-solutely terrifying. they slice right to the heart of the matter, they expose complacency for what it is...a stance that is only based upon its remoteness from the actual matter at hand. you, in a hospital bed; that is the reality of the matter. and that is what is most striking about death. you just never know~ there is an assumption on m's part, probably on most people's part, that they will live to be 80. it seems a safe assumption, does it not? it can disappear, like *that*.

the timeline is also an interesting facet of this idea residue...the idea that we have a few cups-full of life to spend, and that the quality changes over time. does it improve? does it degrade? ask matches in twenty years. but even now, sometimes a demon comes to him in the night and whispers to him that he is already a quarter-of-a-century old. he is only 5 years away from being 30. 30! that seems quite a benchmark, doesn't it? things, up to this point, have been assumed to be figured out once one is thirty. now the mark nears, and the mystery shows no signs of drying up~ if anything, it complexifies. if we can admit that to be a word, because spell-check has placed a red line beneath it. he knows the point comes through; stop bringing him down, spell-check.

he wonders about the quality of the timeline, from an aged perspective that he has yet to attain. are these really the 'golden' years? should he be more, less disreputable and carefree during them? what of after thirty? after fifty? will he still really want to cling to life with this same tenacity, when he is seventy? will he wish for it to end, if he is ninety? there are some devastating consequences of long life; most notable the deterioration of the body and the mind, and the, unmapping, to be kind, of friends around the globe. the death of a significant other, of 50 years, would seem impossible to endure. the passing of all of one's friends would be excruciating. how much can the heart, the spirit, take? what would the world be like, to a mind handicapped by something like alzheimer's? these things are perpetual mysteries, and they do not really gain power enough to touch us until either we or someone close to us experiences them.

so they get shoved back into the clutter of the mind, and there they lie in wait. there; that is one thought lurking in the shady corners~ have with it what you will.