I sat on the aisle seat at the far end of the flight. My friends sat in the same row. Before I knew it, I was knocked out. I reckon my body knew it was time to go home. When I woke up from that hour-long nap to ask for some coffee, a familiar otherworldliness spread over me like a blanket. Once again, I got the feeling that I was not an entire person, as if I was very close to the real thing, but something seemed off. I wondered if all the people who sat in their various poses felt this way, too, but I could never know even if they did. The man who sat at the window seat said he was seventy years old and had just returned from a yoga retreat, which was impossible for him until some seven years ago when he busted his knee, went through surgery and still needed to recuperate enough. This complexity I find so fascinating in others is intriguing because I find it missing in myself. Even my decisions are based on how I feel and lack any or all narrative.
Everything I feel, everything I am, is too rudimentary. Before you make the obvious suggestion that I look deeper, I beg you to consider that over seven hundred of these pieces remain written as of now, not to mention the many before them which have now been lost to time, and writing does not come easy to those who wade in shallow waters. I have looked; I have looked hard. I have left no stones unturned, no sheets unfurled, no drawers shut. I have only learned that no matter which strata of my soul I visit, it is all the same. I exist in a world that is not fit for people like me.
This incompatibility is not because of some underlying complexity but a rampant simplicity. It is the people around me who have agendas; it is the world around me that makes the demands. I only exist as best as I can, confined by these rules. I fall in love easy. I appreciate all good things in the world. I like sitting in the sun. I try to keep an open mind. The missing bits are how others live for other people—and not in service but desire. They desire to be looked at. I live to look at the world I live in. The world prefers the former more. I do not know why it does so, but I do know that this gap, in my experience, is irreconcilable.