Another Trip Around
I sit here in my office on my 28th year of life, drinking jasmine tea and watching the city wake up. I reflect:
It’s my birthday. The day I took my first breath. For the most part, I’m glad I’m here. I enjoy the person I’ve become, and I’m able to see them as the witness and participant. I hold their hand when they go through hard moments and celebrate with them when there’s joy to be had.
This body I’m in, the organic part, is on the downswing. I can feel it with new pains in my back, energy that seems to just disapparate, the wrinkles that draw paths on my skin like rivers reshaping a planet. All of those cliches I heard when I was younger, it wasn’t just hot air. You only learn that in time, such as everything else. My personal favorite:
You’ll understand when you’re older.
WELL I’M OLDER. WHEN WILL I UNDERSTAND?
I don’t think anyone truly understands anything ever. It’s just something we tell each other to ease the pain of not knowing. We have other ways to ease the pain, religion, substances, abusing others. I get it. It’s hard to stay in limbo you’re entire life of not having answers to questions that take over your mind and just be…okay with it.
I pretend that when we die we get to enter a room with no walls, probably a white void. You walk around for a bit until you stumble upon a simple wooden desk with a computer (most likely an iMac G3, but what do I know), a notebook & pen, a cloth handkerchief, a cup of water that is self-replenishing, and a bag of Snyder's pretzels. You sit down at this desk, the monitor springs to life as you wiggle the mouse, you see a search bar that reads “ask” at the top.
You write where am I?, the computer takes less than a second to return an answer of nowhere and everywhere. You write How did I get here, a video pops up, you press play and you watch the last few moments of your life before the electricity leaves your body and it becomes lifeless. You see yourself just moments ago waiting up in a room with no walls, a white void.
It’s starting to make sense, you start typing in question after question. First, you start asking silly ones: How many steps have I ever taken? What truly was my favorite food? What was my first birthday like? Then you get into the 'what ifs': What if I was born in Sudan? What if my sister died when I was little? What if I was a big-name musician? OR worked for a non-profit company? Who would I be? What would my life have been like?
With each question comes a series of videos and text files holding the ultimate answers to everything ever, all stemming from the knowledge of how you handle the life you lived and how others handled theirs. And soon those questions turn a corner: Who truly loved me? Why was I born? Did I matter? The answers to these feel a little less solid but you still need to ask them.
You finally get past the self, just like in life, and are ready to ask questions about the greater community of your world.
You ask things like: How did the pyramids get built, how many people died while creating them, did they feel valued? What was my mom’s childhood like? Explain the gene for cancer and does it ever get cured? It bounces like this for a while, like an audience watching Kristen Schaal and Kurt Braunohler performing Kristen Schaal is a Horse. A flood of emotions: curiosity, amazement, delight, terror, sorrow, humiliation, disappointment, anger, joy, fascination, dissolution, bewilderment, and then… Show me how the universe was created. The video for this is extraordinarily long so you tac on a sped up by 1,000.
You sit there for a while mulling this all over, everything you’ve ever wanted to know, answered. Finally, you say what happened to my favorite red T-shirt from 6th grade? A photo appears with a flowchart under it. Showing you exactly where you last saw it and how part of it ended up being oil rags and the other part went into a handmade quilt.
You get up from the desk. There’s still a pretzel or two left in the bag, you turn your back on the computer and walk away from it.
I tell myself this story when I have questions with no answers. I tell myself this story to calm that restless energy inside me.