Subject: I wrote poor lee
9/8/13
Dear dear,
I was lying outside on the ground Friday afternoon, soaking in as much of the remaining warmth of the day as I could with my eyes closed and resting when I heard a rustling. I opened my eyes just in time to see all of the trees disperse! into tiny particles, or at least that’s what it looked like. Anyway, they were small bugs that were clutched together, formed into these giant shapes and colors and textures… becoming the actual trees, it was no imitation. Turns out trees were made up of these bugs all along! I am not sure if they were all the same kind of bug since, of course, each one was so minutely different–there were both brown bugs and green bugs all on the same tree, some yellow too, or red, black. But then there were different types of “trees,” so even with the vast array of differences within one species of tree, there were innumerable shifts and changes between the bugs of one tree and the bugs of another.
Oh but when they took flight and all mingled in the air, these billions of trees were floating and flying! Even if they did not keep the form of the trunk or the leaf, they held the same essence, you could still see the grandeur of these beings… these bugs, or… or trees–they became one in the same. I was drawn to the sight and did not notice that half an hour had passed since I began staring, but now they were gone from my point of view and I finally took a breathe, looked around, and everything was empty.
First, I was amazed that no one else was around… no one had seemed to notice. A boy biked past as if nothing had changed, but perhaps we get used to that. There is a change in every moment and we eventually get used to gluing ourselves to some idea of stableness, either in the future or the past. Maybe that was why I noticed. I was finally resting, in the present, nowhere else. Feeling how the wind and sun changed placement and direction, the atmosphere becoming and being encompassed. (Can you be truly present with someone else? Can you be truly present without experiencing the world through yourself? Is objectivity real at all? Is grass objective? That’s silly, grass doesn’t even have a sense of such things.) But how could I be the only one to feel the emptiness? The trees, they were no more, at least not that I could see. They had flown away.
Somehow, in that moment, I felt abandoned. A greater loss, I thought, that I had felt such awe just a moment ago. If one day I just walked outside and there were no more trees, would it feel better or worse? It was dark now, and a few stars struggled to shine against Conway’s light. I admired their persistence. I rolled up my blanket from the ground when all of a sudden a star fell, all the way to my feet! What a day. Suddenly, though, everything turned to light, it wasn’t yellow like the sun, just bright and empty like a hole. Who knew a hole could blind you? It seeped across the ground from the fallen star. I looked up out of fear of falling just to see that a blackness was covering everything above my feet. But again, this was not a black like night, but instead an emptiness of a different sort–one that did not open around you, but closed. That is when I fell. If it was up or down I could not say. But I panicked and struggled, waved my arms about and jerked my body here and there until I tired and finally became calm. That is when I realized that even if I was falling, I was never going to hit anything, there would be no impact and so there was no reason to even label the very thing as falling… instead it was just being. Although, I was barely being by then anyway as my body seemed to have disappeared too… perhaps the black and the light were too encompassing for me to see it, but it began to feel as though I didn’t even exist outside of my thoughts. Did the star eat the world? Am I alone? Is this God? It was. “It,” my thoughts finally left, and my feelings… this sense of my, “I” became everything (in turn, nothing). Although “my” feelings were gone “I” could still sense. Not actions or reactions but the wholeness and emptiness simultaneously. It was not scary or sad, it was not. That is when I became. I died to live. I died and became alive. I became alive to die. But death didn’t exist, and neither did alive. And there was no. more. Language.
My mother is in the hospital for things. Manageable, “treatable” things, but things none-the-less. I think it is starting soon.
I will reiterate three things: I miss you… maybe not in my movements anymore but inside me somewhere deep, I would say my heart but that seems too cliché and, being a hipster, I must rebel from such things. I love you…it seems weird to type it like this, as if the typing renders it meaningless but I can’t be with you, I can’t love on you, I cannot show you… loving from afar is very different and very strange. So I type it, and it feels like it is nothing, because it is, they’re just 01001101s, but I trust you know, and I know you know, so I should not fret. I am glad you are far away for this, for my mother’s end… I can feel your support and yet cannot rely too much. I believe it will help me maintain strength, and not drain yours either.
With all the force of the binary code, I send my love electronically, universally.
You amaze me, you help me amaze me, you amaze, ahhh maze.
PS. Sorry this is so garrulous, effusive. Do you have an address?
