Here and There

Self-Portrait by Bikini666 (CC licence)

Believing you can move from here to there is always going to be shaky and wobbly.  Without any sort of safety net, on hypoglycemic legs, you must jump from one place to another that you're not even sure exists.  Fair Work Australia wouldn't condone it, that's for sure.

And so, because leaving here feels impossible, you sit down and begin a scan.  You trust your brave pair of eyes to do the searching and not to flinch.  You'll know the way out when you see it.  And then, ah, there it is.  This file, it turns out, is labelled Victimisation.  It's funny, but you never really thought that you would own a file labelled such, that had contents in it.  You tried so hard to not be a victim in any way.  But then you realised you could see it in others, and when you did you had a strange reaction to it.  A rather strong reaction.  That was the first clue.

To not flinch and to open that file is to access some of the pain that looms so large on some occasions and is entirely unfathomable on others, a continent away.  The shit you sequestered away because you didn't know what to do with it, the way your body takes mercury and lead and sequesters them away for safety in your brain and in your liver.  Opening that file is an act of bravery understood only by yourself, and able to be done only by yourself.  It is difficult to admit to it, because it feels so sort of middle-class.  My pain, my pain.  You're like Dr Smith from Lost in Space and the whirling robot, all in one.  

Opening that file takes back some stuff from your shadow and really makes it yours.  It's the only way that you can leave this place.

This place.  It's strangely compelling, once you're here.  It validates to you what you can't always feel, that those gaping numb punctures, like flaccid truck tyres on the side of the highway, really are real.  But being here is embarrassing.  It's small.  You never thought you would fall into this sort of thing.  You have fallen so far into the vat, you don't know if you can climb out.  Its walls are so slimy, you start thinking that maybe you're always going to be here.  That this is your destiny.

Back here, the vines casually drape themselves around your feet and your ankles and then dig in, like a pair of too-small undies.  When you are over there, you try to remind yourself to remember, as though to a future incarnation pre-Bardo, that though it feels as though you can't move, you have invisible energy scissors.  Because once you've arrived, staying here is sorta warming ~ in the way that pissing your pants in a snowstorm is sorta warming.

Staying here is like slipping yourself a microgram of mercury ~ not immediately toxic, but draining your immune system, feeding the largest dragon in your repertoire.

Leaving again, it's like you've bust your way through a door that you didn't know was going to budge because it's made of steel, like in Get Smart.  But no, not even busting through ~ you don't even need to do that.  You reach out and turn the handle and walk through.  You grab the bottom rung of the ladder in the vat and climb out.  Ridiculously simple.

When you have jumped from here to there, the air is immediately different.  Higher altitude.  You've been there before.  You were there 10 minutes ago.  But when you're back here, you immediately forget that there exists.  When you're there, you can never forget that here is.  You flinch at the thought of returning, knowing that you probably will.  All you can do is hope that with each walk-through the vines diminish some of their hold, that next time you won't forget what you know there.  That nothing can hold you here.  It's just a walk-through back.

Tus Misterios by Alfonso Maggiolo Pierano (cc licence)