A Dip into the Intangible
Also known as the imagination.
Really, I just want to be able to hike to a high place, or drive, or take the lift… it doesn’t have to be the peak of anything, but it has to have a view, and I want it rather exposed, without leaves or bushes or walls around me much; really I just want to gaze out beyond and below; gaze out, unthinking – yet thinking about everything at the same time.
And really I just want to spend as long as I want there, just there, sitting, standing, looking, thinking.
Honestly, at this current point, and at multiple other occasions in the past year, I want absolutely nothing else.
I don’t want any time pressure, save the natural proceedings of a regular earth day. I don’t want any stress, any planning, any distracting factors to shorten the time spent at that high place. I just want peace, I want to be able to do whatever the fuck I want, I just want, for once, to be able to spend as much time as I like, with whatever surrounds, with whatever is.
No worrying about sharing the space, no worrying about having to go because of another appointment, no worrying about any sort of external limitations. Just, purely, freedom to be. That’s all I ask. To be. To just gaze out. Just like that. The ocean, the mountain range, the city – anything. Just the freedom and abundance of time, at a high place. A balcony, a cliff, a ridge – anything.
Just the freedom, the abundance of time, a high place.
And I know, I know for a fact, that I will want to jump. I know for certain that my brain will imagine the scenario.
It’s called “the call of the void”. It’s curiosity, it’s wonder, it’s biological, it’s psychological, it’s whatever the fuck science wants to call it.
It’s human.
The greatest fear is not the jumping itself. The greatest fear is that I will, and on the way down, think, “This is alright.”
And, typing this now at the end of a long week, and before the beginning of a longer one, I fear this irrational fear, not of the flesh, not of the mind, but of one that seethes within the deepest depths of the soul, one that is really ever-present, only hidden… that if now, presented with a cliff, an ocean, a sunset…
I don’t think I’d be edging slowly forwards. I don’t think it’ll be a charge either. I think I’d do it in a giant leap. Right now, I am likening it to taking a corner kick in football. Couple steps back, small run up, whoosh. 1 second upwards, then just rushing, rushing, rushing…
I refuse to believe no one has never thought about death. With death being the only certainty in life, it’s impossible not to entertain the thought.
And then, a stranger, a beautiful one, with hair messy from the wind, boots dirty from the earth, appears. I’m back at the high place now. And strangely, even surprisingly, I catch myself – I imagined this person as either gender, any gender. I constructed this person as, well, a person, rather than the opposite sex, or a potential partner, or a wild encounter, as a worldly mind is wont to do, in such scenarios.
This encounter, is the encounter that completely rewrites the story.
These are the fantasies I lose myself in, on the commutes, in the queues, during the periods between lights off and sleep, during the time between putting the phone down and the arrival of a friend.
This particular one, the one with the beautiful stranger, I believe has happened before, but try as I might, I’m unable to pinpoint the experience.
Alas, it may be no more than a false memory.
