Days in between days and in between hours, life fades. It sheds invisibly like a dead skin. The incredulous pressure to count more of what is lost and growing more perplexed as to why: such is living. It keeps happening so we become alert. Loss makes us aware of the gaping holes in our hearts that needs filling. Every day you wonder when you will gain something, truly, something of value. And even then when it passes through your hand, will you know? Will you recognize what it is that one ought not to lose? You never know. Such as how you never know how hours turn to days in between days.
At times it is bearable to cope with this sense of loss. Hope clings to the surface of our consciousness like a damp cloth.
I once dreamt that I stood in the middle of a near empty highway at night. There were no cars. As soon as a headlight reared itself from a distance, I crossed. What was the point of this? I knew that regardless of how unthreatening it might be to stand in emptiness, it is still precarious. Precaution is never the absence of danger. When danger waltzed in, I felt safer. At least I knew what was coming. Knowledge is never reassuring but it has the illusion of security. When we know then we become less afraid. Even of dying.
But dying is different from death itself. We do not know what death is like so we are afraid of it. Is this what they mean by “face your fear”? Is it facing the possibility of death? It made me think of all of those who stared down at death from the precipice. It must pass through fear somehow. And after that, who knows. Is it a vacuum? Are we emptied of all fear when death finally comes?
Perhaps this is why some are no longer afraid to die, or at least they say they do. They know it does not last: fear, life and death. For that matter, nothing lasts. We cling to the transience of things being where they are at a certain moment before they are gone. We are obsessed about preservation, permanence and the habitual discourse of living life to the fullest. When life is full, does it not become empty? Heidegger must be rolling in his grave by now. Are we not living paradoxes, in that sense?
Every day I contemplate. Modernity prescribes that this is a pointless exercise. I laugh, I talk, I eat, I sing, I love, I dance, I drink, I cry – nothing wrong with that. True that no one tells me what to do but how come all this pressure not to think? I ask, I think, I think again and on top of another point of analysis, I think about that too. I have been told that I think too much like it is the most laughable thing. It is funny. It is funny that it is funny and even funnier that it is funny at all. We laugh at the darkest things to ease the tension, to reduce it to its most trivial form. For when things are small they become bearable. I remember how the late Edith Tiempo described, for instance, how love is folded up so it is compacted in our hands. We compact those that overwhelm us. An act of suppression that makes life all the more bearable: we fold and fold until we run out of halves. We are all made of the little things that we shelve in the back of our minds. The little things we would rather not think about.
Albeit, it is pointless! It is pointless to think about the big questions. I am just as clingy as the damn damp cloth. For what little or much I have to live for there is that pointlessness to it. We all fall down eventually. We all fade. We all lose. But here I am and you can read me and that is the point of it all.
