III. Hold it Close (like a secret)

Continuity of self, glimpses from the future and the past | Between Selves

If you look up at the sky and you're in the right frame of mind, you can see the curvature of the earth. An invisible dome indicated only by light reflecting off the particles below. The weather cycles continuously from one form to another, one place to another, held within this envelope. The elements have the potential to change the course of it— it seems spontaneous, but is it? Sometimes I can feel the churning in my belly, and I know that it is possible to change.

It is possible to remember.

I never had to ask myself if I believed in Past Lives.

What I didn't know was that you could decide. I didn't know that you could reshape the past. I didn't know that shaping changes the contour while the materials stay the same. Clay molded by the weight of your foot is only permanent if you walk away.

Actually, nothing is permanent.
Sometimes you walk away thinking the past remains and later learn that it changed without you.

I realized I had abandoned myself. Silly, I know, but it came as a surprise. Getting lost is like that, you only realize you've been walking in circles when you arrive in a place too familiar to overlook.

When I opened my eyes I felt uneasy and placed my hand on my chest as if to check that I was alive. I could still smell the waiting room, that smell that hospitals have.

The sense of loss surprised me.

When I was 11 years old I went on a white water rafting trip with my mom and her new boyfriend in Colorado. We all wore wetsuits, and were standing knee deep in a calm section of the River. The guide was giving us instructions in “the very unlikely event of the raft overturning against the rocks.”

He said, “The sections across the center, where you’ll be sitting, will create air pockets under the raft. Hold onto this rope along the edge, especially if the raft overturns. Find the air pocket between the seats so that you can breath. The edge of the raft will protect you from the cliffs, and everyone will stay together.”

It was less exciting than I imagined.
I knew instinctively a few seconds before the raft hit the sheer rock face that it was going to flip over.

(Hold on to the rope. Find the air pocket.)

Thick ribbons of tiny bubbles passing across my vision. My feet in silhouette against the dark water. The occasional jolt of a rock hitting my shin. My arm isn’t long enough to reach all the way, so I have to let go of the rope and claw my fingers against the vinyl. Seems like forever when I can finally take a big breath, alone, under the yellow glow of light through the floor of the raft.

A few days later I noticed a small red circle around a bug bite on my stomach, a different color than the bruises from hitting the rocks.

I looked at my stomach the next morning to check if the circle was gone and felt a pain in my neck. I couldn’t move my head to the right at all.

Occasionally I wake up like that, not being able to turn my head. Or shortly after. I’m making my coffee and suddenly I can’t turn my head. It always passes.

I couldn’t shake the question.

I was walking through Prospect Park that afternoon when I noticed flashes of white floating through the air, past my head. At first I thought they were seeds, but as I looked closer I saw they were tiny moths. Hundreds of them all flying in the same direction. I looked to see where they came from and saw a rotted plank of wood awkwardly propped against a retaining wall.

I always imagined that coming out of a cocoon was a slow squeezing process, like getting out of a wet bathing suit, that there would be a collapse of exhaustion at the end of it. But each moth exploded out of its sheath and flew off immediately.
One after another.
A robin sat at the far edge of the rotted wood, head cocked, inquisitively. Without moving its body it waited until a tiny moth would fly close to its beak and quickly snap it forward, eating them in a steady rhythm. New life extinguished within moments, a lucky bird rewarded with a feast.

We don’t always have dreams like that but we had a few, when we were young. Lately daydreams can feel as vivid as while sleeping, or maybe we would call them visions. Sometimes they are about us and sometimes they are about something older.

We remember some of it but probably not all of it. We’re only partially conscious, after all. We are careful, exert too much influence at once and we might wake up prematurely. The still surface of a lake loses its mirror image with even the slightest disturbance, a reflection is but one possibility.

There is a moment where you can decide, what a dream means to you. You can choose to wake up. A dream is not a premonition, or an absolute truth.
A dream is a reflection. Reflections can bend and so too can the dream.

If you pull at the edges you can stretch it wide open. You can step through and feel it shut behind you. The sun rises and if you look closely, you can see where you are.

Next post > IV: home, again