About Being
“Nothing Happened, [and] then suddenly everything happened”-Jonas Mekas, Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1972)
Was it the same to you or is it just me? About being and non-being, living and existing an inch away from dying. From a young age I have known what it is like to feel, the little joints in my finger that can extend towards another. The voices and sounds that carry my words across the room. To me, from a young age everything is an extension until it is not anymore, was it the same to you?
You see, childhood is not about innocence and ignorance, no. Childhood is a glimpse of what being a person truly is, the way we can extend ourselves towards another without worrying too much about it. The way we cry and throw a tantrum, it’s not that we don’t understand but it’s just that our hearts are too full, filled to the brim with so many things. In the process of growing up we subdue ourselves, like when you held back your tears and hid behind a screen calling it “sad”
I do not know if there is a paradise, if there is at all, but I do know how the first light that we felt as children kept us longing for it. Even just a glimpse, the little glimpses of paradise scattered as we move ahead. Sometimes that glimpse can only be seen in memories, from our time in the future looking yesterday we saw what we cannot in those moments. A collage of memories hastily spliced together, like a movie about nothing in particular, haphazardly made and screened
About being is being reminded, of that little time when I am allowed to live. Was it the same for you? That reminder of childhood, where we are most free, free from the resignations, rejections and disappointments of today and tomorrow. For me that reminder came in the span of several eternities when your head turned to mine and everything happened all at once. It was so very sudden and I found myself wanting. The dull throb that I came to know as emotions vanished and is replaced only by the most vivid of expressions, something that was alien before. And I know nothing about that terrible loneliness and happiness, only that it ached me so like a feeling that I’ve come across before but forgotten when. Like nostalgia
I’ve never been able to figure out where the moments begin and end. Pure chance people say, but I cannot seem to figure out whether there is such a thing as chance or fate. Perhaps the little fragments of paradise that come our way take many shapes and forms, the fragments that remind us of our being. Perhaps for me that little fragment came in the form that I least expected. It took the form of a person in a white blouse, sitting beside me talking. Someone whose face I search in the lonely moments between sleeping and waking, someone that can help me understand and remind me about being. Is it the same to you?
