There is a blank spot where the ideas had been just now. I remember that they existed, but now I can’t remember what they were. Post-Covid sucks. It’s as if a fog lay on the low patch of ground across the road and I stared at it too long and it seemed as though the little white house, the field of sunflowers, and the stream had all disappeared in the moonlight where the fog lay instead. If what I saw, tasted, smelled, heard, and touched was all that was real, then there was no little white house, no field of sunflowers, and no stream. How could I prove that they existed unless I could procure a heat scope—What do you call those things?—and confirmed their existence by seeing red and orange recumbent forms presumably sleeping inside the vague shape of a house. Without an image of warm bodies and the skeleton of a little white house, the scene was like an episode of Schrödinger’s cat. Was there life inside or was there none? The answer was that there was both. Once I took a measurement, only one way or the other would be proven. All of existence is a crapshoot.
Ah, there they are, the ideas. Sometimes, they slip back into place as if they had never been gone. My thoughts used to feel as solid as my faith in my senses. When I was a teenager in the 1970s, I had tried transcendental meditation. It was a thing back then. I had read a book that insisted that, if I tried hard enough and in just the right way, I could leave my chubby body behind and travel the universe.
I just want to tell you that the idea is still there in my mind, waiting for the attention I’ll give it, but there are a couple of things about looking into that lavender room back in time where I sat on an itchy carpet with books spread out on the floor around me. I was not fat. I had always had a thicker waist, wide sturdy bones, a little roll of fat that folded when I sat, but I was not fat, not even chubby. Who can force a duck to fit into the feathers of a swallow? Yet, I could not see the truth of own myself back then, or of the ugly messages that people fed me instead of love. So, instead of sitting in my skin, I wanted to escape into the universe, across mountain tops and into space where distance and time were altered, just so I could escape the ugliness that had ingrown into my body, if only for a moment.
I tried so hard to fly as I looked at the thickness of my strong thighs. I even closed my eyes and tried not to feel the firm skin that held me together. I could imagine the mountain tops and the space around Saturn and the nebulae deeper into space, but I couldn’t feel the space whoosh around me. I couldn’t relax enough, I thought. If only I could do it right. My thoughts remained as solid as the itchy carpet pressing into my legs and butt.
And now, I float. Not even the duvet, the comforter, and the quilt on my bed kept me from floating out of my body last night after the long drive to pick up my son from school. Do you know how you seem to float and spin with a few too many drinks? Ah, everyone should try that sometime, at least once. It takes you out of your certainty regarding the solidity of your senses. It’s a chemical meditation, but it will do if you can’t let go enough to find the space above your body. A hangover is the only payment. But these days, all I have to do to float is to push through when I know I should rest. And with the floating, I can hear the singing of space, a frequency almost too high to hear. Tinnitus makes me so aware of quiet that it hurts.
Which is real then? The floating or the view of my body held down by my covers? The imagined quiet or the singing vacuum of space?
Only Schrödinger’s cat could tell.