time, a dissolving butterfly

excerpt from recent diaries

And of course, when I am writing to ‘you’, I am speaking of the universal you, which is every ‘you’ I’ve ever dreamt, or perhaps the space between them. When I speak to you, I am speaking to no one, to everyone, to the ever elusive ‘other’ who never ceases to confound me. Think of you as the space that is decidedly not me, which is at times the sum of my fears, and at others the hopes of my conquest.

Recently, I have been overtaken by a blooming curiosity, where before there lay only the space between reinforced beliefs. I find myself asking questions and wanting to know the answers to them, which implies an acknowledgment of the possibility that I do not have them already. It would appear I am growing more human. Growing, because it is not a thing that comes naturally to me, nor, do I think, to most. Occasionally I will meet someone who is so remarkably animated, not in action, but in stillness. I observe a sort of grounded state that tells me they are really here, not simply pantomiming life, but enraptured in it, even if they themselves are unaware of the clarity of their presence.

I pray to be made fuller, to collide with the present, to grow, always, more loving. I draw a parallel between loving and presence. As much as I can, I try to escape narration, any narration that exists beyond the now, and preferably all narration entirely. I find that questions dull the noise. An earnest question, and the silence attending its answer— those are the arcs I begin to carve above and through time, the spaces within which I can feel the thrum of my heartbeat, in which I begin to feel the sensation of ‘time’, not as a burden nor a noose, but as a living, breathing thing that vibrates all around me.

Yesterday, stalled on a long-distance train, I watched two butterflies chase one another in alternating spirals: one white, one yellow. I was struck by a wondering — what would a butterfly feel like upon the tongue, if consumed? It was not a question of logic, it was purely a matter of feeling, and I came to the belief that it would be something akin to an ice cream cone, the papery kind, that feel like a sort of styrofoam that melts upon the wet of the tongue. And I knew it then, that I’d discovered some truth far beyond the physical. It was the truth of the moment, splendid and serene, melting across and into my forehead, and in that space of warmth, I felt time— time across my brow, time making itself known in all its tender unknowability.

And ‘you’, too, the tender unknown, the vast expanse of void contorting to proliferate and proliferate a limitless labyrinth. And this is where I falter, hesitate, at the edge of the world, of all that is ‘me’— for perhaps, one day, I may find that there is some bedrock to what exists of me, some limit to what lies beneath, but that which is not me is not bound by constraint. It is, at the very least, a universe, and more likely a thing far larger. The ‘other’ is that which I cannot conceive, not in the vacuum of selfhood, of ‘I’, and so as I open myself to perceive, so at once I am creating a portal, not only to know, but to be known - a task which I hope to obfuscate by simplifying the issue of you.

And thus begins the narrative, which takes root to strangle inquiry, which in its visions collapses the realm of possibility and tells me that I know, and in all my knowing, I lose time, I lose hours, I lose the deliciousness of the essence.

I am not the first to demand more of the ‘now’, to feel in my core that there is something deeper, some untapped marrow, the flavor of which sometimes dances across my tongue and disappears just as I attempt to tap it gently to my lip. But in flashes, I do possess it, the sensation of a dissolving butterfly. And it is in these tender flashes that I slip from sanity, which is knowing, and become insatiable for all that is unknowable, but which I am here attempting to capture— the myth of the not me, of ‘you’.