Geometric Allegory

The mirror broke at exactly 5:45 PM on Tuesday in April. The fissure between reality and dream tore into him with a feeling unlike anything he’d known.  The feeling made him dizzy and afraid and he looked down at his hands.  He staggered toward the couch and abruptly sat down. 

It must have been mid-afternoon because the sun was shining through the window, and yet he could not entirely orient himself to time or place.

He sunk deeper into the couch thinking he would pass out, and as the tiny room began to unhinge, his focused locked on his hands anchoring onto an age spot on the back of his hand, and then he felt a certain panic bleeding or from underneath the skin of perception.

The skin on his hands looked thin like tissue paper.  These were the hands of an old man, but that would be impossible because he was…

“I’m 42…  I’m 42…”

And then:

“I’m not… I’m not me.”

And then:

“I’ve never been me.”

He’d lived through this same event billions of times before, and the confusion in his mind was becoming clear.  Every time it hit him it was with enough blinding force to leave him dazed.

We live in a glass jar of perception.  Our physical body–with the billion firing neurons in our brains–shapes the very experience we’re capable of having.  We cannot experience anything outside of the human experience, but that is not to suggest that the universe doesn’t everience consciousness in ways that are not had by humans. 
  
A voice came from his mouth as he struggled to calm down: “You’ve got to remember… You’ve got to remember… You’ve got to remember…” He was repeating the phrase, and he knew the words were somehow important.

He couldn’t even remember the meaning of most words.  They sounded like dough in his ears, and a pressure expanded in his head; he felt as if he were drowning.

A word flashed in his brain, and he didn’t know what it meant. HELP.  It had no real meaning, but he knew it suggested some kind of fear or warning or death. The fear was sharp and certain, dark around the edges, and smelling of moldy oranges.  

Was he having a stroke?  Were his psychotic thoughts the result of oxygen cut from the brain’s oxygen deprivation?  Was this a panic attack? Was he dying, and this is how it felt to finally shut down?

A voice from the tv managed to reach his ears, saying “NASA sent seven astonaughts into space” and all he could think of was a tiny speck of light in the sky erupting into red flames followed by a plume of white smoke cut into the blue sky.  He forgot that he was sitting on the couch, and he remember a woman, a school teacher, and how she kept saying, “I am not afraid.  It would be an honor to die for such a noble cause.” 

He thought, “Why would she die for that?  Why is it an honor?” But he couldn’t fathom any of it.  He had waves of feeling, but there were no words to accompany them other than a televised voice from NASA…  No.  The televised voice wasn’t from NASA.  It was from a tv, and it said… and the televised voice repeated it again… and again… and again….

Remember.

(They believe that life is the flesh.  They celebrate the flesh because they do not understand how the universe rolls out and over and across.)

And the scene kept repeating’ and each time he felt lost to the confusion, he would break the surface and catch his breath.  His head was spinning.  It was like a skipping vinyl record, only it was his whole perspective of the world–his vision and hearing and emotions–that repeated before him.  And as it kept repeating, it kept getting faster and faster until he felt the lagging trail had pulled him into a terrible feeling of panic.  

He was stuck in an air pocket in time, disconnected to his flesh.

I’ve had this realization billions of times before, he thought.  I will remember…  Remember this is my life, and then I will forget. 

He knew that if I went to the mirror and looked at himself again he would forget everything.  It always happened this way.  The moment he looked into his own eyes, his brain would press the reset button and he would disappear again.

I’m not going to go to the mirror, he thought to himself.  I refuse to go through this again.  He looked around the small house, and nobody was home.  The house looked strange to him, and he only vaguely sensed that he was supposed to recognize it.  He saw two dogs, and he didn’t know where they came from.  They were black Labradors, and he knew that he loved them.  He also knew that in only a moment’s time, he would forget everything and be right back to staring at his hands wondering how old he was.  He couldn’t remember it’s name, but he knew he loved it.

Someone will come home soon.  Someone lives with me!  Someone knows about these dogs…

But he’d had this realization a billion times before.  It’s as if he were lost in a time machine, and in this moment in time, he knew he would be here forever.  A fear overtook him because he knew he was trapped… perhaps even damned, and he knew that t.he moment he goes to the bathroom mirror, the whole thing will start over, and he will be magically transformed back to the couch, looking at his hand, and suddenly realizing that he is not twenty-seven.

But another fear gripped him.  

With determination, he stared at the smaller of the two dogs and tried to focus on it.  He tried to remember what is was or where it came from.  

One cannot imagine being so lost as he was at that moment.  If I’m not real…  What am I?

Someone knocked on the door, and he felt the panic rise up in him.  He sprang up from the couch and wondered what he should do.

He started to walk toward the door, but then he had an impulse to clean himself up before he opened the door.  

“One minute,” he said, and then he raced toward the bathroom.  He needed to check himself to make sure he looked ok.  Without thinking, he looked into the mirror and caught eye contact with himself and everything went black.

2

An older skinny woman stood on the other end of the door.  She smiled at me,greeted me, and then handed me a hedge clipper.  It was bright orange, and it perfectly matched the extension cord that was rolled up at her feet.  Though she looked vaguely familiar, I didn’t know her name or why she was at the door.  I didn’t know who she was–or who I even was for that matter–but I knew enough to take the hedge clipper.  I said, “Thank you.”

“It took us a while to clean up around that plum tree, but we’ll be back next week.”  She looked dirty and her words didn’t have any weight with me.  I didn’t want to be standing there, and my heart was pounding so loudly that it filled my ears.  As she continued speaking, I held the frame of the door to keep balance, and I think she must have noticed that I didn’t look good because I remember she went away as I shut the door, and I heard her in the other side of the door as she walked away. 

She must have been the gardener?  But why would I hire such an old woman to take care of my yard?  I looked out a small window, and I watched her as she and her friend got into a broken down looking Mazda. 

I felt guilty because… Because I hadn’t paid her.  I realized I hadn’t paid her.

I pulled back from the tiny window and opened the front door.  The car had started, but it hadn’t left the driveway yet.  They both looked up at me from the car.  The old woman from before opened the door and started to get out.

I wasn’t thinking at all.  I heard myself say, “Carlos is going to give you some money.”

Carlos?

Yes.  Carlos.  

I remembered Carlos But she was talking about the yard, and I figured out that she was gardening or doing landscape, but I couldn’t understand why this old woman was doing this kind of work for me, especially when I could have been doing it myself.  Eventually, I managed to end the conversation and then I shut the door.

Once it shut, I ran to the backyard.  I don’t know why, but I started to cry, and I sat down on the stoop, and I wanted nothing more than to smoke a cigarette… I didn’t even know if cigarettes were real though, because everything was so ridiculously.

They actually think that some people are more important than others.  They think that  and lit a cigarette.

He ran to the mirror and looked at himself.  The reflection confirmed his worst fears.  I’m an old man.  I keep forgetting that I’m an old man.  As he stood at the mirror staring at his own eyes, he remembered everything, including that he would soon forget. 

Oh my god…  I keep forgetting.  The panic circled his body, and he said to himself, “I keep forgetting.”  


Sent from my iPad

We are the event horizon.  If number one is equally far from infinity as a googolplex, no humanist connection could be made from point a to point b.

Memories allow us to integrate experience into our subjective experience of the present; the present is the event horizon, for it is an infinite place of creation.  The past and the future both bend to the will of the present.