The Mist - A Journal Entry

I will let you in my mind.

A thick fog envelopes my days. There is an ache on the back of my thighs urging me to run, and a nag on my finger joints itching for a crack. There is a loud but invisible clock nesting in my skull or stomach (I cannot pinpoint, exactly) and each ticking thump jolts my body's yearning for something: an action, a dialogue, a spark.

I am always in wait. I wait for things to begin, and when they do, I wait for their end. I wait in the space between moments; there is no pause for me, there is no silence; my legs are always shaking.

I laugh in the face of Laplace's demon: map my molecules against every worldly parameter, extract all possible permutations of an action of an action, and I will still be unpredictable. I will do anything (and if fact do everything) to outrun this strange mist, this weighty feeling of absence even in the face of abundance, this nonstop itch on my fingers and toes. 

It is at its worst when I am alone.

When I am alone, the fog is dense and opaque as solid. When I am idle and alone, it is worse than death; at least death is finality, is certainty, is not-wait. When I am alone, the fog is a being that consumes, and my eyes are blind and ears, deaf. I am clawing through a haze that has grown tall and deep as the crust.

Then, it dissipates.

I pick up myself, and it dissipates. And I am not alone, and it settles. It spreads in the air and thins.

I am left wondering if I had dreamt the whole thing; if my mind was going mad, but only for specific hours in the day. I feel light as air; my vision is full. Colors are vivid, lines are defined.

It comes back.

After some hours, days, weeks, years. It lives in a cycle of emergence and invisibility, sourcing awful pleasure from the tease. What else do I do but live with it? But capture an inkling of its presence in the form of words, paint, a bug trap?

What choice do I have but radical acceptance?

I will neither be master nor slave of my mind.