How can you ever make out what another person is thinking or really like? Or how can you be sure that what you perceive yourself as is what others do too? At best, we are all perceptions or facades.
Why the droll mood, you may ask? I wish I could say. It’s just one of those things that comes out of the recesses of my subconcious mind and catches me unawares. Why this? Why that? Why the other?
So many questions. Sometimes I think too many, but without the answers I can do nothing.
I can pretend to forget they are there and continue living life like everyone else does. But every so often, just when I am in the middle of a conversation or when I’m actually in the moment of an experience, my mind will simply take a step back and then another sideways, distancing itself from the moment and from my self.
In such cases, it’s almost as if I’m two people and not one. No, I don’t mean I’m schizophrenic or anything as complex as that. I just take on two roles: one of a participator and another of an observer. The Watcher and the Watched.
The one thing I’m still trying to figure out is whether I have done this all my life or if it’s a quality I’ve developed over the years. Perhaps those months I spent looking inward were too well spent. Perhaps I discovered someone inside of me I wasn’t ready to meet and yet to whom I had already been introduced.
Knowledge cannot be un-known, can it?
I might have turned away scared the first time around – that’s the only way I can explain this sudden ‘brightening’ of my life. Not necessarily in a more positive or happier sense. Just literally brighter. I guess when you dig down, you generally do enter darker, gloomier territories before you reach that light at the end of your tunnel.
I didn’t emerge at the other end, as much as I seemed to scuttled backwards and re-surfaced from that somewhere else to join the melee of world once again – but I can’t shake of the ghosts of that time or the voices that call me back.
Maybe it’s time for another dip within.
S’laams
Bint Ali
Peppermint Prose 