As you do
I just typed "This morning" to begin this sentence, but had to lean thoughtfully on the backspace key, because yes, this is morning, but not the morning I'm talking about.
I've been having a recurring dream intermittently over several weeks: in this dream, I'm catching riots of butterflies with a flashlight. I'm holding a torch that hurls out a single beam into the pitchblack landscape, and where the light shines, raging throngs of butterflies batter furiously against the walls of the beam, like they're trapped within a frozen cage of fluorescent glass. Then I flick the switch, and plunge into darkness; but high above, emancipated butterflies explode into the empty skies.
Yesterday morning, I woke from a recurring dream to a recurring nightmare. You know, the one where you know what you're going to see before you even open your eyes, emblazoned into the back of your eyelids: the same goddamned four walls topped by the same goddamned ceiling topped by the same goddamned routine. I curled up into a ball of rage and hollered vowelled obsceneties into my pillow until my lungs imploded, or so I hoped. They didn't, so I got up, slightly disappointed, and routined away.
Routine, fucking routine. The problem is that things cannot stay different all the time, but things can stay the same all the time.
This isn't just speculation, it's law. It's Newtonian law - things at rest will remain at rest unless a force of change is exerted. If I remain at rest any longer, I told myself, if I do not elicit an appropriately non-destructive form of change that will release me from the nightmarish tedium of routine university life, salvation may come in the violent and deleterious, but ultimately necessary form, of stabbing large forks into my eyes.
Forks, plural.
Yesterday morning, I cowered in routine and daydreamed desperately about hurling sand at the sea.
Fast forward to several hours later, when I'm sliding down slick quasi-Welsh cliffs and squelching through stranded clumps of seaweed landlocked in the low tide; fast forward to several minutes after that, when I'm using hands like awkward icicles to snowball frozen sand at a reticent sea.
But, I digress! Rewind to the part when I'm pacing in my friend's room, bubbling with impatience. In his car, speeding away from the enclosured campus, pressing my pen into my scraps of paper, etching out the seething capitals: I CANNOT TAKE HAVING WALLS AROUND ME ANYMORE. I'm staring up at the matted grey fibres above me, thinking, this is a car ceiling, this is different, this is good. But hell, I wish it would just dissolve into sky.
An hour later, I'm thinking, I don't know where I am, and I like that.
We're headed westwards, towards open water. The plan was to beat the sunset to the seaside, just so we could watch it drag the twilight under the empty horizon, but instead we stopped at a pub in a town that redefined "hick" as I've ever known it. Entirely of its own accord, my brain surreptitiously inserted a background soundtrack, plagiarized from one of those antique Western cowboy films. You know, the country twang of lazy guitars as the two cowboys draw their pistols. Feel the thick dusty atmosphere of smalltown camaraderie, and you'll know how I felt, perched on a barstool, legs dangling a foot off the floor, painfully conscious of being 19, small, female and Asian, in a small room where uproarious geriatric white males clapped each other heartily on the backs and called each other Ol' Bo Codger and Sunny Jim. The thing is, I'm not even kidding.
The incredulous stares hammered me into a little cube of incongruity.
I wanted to wrap myself in the antique floorboards. I wanted to shrink and hide behind the bar's peanut tray. I wanted to know who in hell would concede to being called Ol' Bo Codger.
We pass through hamlets so astonishingly compact that the bonnet of the car is already on the outskirts before the tail-lights have even reached the town center.
A long while after the highlighted skies have bruised slowly into twilight and solid night, we're clambering down those quasi-Welsh cliffs, christening our flying handfuls of sand with symbolic frustration. There goes a wet handful of ennui. There goes a sandy fistful of bloody essays. There goes a scattered spatter of routine.
There goes feeling in my fingers. Sea-soaked sand freezes like burning.
Sated like drenched fire, we speed recklessly to Bristol to meet bewildered friends for drinks. Then we set a course for Lands' End...
...but we don't make it there, because we're distracted by roadsigns, mischievous kleptomania and prospects of cow-tipping (hi Jacq). One screeching stop in the middle of an uncertain suburbia rewards us with a large roadsign nearly as tall as I am, which he bundles frantically into the backseat while I whistle innocently at the passing vehicles. One swerve takes us towards Glastonbury instead, but for miles we're streaming through ponderous mists, barelling through fog that parts relucantly and slams shut in our wake.
And somewhere along the way, we swerve to a stop at an unknown T-junction, kill the engine and listen to the furious silence until my ears hurt. The mists are so heavy that the world just ceases to exist less than a hundred metres in either direction, like we're standing in a little island of reality suspended in infinite nothingness. Absolute, raw, unadultered isolation. Enclosed in emptiness. This is the best I'll get to describing the experience:
"I was just, like, duuuude."
Really.
We explore Wells and its Cathedral in the soggy fog, in air that has the consistency of undiluted honey and molasses. We skirt along the fringes of Bath on the cusp of 4am. Under 12 hours ago, I thought, I was sitting at my computer contemplating inserting forks into my eyes. Now, I'm subsisting on a rush of wanderlust, at least 200 miles from my caged campus bubble and watching the white road lines vanish like parallel lightning underneath the wheels. This is a dream, I keep telling myself. This is a dream. Someone's flicked that torch switch, and I'm emancipated and bursting into empty skies.
And it feels fucking awesome.
By then I'm so exhausted that each word I formulate feels like I'm pushing it out of my mouth with a leaden tongue. We pull over at a service station and snooze through a laborious sunrise.
Now I'm typing this from work, back at campus and slotted like a square block into a triangular hole of daily routine again. This is this morning, and I'm high on caffeine and spontaneity. This is what I have to do when walls become a nightmare - travel myself to exhaustion, until I crave the homecoming, or am too exhausted to care. Drink my fill of otherness, until sameness becomes tolerable, or at least, less intolerable.
To me, death reeks of changelessness, stillness, stagnation, unmoving rest. Therefore, therefore, life must be dynamic, ever-changing, ever-moving restlessness, unpredictable, teeming - like just so many explosive butterflies.
"What a random night," he observes, as we walk back to the car.
"Oh yes. Random." I'm balancing precariously on the yellow lines on the road, reliving a childhood fantasy that if I step on the grey tarmac, the road-snakes will gnaw on my ankles and eat me alive.
"Good random, huh."
"Oh no, no. Necessary random."
The thing is, you see, I'm not afraid of death, of dying. What I really, really fear most; what's more of a nightmare to me, is not living. Is this just me?