Messy.

A tub full of dirty dishes that I can’t seem to ever stop trying to find the unexpected beauty in.

That is how these past few weeks have felt. The ones that have been enshrouded by dizzying, sickening, exhilarating chaos.

I tried to write about something, anything, else, a hopeless endeavor akin to trying to fold laundry while fireworks explode in your backyard. So I put the practical away and sat down to write what felt real and true and aching and beautiful, remembering that this space, after all, is an ode to nothing if not messy things. And what do you know, the words fell onto the page.

These are those words.

THE INTENSITY OF LIGHT

There is something liberating about giving in to the natural order of the universe.

The one that governs life, love, and every other messy thing that we try to clean up, make neat, organize. We search for order where there is no order to be found.

Because stability is like the sun.

There one moment and gone the next.

When it is there, it is so brilliant. It’s warm light falls over every inch of me with the kind of grace that I am still trying to understand the physics of, calculate the time and space of, crawl through the fractured dimensions of. I am reaching out to wrap my hands around something that can’t ever be grasped but that can surely be felt. Particles of vitamins fall onto my skin, nourishing my cells with intangibles.

But then, inevitably, invariably, the sun falls out of this sky and into one that I can never follow it into. It takes ease and brilliance with it, leaving empty shadows devoid of all certainty. Devoid of all light. Illusions begin to dance like circus animals in the night. One balancing on a neon tightrope, another flying over my head with a firecracker in each ear. I can barely see anything as I stumble through the dark, still blinded from all the light that was there only one moment ago. Still unable to visualize anything but hazy orbs that offer only the mere remembrance of light. Afterimages. That is what they are called, the spots you see after looking at the sun, the spots that I read somewhere are the result of your eye not being able to process the intensity of the light.

AFTERIMAGES

This is a light I cannot not process the intensity of. I see spots every time I try to look away. Spots that are not really there, spots that no one else but me can see, spots that my brain has concocted as a mere compensation for what it has witnessed, a desperate attempt to ease the transition.

It is the brain’s way of holding on. It injects illusions into your perception, convincing you that something, anything, is still just right there. Object permanence. We forget that believing in things we cannot see is a learned habit, one that did not come naturally. We forget that all of this holding on is only just the unfortunate result of psychological development. I wonder if Jean Piaget ever saw his discovery as the catalyst of heartbreak. I wonder if he looked at those babies as their brains developed and thought, ah, now they are capable of convincing themselves to hold onto lost things.

Things we want to believe will return to us. Is the ball behind your back or has it fallen into another dimension, landing haphazardly on a plane I cannot walk upon. Cannot breathe upon.

All to say, I am used to losing things. I am used to afterimages. What I am not used to is the light returning by morning like the sun, cracking open like a chasm so vast that I could spend forever falling into it.

FRAYING ORDER

The light is never the issue.

No one is afraid of the light. It’s the dark that haunts us because it is the dark that acts like a Rorschach test, an ambiguous space to project our deepest fears and desires onto. A space where anything can be everything, nothing, something. We need to see something.

Collections of stars become constellations because psychologically, we can’t resist connecting dots, drawing lines that are not there and never will be. The stars were arranged in the shape of a crab on the morning that I was born, making me what they call a cancer. Except they weren’t, were they? They were just scattered stars that the human mind couldn’t help but make shapes out of and we have been believing them ever since.

THE CHEMISTRY OF CHAOS

Because like chemists, we are obsessed with the potential for transformation.

When I was fifteen, I sat in a classroom by the sea and listened to my chemistry teacher explain to me that electrons exist either in the ground or excited state. The ground state requires the least amount of energy and is by far the most stable. Electrons are only ever coaxed out of this stability by the magnetic energy of their surroundings. As they absorb the world around them, they find themselves forgoing the comfort of stability for the intoxicating allure of other orbital fields. They jump from one ring to the next with increasing speed as they fill with potential energy.

They become the antithesis of stability, the bleeding inverse of order and logic.

Our world is like that. We are each just electrons hopping from one orbit to the next, rising and falling from stability to chaos and back again. Making sense of the chaos has been the grand, futile project of the human race.

We refuse to to let one thing not be something else. Meaning must be ascribed so some semblance of sense can be suckled from the ever corroding carcass of chaos that is anything, ever.

Order is nothing but a fraying rope that we have wrapped around this world since the beginning of time. A room will only ever get messy. We will only ever try to make it clean.

Society is a simulacrum of a dream that physics never meant to see come to fruition. Has it come to fruition? Are we any less animalistic and messy when we comb our hair and drive to work, thinking about meetings when there is a beating, breathing world just outside the perfectly constructed cubicles of contemporary life?

No.

And are my emotions any less dizzying, any less consuming, just because I run too fast to music that is too loud next to a shoreline of waves that crash with a comforting reciprocation of intensity?

No.

It’s all just fraying rope, wrapped tightly around the things that we have been told we need to control in order to be functioning members of a cubicle world.

REFUSING GRAVITY

I always hated tug-of-war in school because it felt like that. I hated the gym coach yelling at us to dig our heals into the earth as the rope burned our still innocent, still soft hands. I never knew what it was for, never understood why the measure of victory was the ability to resist falling. The ability to resist the most natural thing in the world—gravity.

I have since learned that it is indeed the opposite.

Maybe trust falls would have been a better activity for the blooming youth that we were. Maybe then we would have spent a few less nights clawing at our chests, wondering why the sensation of being pulled by a force larger than us feels like a precursor to loss instead of a catalyst of gain.

Maybe then we wouldn’t find ourselves holding opposite ends of a rope with every person we meet, focused so intensely on not letting ourselves fall that we forget to lean back, to notice what it feels like for the tension created by two people tugging on the same thing to be strong enough to hold each other up, to relieve the weight of each other’s worlds.

If we could just bring ourselves to let it.

Click here to support a small artist with big dreams (me)