The story, all of it, something else. And still revealing itself. Interim:
I was on the treadmill after a month not on the treadmill and I plugged into my obsolete iPod and I launched my current gym playlist that is my post-death playlist, after which I will be at a loss. Like, we exhausted death, we'll soon exhaust post-death. Then what?
Everything stopped and shifted and in that I'd not been in the gym and I'd not been on the bike which was now a 55-mile ride. I was engulfed in shift, exhausted in it and owned by it and I forced my way to the gym finally one night, yawing all the way but still there. I pushed play, and it did, it played like a memory and the memory said, Remember who you are.
What?
It happened again, and another night again and I had to face something: I'd become. There was this thing beckoning, and this thing was who I became.
Wha???? When did this happen?
No means by design, I seem to have stumbled into myself, unwittingly. And into myself is outside of everything else.
I plugged into my obsolete iPod and launched my post-death playlist and sighed a sigh like I'd just come home after a most long and grueling journey, one I was never wanted to take. I came home and exhaled in post-death. Who I am.
And I got back on the bike.
A year ago I walked home from work one late summer evening and I thought: Nice night. I should go on a bike ride. I did that. I stuck with it, it remained. I was about to celebrate the year of having done that when it all became something else. I had rides waiting, shifted routes. The miles were there. I was riding out to Playa del Rey every week, and out to the edges of the Valley. As the rides got longer the hour got later. When I began the goal was to be off the road before peak bar-emptying hour. Eventually I was riding through Los Angeles well after they were closed. And it was glorious. Riding down the center of iconic roads, block after block nary a car. It all belonged to me, the night, the moon, the streets, the silence. Mine. And no exhale was more satisfying.
After a month in something else I plugged into my post-death playlist and it felt like home, and I realized it was. I was never meant to occupy life, only ever death. It took me this long to understand this? To let go. Because I could never let go. I always wanted to belong, to be liked and loved, to matter, all the confirmations. I wanted life to accept me. It never did and I lived in this failure, a great and eternal sadness.
There once was a conversation about things like childhood trauma and how does one let go of these things and I never did, I could only ever find something stronger than it to displace it. I could never let go of life because I'd never found the stronger space to occupy. Now I have, while, bonus, still breathing. Living in outside of life.
Sure, I have to continue to subsist in this thing we are all playing at but now with the realization it is not MINE, it has nothing to do with me. I didn't build this. I didn't choose this. This doesn't speak to me. I don't understand this story, and in it there is no place for me.
Never am I more alive than when I am not participating in life, the life we were born to occupy. That script, epic. Never am I more alive than when I am dead.
I have been living in all this something else for three months now, suspended and waiting to land, not certain where it will be, still already occupying home sweet home.
