Surely reality is not the space which I inhabit, surely reality would be more exciting, more substantive than this dull existence. I live in a single room and while I wish I could claim it was a room with a view of the Seine in Paris, or with a view of the Oder, the Rhine or the Elbe in Germany, it isn't. My view is of another apartment building and these 2 monitors before me on which I type these very letters is my life based on.
There are many a day when I dream of palaces, castles and country estates. How wonderous it'd be to live alone in the countryside, near a quaint river in a nice little estate with decorated walls, no one to disturb me and no one to be disturbed by me. It'd be lovely, I think, although it would merely be my current existence with a greater level of wealth.
But of palaces is not all of which I dream. I dream of much, of worlds both fantastical and faraway, and of worlds similar to ours but different in slight ways. I find these dreams to distract from the miserable dullness of my current being. This dreaming has gone to the point where there are many days, and many times per day even when I am struck with the realization "This is real" and snapped from my dreams. But not always am I fully pulled back into reality, a part of me stays in my dreams, in my head, in the worlds I've created. They've become my substitute for reality from which I will not be pulled from until this reality becomes more worth existing. Never, do I think, have I truly wished to be in reality more than in my dreams.
I enjoy, in a way, that sense of not being in reality that so often comes over me. Drunkenness, I have found, has made that feeling greater. Some days ago I went prancing around outside my little town after having swallowed a good number of shots. It was lovely to walk around, to feel detached from all which was around me, like none of this truly existed and even in the aspect of control of my own body and my vision did everything feel dreamlike. I don't think there will be many moments in my life where I'll truly feel that detachment from myself again. That pleasant escape, I'll miss it.
I remember having lain by the side of a river among the snow. It's gentle stream brushing past. None of it felt real and I laid back, the snow came to greet my head, not as gently as I'd liked, but still welcoming in its frosty bite. There I laid for a while, enjoying that aforementioned stream. It was lovely. What was also lovely was after I'd stumbled to my feet and wandered around to the old vodka factory near the river. The building must have predated both world wars, judging by its construction style. So even in its decrepit state there was a lovely beauty to it that you couldn't find in modern construction in the same state of decay.
None of that felt real, and even now as I recall the memories they appear to me fuzzy and oddly detached, as if I was witnessing them through the eyes of another.
I sometimes write these experiences down and I wonder to myself if those I speak to, the everyday person, has already experienced such things, such pleasant delirium from drunkenness as I did, or the same feelings of detachment and irreality I experience. Sometimes I assume, or maybe delude myself to be more accurate, that they are normal feelings all have felt and thus there is no purpose in speaking of them or writing of them, lest I appear as a fool who has not, at my age, experienced what many have experienced at younger ages.
But at the same time, should I deny myself the right of expression simply because these feelings have been expressed before, should I not express my experience. Is my expression cheapened because of my state of isolation from reality, from others, from what I want. Is it? There are a thousand questions I wish to ask from someone outside of me, outside my reality, from someone who might provide a less biased answer.
What was that famous line many quote from Sun Tsu? "If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles." While I am not a military-illiterate noble from 6th century BCE China, this quote does still apply in the manner that I fear I do not know myself and thus can't really exist as a person. There are too many unknowns, too much guesswork. I've not been through enough experiences in my life to truly know myself. And there lies an issue, the people I know and speak to, I know for a fact that although they themselves do not fully know themselves, they've experienced, seen and felt enough to know more of themselves than I do. I know that to be a fact! Am I misguided in believing this? Perhaps, to an extent. There are things I can reliably work out about myself, but with some things I must experiment.
For example, I did not know I couldn't drink alcohol while in the company of others before I had done so, I could not have worked out that through any method of deduction available to me. My original point still stands, I know not myself, and for that, I suffer.
I find that often when my mind wanders to thoughts of my own inabilities and shortcomings, especially in the department of being able to connect or bond with others, I tend to short circuit. My mind's logic runs into a loop, I need to develop one skill to be better at doing something, but for that skill to develop I need to do that something, and my mind exits this loop by moving on to the thought of "I should be put up against a wall and a firing squad ordered to end this pathetic mess." A thought process which I believe many can agree on being counter-productive.
Uhh, The End
As a present for making it to the end, here's a cool picture from a Wikipedia article I was looking at:
