: aka
>This is a work of autofiction. Any names or characters, businesses or places, events or incidents, are possibly fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is likely coincidental. Or not<
It was a pleasantly warm end of summer morning. I was lying down on the white sand of an unnamed mediterranean coastal beach, surrounded by faint sounds of seagulls and waves breaking the shore. Concluding my daily meditation practice, I opened my eyes. As they adjusted to the blinding sunlight, I felt, all at once, something I had never felt before and that, unbeknownst to me, would continue to follow me around for months.
A gaping hole had opened in the middle of my chest.
I was paralysed, the overwhelmingly confusing feeling of the sudden loss of a chunk of my stern became all I could hear, feel, taste, see, touch. I did not scream, nor kick, nor toss, nor turn. The sky above me, utterly blue and unpierced by even a shadow of a cloud, felt like was pushing me down hard on the sand, which conversely began to reject my body weight. Sandwiched between the outer layer of the earth and its heavy rarefacted lid, I felt, for the first time in my life, panic.
My whole existence, before this moment, had been indisputably easy, fulfilling, unproblematic. I knew I was very close to reaching nirvanic climax, every meditation a stroke of my spiritual clitoris. I truly believed, until that very moment, that my life was beautiful, that if everyone else around me felt the way I did, then there would be no war, no pain, no suffering. And it took no effort, it came natural to me, to just be. But somewhere along the road of pure purity, something, somewhere in my body, broke down.
I did not know or understand, at the time, what that hole was. I did not understand where it came from. Nothing in my surroundings had changed. No blunt object had fallen from the sky, no stump had burst out of the ground. But what I felt immediately after being wounded was an unquestionable need to redirect, move away from anything I had learned in my years of serenity.
One thing I want to make clear is that the decision I made at that moment and everything else following that august morning was not me letting go. I had spent 23 years observing my thoughts, feelings, emotions, impulses, from afar. Like a silent spectator. Not judging them, not trying to control them, not even really trying to understand their origins or motivations. This was me letting go of letting go. This was not me losing control. This was me taking agency.
I decided with no doubts clouding my mind, that all of my impulses had tobecome destructive. I decided to indulge in my deepest most primordial desires. I decided to completely de-stabilize myself. I consciously chose to devote all of my energies to looking around, at others, as an effort to halt any form of passive self-reflection, passive self-awareness. I rejected embodiment. I knew that beauty was all around me but I decided I should see it as pain.
<This was good, I thought. I was finally doing something that really mattered. Chasing after any and all impulses felt productive. Something was getting sorted out. I knew in my heart—this was, perhaps, the only thing my heart knew back then—that when I’d indulged enough, I’d be okay. I’d be renewed, reborn. I would be a whole new person, every one of my cells regenerated enough times that the old cells were just distant, foggy memories. My past life would be but a dream, and I could start again without regrets, bolstered by the bliss and serenity that I would have accumulated in my year of unrest and desperation.>