Escape

I wonder where I go. Sometimes I snap out of a haze as if I just woke up for a second. And then it somehow transcends back into oblivion. But I never notice. Only when the cloud clears up do I notice. Like when you smoke a cigarette and something seems to clear up. But I can never find the origin: the line between the haze and the clarity or when that momentary clarity dissolves into  the other. 

Most of the time I just try to avoid reality and the fact of existence. And I escape within my own self within my own thoughts. I conjure up a life of my own in my head and I live in it, revel in it. It’s addictive: an escapism of a different sort. A cultivated escape: your imagination. I run from reality and I run and run. Until I have hidden inside myself enough to not know what is around me anymore. Or not acknowledge it. Or not notice it. A wilful ignorance, to hide from all the disturbing things in the world and pretend they don't exist. To retreat within myself. Within my body is my soul confined and no one can touch it, though they can touch my body. 

But it is suffocating sometimes. And  I wonder. When the internal state becomes chaos and the external is something I have removed myself from for so long that it feels unfamiliar, unnatural and unsafe , then where can I seek refuge in the end.  Not within myself, not without. Not in company and not in solitude. Not in the external neither the internal. Where do you turn to when there is nowhere to go. Can I forget myself only to be brought again into consciousness more harshly than ever. I am unprepared, unwilling. Dissatisfied, disassociated, apathetic and unfeeling. 

Yet even to feel nothing is not enough. Even when you feel nothing, there is still ultimately awareness. There is consciousness and it exists so long as you are awake and alive. Unless you lose yourself so deeply in some activity that it goes away. Back into the clouds. An autopilot which clears up occasionally to remind you in the end that you are here but don't know why, or even what to do with that information.

Memory

Memory is such a strange thing. I feel like future me and past me are strangers to myself. I feel alienated from my own self. Like I do not know who I am. Who I was before and who I will be tomorrow, are all strangers. It really enhances the isolation when even in your own company you have only limited access to yourself . That you can never truly know someone else but in a way you can never know yourself either. That everything is elusive and vague. Maybe I will not like who I was, or who I am. In this rejection of myself I am no more a comfort to myself than the rest of society: the people who always love to point out your flaws and shortcomings.  In as much, I am more a part of that external society than I am of internal me. I am more the world’s than I am my own . 

Being a foreigner to yourself certainly has a strange feeling associated with it. Suddenly I am two and not one, in terms of action and observation. Or I am three and not one, in terms of copies a long time streams. Or I am infinite, in terms of every passing unit of time, Forever changing and divided and never the same.

In this mutability perhaps the soul is a constant, an essence, for what else can be constant within me? Even your cells are replaced so no part of your original body remains. It is the ship of Theseus. Am I the same , and if not, at what point did I change? When do I cease to be one me and become another?  Memory is what links your past and your future. But it is such a fickle thing, confabulated thoughts and cognitive biases.  To what ideas and thoughts do I use to define myself? To what essence can I cling to so I don't feel lost and estranged from myself?