Fishbowl

At one time, I'd asked for a sign
to help me identify a person

A friend asked me once, what I would do if I got it.
'I think I'd cry'

A year later, my ideas of fate and signs had changed, but I knew when I found its equivalent, and

I was right.

I cry at things I don't understand
and things that are true
and I'd just found something all of good, longed-for, unexpected, and real.

However, the near future contained sudden modifications to the situation I thought I'd found, and the side-effects from it which I'd accepted on temporary conditions swelled like ice until entire paths turned to rubble. The maw between what could and what was yawned until one gray morning I woke for the last time for the next year beneath my bed, unusually confused by my surroundings and feeling like a seasick sailor. My first task was to understand that I'd never before understood what being homesick really felt like.

For a year, I lived with experiences and colors at once too subdued and too brilliant to be continuously real. I looked out windows as if they were closed eyelids. When I awoke suddenly this January, my memory of the time preceding seemed to fade more quickly. My inclination is to explain this in terms of a lived dream, but this is probably not useful as I'll only confuse myself with attempted justifications for uncorrelations resulting from a poor organizing metaphor. It is poetic though.

The hope I'd let dissolve revived in the real world, and I searched for a phrase to describe how I felt. I wanted to say it felt surreal or felt like I was dreaming except that those sentiments are both cliché and false. If anything, I felt like I'd finally woken up.

But further complications continuously submerge me into an underwater realm of subconscious. At times I find myself free of this fishbowl, but eventually my sense of the vitality of reality fades. I don't know if I'm exaggerating or getting complacent.

I sometimes find a distinction between waking and sleeping useful because knowing that the reality I exist in will not stay helps me get through dreams. I had a sign above my pillow saying 'Reality' with an arrow pointing towards the rest of my room. But,
I probably do not help my situation by dividing time between dreaming and awake. It might all be one tangled string of possible correlations and attempted explanations.

.

I heard that there was a study done on rats in which the rats received random shocks regardless of what levers they pressed or what actions they did or didn't perform. I heard the rats ceased to function.



The ability to function is an extremely important one to me. Perhaps this is why I feel like I have so much trouble with it. Perhaps I want the wrong kinds of explanations - the kinds that use words and begin with 'because'.


I think I will never get out of the fishbowl by specifically trying.



(further thoughts might unroll, I feel them curled like ferns around these images)