Having one of those days. The kind where it doesn't really matter how many people you talk to or emails you respond to - you just feel incredicably existentially alone.
I can't say that my head feels like a big balloon - but the world sort of seems like one - or a giant fish bowl that - I am on the outside of. Which is why I can see the lips moving, but I don't have a clue what those fish are saying. Well it could be that I don't speak "Aqua" or that they aren't really making waves so they aren't really coming through at all.
As for anybody in here? Hell, I think I am, but that is only because I can see the letters emerge on the screen as I type. Otherwise - this is all just like some kind of mirage. This day lacks the basic fetters of feeling human enough to be connected.
Without the occasional comment from co-workers, I would swear I was not visible at all. I have definitely not become comfortably numb.
Though I think perhaps I would like to do so. It would make this existential funk much easier to bear.
I just want to feel like I am attached. I so would like to know that I am not trying desperately to believe that there is a horizon I can look to and find substance. Unfortunately the highway outside my window seems to be adrift in a sea of similarly anchorless wayfarers. There they are traveling at top speed, nothing but the orange construction cones to keep them between the lines.
Can they feel how dysfunctional this day has become? Or is it only me - disconnected in my own space? I would suspect the latter. Yet on the elevator only moments ago I could swear the eyes of my fellow occupant were just as glazed and vacant as my own.
Perhaps it is the lull of the constant rain. Or perhaps it is the droning of our computers as we sit before them hour after hour - maybe it is the building itself - reaching out with contaminated breath to steal us from ourselves and trap us in its granite slabs.
What drives any one to feel isolated? What provided the impetus for the creation and definition of the word existential? I used to think (and to some extent still do) that it came from giving birth. That the one time where a human feels totally connected to another is when they are carrying a child inside them - and the one time when they come face to face with the unilaterable truth that they can never and will never be wholly connected to another entity, truly mentailly fused, is at the moment of birth. When the child takes its first breath, and the mother realizes that they do not know that little person any better than they know anyone else. They may only love them more because they have held them closer, but they cannot know their thoughts before they are spoken - and even then they may not understand. - Hence the pain and the freedom of existentialism. The gift of being completely an individual and the condemnation of always being on your own - even when you are with others.
Please do not misconstrue this commentary to decry the concept of love, trust and relationships. You can have these - but even those who know you best will never know all of you (you probably never will either so suck it up) - and there will almost assuredly be times when you do not communicate well a thought - and hence they believe you have said something that is contradicted by what you actually think or feel. It happens.
But today - today - I don't think I could bridge any gap at all, not even one with myself. And perhaps that is not so bad afterall. Perhaps I just need a break from the think-tank of being. Everyone deserves a vacation - even if they take it from themselves.
So - call tomorrow and the answer is likely to be - Yep, come on in and sit a spell -
How's your existential self treating you today? Is there anybody in there?
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