I’m getting old. Stop the world I want to get off. Are we there yet? This isn’t fun anymore. Isn’t this show over YET?
I thought I wanted to stay until things really changed, you know, until the end of the Mayan calendar, until Time Wave Zero ends in December 2012, or thereabouts. But that’s just the same old line as always. I want to stay until I (insert way-marker here). Get laid. Am old enough to drink. Get my driver’s license. Meet the love of my life. Lose weight. Do Europe. See the world. Find God. Achieve world peace. It could be anything. And getting there is just as arbitrary as any other moment in life. I don’t think those moments—the ones we conventionally call significant—are necessarily mundane. It could be that all the mundane moments are actually just as magnificent as any one of our best moments.
I could do all those things, and a million more, and where would I be? Here. Sure, ‘here’ might be in a different country, and I might have different things, and be with different people. Maybe I’d even speak another language. But here is where I’d be, nonetheless.
Here is all there is. But, get the rope and suddenly everything becomes an unsustainable loss. Everywhere becomes a ‘here’ which I absolutely must visit before I dangle. And in that moment, ‘here’, the place where the rope is waiting, becomes nowhere, an inverted reality in which ‘here’ is utterly drained of magnificence, and everywhere else—every single other possible existence—becomes unspeakably glorious. Is it this awareness that the suicidal mind lacks?
So, some cheap tears are shed, and some trite trinket is snatched from the bargain bin of insight, and the rope gets put away. But the magnificence that returns to ‘here’ is never as magnificent as it was when it was ‘there’. In that dark limbo, standing on the chair with the rope, all the world, everywhere else but here, every single moment in every spot throughout all the whole fucking universe and beyond, all of it shone like a thousand Suns. And all of it was intricate beyond belief. And beautiful.
There is no ‘here’ in ‘nowhere’. Here is all there is.
Are we there yet?