Waltzing On A Trampoline

Life goes on. Everyone is out there, doing the things they love, smiling at the winter sunshine. And here you are, curled up inside, feeling worthless and empty, and not even mustering hope to get through. It doesn’t even seem unfair anymore. 

You get what you deserve, usually, even if it comes from the most unexpected places and at the most inopportune times. Like when you want to feel great, and pull together to show a brave face and even believe for a bit of time that you may actually succeed. Convincing others has always been easier than convincing yourself. You are among many people the most alone, as the song says. You look at the bedroom floor and you see plates, glasses, mugs showing off what you had to eat the day before and a vicious sensation of disgust takes hold of you. 

Life is hard, they say. They probably mean the physical act, not the sensations: the disgust, the loathing, the invisible hand that goes around your waist and keeps you gasping for air.

Life is a story of spaces, even when you are a waste of space. You imagine an exhibition of the spaces in your life – mainly absences, those define you better at any rate. You are passing through as a soundless spectator, wanting to vanish, so you and the space can finally become one and void. That’s what you are, a blank blink to the side table of nothingness.

Music: Black Friday by Tom Odell

The first one was supposed to be about writing. How writing can be everything for one and how the act of writing is cleansing, processing, liberating, to the point it becomes a mandate for one to write. Also about how writing and living, however exhilarating these two activities can be, are almost one and the same. How both can feel like one is waltzing on a trampoline, never quite knowing what comes next and how exactly the pliable surface below one’s feet will respond to the next movement. How much it can feel like hard work and yet how ridiculous it may look from the outside. How it does not necessarily make any sense to someone watching from the outside but can be the only thing one knows how to do when getting on a trampoline.

And then, these past few days I slammed hard into the trampoline (once again). To the point that it didn’t support my weight anymore and I hit the ground below in a minuscule and intimate act of free falling. When free falling happens, in better moments it can feel like freedom. When it happens in worse moments, it amounts to the most utter and basic fright. So much so that one’s senses entirely take leave and all that remains is the cruel sensation of thumping against the ground. No bleeding, just another scrape. It is most lonely, detached, humiliating and still deeply human. In this state of being beaten and senseless, the only thing that is real is a will to end it all. A will so strong that it will wipe out in one swift motion any other thought from one’s head and fill out every tiny morsel of one’s being. If nothing makes sense anymore, this still feels like it should. 

And then, in the same dark and cold vein, it begins to dawn on one that there is nothing in the way of senses: no smell, no touch, no light, no sounds, no taste, no other soul nearby. It is  perfectly senseless and stakeless. But then ones begin to question: does it even make sense to live a senseless life? No answer from anywhere, just a mental dial tone. And slowly, intermittently, one keeps climbing back on top of the trampoline, starting to move again. The movements feel unnatural, over the top, crafting somewhat of a loud cry in gestures, and the mat begins to respond. It pushes one around, inscrutable and uncertain. One step becomes another. We gently keep waltzing on a trampoline.

Waltzing and musing for a change.