Making it Mundane

Writing about profound instances in one’s life is perhaps the easiest thing to do. Writing about an everyday, marginally pedestrian occurrence- now that is challenging. Recalling intricate details of entirely irrelevant, even forgotten, information seems near impossible; it is akin to recalling characters in a dream. And then, when you remember it, finding a way to write it so that it accurately reflects its own mundane-ness is a challenge unto itself.


I woke up this morning, the alarm buzzed by my ear. I rolled over, tangled in my blankets, to push the off button. It glowed 9:19. I toyed with the minutes, trying to figure out exactly how long I could stay in bed without risking falling back asleep.
My eyes opened. This time I faced my clock. It glowed 9:24.
My eyes opened. My head was buried under my pillow. I sat up. The clock glowed 9:27. I told myself to wake up, abandon the warmth of the heavy blankets, not to be felt again until night. I stretched my arms over my head, arching my back. Then I stood up and stumbled down the hallway to the bathroom.

The sun sank low, behind the trees and the snow was drifting endlessly. Beneath my feet I felt a crunch that was the piles of melted weather, laboring under my step. My bag was heavy, pulling me to the left, and my face hurt with cold. I could hear myself breathing loudly as I climbed back to my building, which stood solidly in front of me.

On our Existences

“We are supposed to be here.”
This is what we are meant to do. To read or write or work or fall. We only do things that progress into still more things. Actions continue because of what has happened. Yet it is common for people to feel that they aren’t in a good place, they do something negative, unfavorable. People fall out of sync with nature, create disturbances. But the world turns like a nucleus and the lives and occurrences on it are electrons in constant motion, repelling, attracting, dancing along time. It is self-righteous, overpowering, egocentric to believe that “I have fallen away”. The electrons are stable in our noble gas called earth. You cannot break the system, because every time you hit another event and create unrest, something good will come. It is nothing but your own lack of unity with the world that can convince you that of all of the existences, yours is the only bump in the road that will hurt humanity, terrestriality. So out actions may lead to occurrences, our lives may crash into events; but because of the true nature of earth and its existence, we cannot be blamed for destruction- destruction only leads to regeneration and we are supposed to be here causing it.

Ethan's Story 2

Touching the white soil, my new friends the stars let me fall. It’s not a fall that ever would hurt, not that I could feel pain again. My mind is clear, and ahead of me is nothing and everything and love and peace; it is, therefore, happiness. If I had matter anymore, I would use it to run around this new luego or crawl into an undiscovered line to see what it holds. I am no longer a body, though. I am no longer just a dream, just a being, just a matter composite. I can fly so I do. I can sing so I do.

A tree looms in front of me from the stars. They school together to form, at first, a chrome silhouette, but then it forms into a real, living tree in this white Ibid. it could be a box I’m in, but I can’t find the edges. It could be an effervescence I’m in, but then I could leave it. I can see all directions and fly forever but never could I leave and never could I find an end and never could I want to. This is everything, this is hope and life and existences.

I am by the tree now, up in its branches and leaves and xylem, flowing through it as if I am it. I am bark and roots and the fruit on its ends; but this tree is one thing, or a compilation of tissue creating one thing. I leave its system but do not find whiteness again. Below me is dark, thick water, next to me are trees hanging or wilting but thriving and growing. Their branches skim the water, their roots protrude from its surface. What I know to be insects flutter around me. If I was on earth it might be night time or the trees might be covering the sun. There is light, but only enough for me to see a thin mist above the still water. I believe them to be fire flies, they flutter around me. They are the stars in the form of things I can recognize.

I look back at the tree I recently embodied and see moss growing up its side. I see an alligator’s eyes making wake in the water. I see people, like I would have found on earth in the southern parts of the united states when people could survive in villages with paper lanterns hanging from trees and homemade musical instruments and straw hats and dug out boats for traveling. So I follow them. They smile at each other and talk, but I can no longer understand human tongue, nor will I need to again. I realize that they are communicating with the fireflies and the trees and before I can desire that, I am communicating too. With them and with the alligator and the mosquitoes and mosses.

Still not a human and still without matter, I am with them and know everything by its thoughts. The humans in the boats carry me along in their minds. I am this person now, but still not a person at all. I do not control or direct, I follow and relax. Someone else gets to do the work and I enjoy the world through her eyes.

“Now another person, she experiences Ibid as if it were her home. Like a human as she was on earth, but with less strain. There is no worry or anxiety like on earth, her future is not in danger. Nothing can go so wrong that she won’t exist anymore, for she hardly exists at all.

“The bodies carry her down the water to where they call home. She touches the fireflies with herself, hugs the mosses and trees. She can feel the presence of the many fish in the water. The eyes that she watches from look down into the boat at the dirty feet of the body. The body is happy and calm; she knows this, but she doesn’t feel it. All she can feel is peace and happiness. The stars materialize into numerous houses perched upon stilts many feet in the air. There is land, but it is not dry. Other humans are dancing and laughing in circles, around fires, their feet hanging from the houses, music in their hands, paper glowing lanterns hanging from the trees.

“The body lifts itself from the boat, its feet move the way the drum beats. If there was air, it would be blowing at the hair on the people around her. Rain is falling now; it makes this world shine gray. Its droplets on the surface form circles from its wake. If she could have felt it, it would be cold and wet. Now her person’s walking in a line it set. Light flicks in the lanterns hanging from the trees. If she could have felt it, there would have been a breeze.

“People here aren’t running like they did on earth. Their bodies wet, their skin is cold, they dance in the music that harmonizes with the rain. Many of them sing, she does so as well. Not the body she watches from, but herself sings. She can’t touch the rain- or rather the rain can’t touch her. She feels the music, though; it reverberates through whatever she is. It is unearthly, of course. When she was human, music would travel to her mind and it provided pleasure, but it would dispense very soon as would the joy it brought. Here, in Ibid, the music is not quickly lost into the air, its enjoyment is not fleeting. Each new note, each beat, each rain drop plays off of itself and off of the other sounds. Even the laughter and chatter of those around her was music. Rather than ending and never being heard again, it compiles inside of her so that each new moment is only an extension of the last. The relaxation intensifies with each “sound wave,” building this glowing love inside of her that will never drain out. It becomes her and she becomes the sound and the pleasure and the laughter and the rain and the people. She could feel them all. As soon as she does so, they are aware of her presence; they welcome her like one of them, hands the body she is in an instrument, and stands her on the highest stilted house. From there she and the body express together the purest form of peace. It reverberates through Ibid. The rain falls harder, the people smile bigger, the fireflies swarm into a light show that is unlike anything that could ever be seen. Or will ever be seen. Everyone sings, dances, hugs, loves. They love each other and Ibid and the stars of which it is composed.

“Seeing Ibid this way delivers a strange kind of joy. It is unconventional and thus far unrealized to any. On earth, this scene would have simultaneously been the most frightening and the most beautiful thing that she had ever experienced. It is because of this fear that it can become anything worth experiencing or anything so beautiful. Ibid displays it to her with fear substituted for serenity. Ibid, therefore, only intensifies her love of this luego that no longer exists on earth. Here forth she sings and flies through the branches, with the fireflies, as the stars, in the people, to the music. Every movement is bliss that is never excreted. Every movement is love for Ibid and love for her soul and the stars that conjured it.”

Ethan's Story 1

It’s closing in. I can see them, I guess, and I can hope that they are there, I think, but I am still sitting, watching and not really knowing what happens around me. I think they started closing in last summer. Or when I was born. Or when Jesus was born. Or when the universe began, if it ever did actually begin (that’s another story for another day). I am sitting here on the surface of the earth. The sun rotates and goes somewhere that none can pinpoint and we, all humans, follow it, hope that it leads us somewhere, but it may not. It may lead us into a black hole, which is of course nothing. Or it may lead us to an alternate universe in which the earth’s magnetic poles switch and the north is the south, south is north, people are plants and amebas dominate life.

So here I sit, people wandering around me, lives ticking and records spinning. You are not here, and I am not here either, really. Yet we are all here and all not here- does that make us real or nonexistent? Satisfying ourselves with blank checks written to knowledge, we cannot ever know because we simply are not what is meant to do the knowing. So sit with me, let’s think forever and never find an answer. We can think until our brains rot, or two billion years from now, but if the human race was meant to know, we would have known by now. So we just have to wait until we evolve and maybe that species will know. Or the next. Or maybe Earth itself was never meant to produce a knower and we just live for fun, an experiment of what a world with no purpose would end up as.

We are darn near the end, so let us find what we have become. Assigning meaning where there is none, that’s a given. Making rules where rules aren’t needed is yet another. Doing things that need not be done, yes that too. Wonderful things, though, like appreciation of nature and development of the brain as a tool to express itself to the masses, to share happiness, whatever that happiness may be. For even Marilyn Manson is happy- happy with being discontent.

Yet we still aim higher, trying to break through the diamond ceiling. There is no way to break it, though, unless there was another force in the existences that could break it for us. Then I guess we would become knowers.

I’m sitting here with people bumping my crossed legs as they pass me. I don’t know where they are going, nor do I need to know because they can’t see me. They can’t see who I am, at least. I can’t see them. I can see the sky. It is night so the clouds are a dark yellow and the earth moves slightly to the right of Orion- further than it was yesterday night at least. The clouds are yellow and the stars shimmer grey, the way chrome glows when it is wet. As the earth hurls towards the sky and the chrome gets bigger and the yellow gets darker, the people start to notice me sitting in the street; cars stop and go around me and birds fly over to me and dogs scamper up to me, their owners tugging at the leashes “Come back, Chloe, don’t touch it.”

The earth is hurling through the yellow clouds now and the chrome stars are growing. They look mystical, like little orbs that are begging to hover around you the way humming birds hover over flowers. Come closer, orbs, warm us with your light buzzing; hold us up so we don’t fall into abyss.

So the stars do just that. The earth stops rushing and the people stop noticing me and the stars still get closer, but not bigger. The addendum would scare me, but I can’t be scared because earth has hardened me and made me like a diamond that cannot be crushed. The orbs can carry me if they want, though. Carry me, if you want.

Up and down and up, the stars have pulled me into the deep and dark yellow dust. Around, around, the earth moves quickly now and the stars are showing me its life. Honestly, stars, I can’t see a thing, the earth moves to quickly and the clouds are too thick, show me another place I can lay my head.

If there was life to see me, I would be a sight to see. A million stars carry me through time and space so that I cannot see the place I was or where or when I am going. I feel more relaxed than the suns and the moons; somehow, I know I am safe. Somehow, I know that I am going to a book where everything has already happened, I just get to live it as if it were in the present. The author says “The stars glistened in their own light and they illuminated their path with the glow of inner peace. Across the sky, if you looked out far enough, you could just make out the end. Some might call it a forest of rest in which all the creatures reflected those in her own mind- the ones familiar to Planet Earth. Others claimed that it was more of a white cloud that made everyone who touched it eternally happy. Still more believe it to be a hole in space where one could peruse one’s memories and the memories of others like a magazine collection. The stars knew it to be none of these, but also all of these. The stars call it Ibid, so she too calls it Ibid…”