I wonder if it is possible to be more than one person. If there can be two souls, entangled deep within you, they whom are locked within a desperate fight, the ultimate fight, control over you. Is it possible that if you tried hard enough, that you could feel their hearts beating, just below the millimeters of tissue and flesh? That each individual pulse racing in pursuit of the final release, could be touched and potentially understood? Could it be that they fight so, in their unique intimate ways, because they have experienced life on the outside before.
Such thoughts often haunt me in the most peculiar of places. Sometimes they hit me just as I am on the cusp of dreams, they come unbidden and chase away the safety and quiet of sleep. This particular thought hit me on the most ordinary of nights, in the driver’s seat of my car. Sprawled across, with the console digging in between shoulder blades, hands clasped behind my neck, and my eyes full of the stars just beyond the open sunroof, it hit me and the sky exploded.
Stars, so volatile and gaseous, rained on, within, and all around me, slapping me with concussive puffs of air, causing my eyes to well with tears and squeeze tight against all the noise. What if I am more? What if there this enraged inhuman version of me that finds my life incomplete? Could it be that even now it is clawing its way into my chest cavity, taking great mouthfuls of my beating heart into its slurping jaws, the crimson that symbolizes my life dribbling down its black abyss for a chin. Eating the remaining me from the inside out.
The side-to-side swaying of my car is the only thing that brings it, the monster, out of focus. I open my eyes to the high beams of life rushing past the stillness within the Tahoe. Slowly becoming aware of the low husky hum of Halsey resonating from the Bose speakers I refocus on the burning balls of gas, light years away, and try to determine what is star and what is satellite transmitting to me.
Truly, why must I constantly play this game with myself? Do I ponder these things because of some youthful need to psychoanalyze, or is it simpler than that. Perhaps, being young it is essentially required for you to feel like you are the center of your own universe, with infinite choices and possibilities that gravitate around you. Indeed, there is an almost instinctual knowledge that you must not allow the allure of that mercurial blue, revolving around you, to suck and spit you in and out of orbit.
Following the course set out in front of you, the trail displayed against the constellations, is the one most fraught with insecurity and fear. But it is only when infinity has its edges that one is capable of making themselves more. More what? I wish I knew. I wish that I were more than just some random girl listening to music in her beat-up car; to be the heroine in an alternate reality, to be more than just me. To make worlds collide, taste death as ash on my tongue; take it all, anything and everything, and make my life so much more than it is.
Isn’t that every person’s goal in life, to take those infinite amounts of choices and reach the end of their trail. If only we could reach that far into the future and determine if that is how we want our lives to be. Maybe eventually we will have that technology, methods to control those universes that circumnavigate us, without letting their capricious waves move us in the wrong directions.
If this moment was in a movie or a young adult novel, I am sure that there would be some intense and complex buildup that would ultimately result in some epic bass drop with copious amounts of fire works, or some deeply reflective, almost spiritual, moment where the main character realizes that she must make some deep change within her life. This isn’t one of those moments.
