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AMY
PIA
In Buenos Aires, that 2nd
floor apartment filled with car exhaust grimy air where the sunlight rarely
entered, I would sometimes wake up with a feeling of exhaustion from unrestful
sleep and try to sit up and look where I was; but my eyes were stuck shut
and my arms and legs, uncomfortable as they felt, were pegged to the foam
mattress. Stuck there unable to move the completely gravitized
weight of those denser than lead limbs, unable to separate the skin where
there should have been an opening for my eyes, only able to hear the pitter
patter of tiny nails tapping and scratching the floor above my ceiling.
The empty sunken-ness of my stomach over took my chest influencing the
shallow breaths of sleep to turn into deep uneven inhalations and exhalations
of panic. The panic of internal emptiness. The panic of a lost
soul. I woke up on these occasions and wondered where I was, in which
of the many beds I've called mine, then would come the flashing realization
that nor did I know at what point in time I was. I could be that
10 year old visiting "the grandparents" in a cot bed in a tiny room filled
with the noises of a kitchen and her little brother kicking the wall trying
to get her attention. Or the 7 year old in a big new yellow room
in a new house bigger but not as comfortable as the old one 500 miles away;
staring at the mostly bare yellow walls, stricken by fear of the indefinite
grandeur of time and space. The same emptiness fills and I try to
think who I am. Who is it that occupies this body which I call me?
A name? A name is only what you make it. I feel my own existence,
but am only all that I've ever been in my life. All of those moments
of suspended dream state reality from different years of this life being
lived at once. Yes, at that exact moment I feel that I've known all
along what is the course of my life. I felt it when I stared at those
yellow walls and felt their indefinitely divisible proportions, that tiny
corner of yellow paint up there by the closet split in half, then again,
then again, but it could be halved forever with all those molecules of
atoms of neutrons/electrons/atomic particles of who knows what else.
All moving, changing places but still being that same corner of yellow
paint. At that moment in Buenos Aires in South America, I am all
at once everything I've ever been and lost in the falseness of time and
space, alone with myself as I am alone in reality. My whole life
is that instant. And from the depths of my cranium where the essence
of time is stored, I come surging up as if through the entire evolution
of man/earth/universe/space/time in a matter of a fraction of a tiny second
a gasp for air and I'm bolted up standing beside my bed.
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