My Existence

ERIN HULS
word count: 894

Don’t you dare say that to me. I am my own unique person, a girl. I have the same as you. You have the same as me. We are the same species, our DNA should be almost identical. Why do you argue with me so? I am not wrong, you are not wrong. We are both wrong. We are part of a higher being of life. Yet you say I am not. Why should you believe me? I am nothing to you. I cannot breathe. I am sick, sick to my stomach of this madness that is surrounding the existence. I am walking around the grass, feeling it brush up against my legs and I want to shout to it “How dare you tickle me?” I want to be alone. More and more it feels comforting to be away. A permanent vacation of my life. A way that no one can come to me. No phones, no wires, no existence. Just a speck on a great sandy beach. A beach where no one comes, it is isolated. Shaped by wind and water only, it bears no life. Only me, without a life. I want to see a non-existence. What would happen? The wind and water would only shape me into whatever it wanted. Maybe it would be something grand, like a shell. Or maybe it would be nothing at all, just another speck of sand in the endless vastness of eternal miles of coast. A ship would probably pass by me ,then years later another. Wouldn’t that be grand? Nothing to do or look forward to ever yet never being alone. Sharing an experience with thousands of others in the same existence as you, not knowing what is happening or what to look for. But that’s the whole point. What is there to look forward to anyway? A promotion, a marriage, a child? No. There is that occasional storm that shakes up the sand a little, mixes up all the particles. Makes a glass-les hourglass with sand swirling around and around forever making inches down the eternal coastline. A crab, lost at sea, forever lost at sea, shuffles forward. But is forward backward? He is always moving in rewind not knowing which way his directions got lost at.
Direction changes. A clock chimes. An alarm rings. The oven beeps. The car dings. Constant reminders that our life is timed. We move by hours, minutes, seconds. Our directions are lost, though. We move to places we think we know. We move to places we think we need to move to. We move to places we like to. We move to places we need to. We move in circles. We move in squares. We move them fast. We move them slow. We move efficiently. We move in a pattern.
I want to break the pattern. I want to move where no one has moved before. I want to say things no one has said before. I want to tell people things they have not heard before. I want to tell the ignorant to ignore. I want to tell the positive to stay in the direction they are moving. I want to tell others to stop moving, it is not worth it anymore. They need someone to tell them. Otherwise they keep blocking, stopping, interrupting the path of others. How can they be stopped? They are running, moving at light speed, gliding, speeding everywhere. They are upstairs in my house. Up and down the stairs all day they come gliding, bringing the pain and the bitterness and the sadness. They block my path to the sunshine. They block my path to the water. They block my path to heaven.
They bring these thoughts in me. When I sit under the oak tree in the courtyard I feel foolish to think the tree will know and remember me. I am foolish to think that I am different, I am special. I am like that single speck of sand on the beach drifting through in the circle of time that is really not a circle at all, but a straight line. I am moving about it in a square motion. Maybe I should straighten out my lines.
I wonder if there is a connection in our movement pattern and time. We move to the beats and sounds of our life. Are the beats and sounds moving us? We shouldn’t let them. The sounds and movement we hear, the gliding on the stairs, it affects us in different ways. The movement doesn’t run us, we run the movement. But not always. When we sense that the movement is bearing down on us, stomping, hitting, beating, we leave. We follow our own movement. We move in other ways that are more powerful than the next. We control our thoughts, then we let them run free like a stampede of wild horses let out on a prairie.
Following someone elses’s has got me here now. I am sitting on the sand, as invisible to the naked eye as the grain of sand next to me. It is clear, non existant. Does anyone know I am gone? My mind does. It is free. It likes it free here. No one knows what it thinks. No gliding down, stomping, funny places and games. Just my mind, my body, and my spirit, home at last.