NEEDLING

My brain is dead. My thoughts have rivaled death and lost. There is nothing left. I’m not even sick. I trod on, one step at a time. My sleep is deep and silent. I fall from wakefulness into unconsciousness nightly without knowledge. It’s beautiful in the sense that I’ve always wanted, or thought I’d always wanted, this darkness. Now that it’s here, I’m no longer sure. I wake up early in the morning ready for the world...at least physically. My body is wide awake, in charge, full of energy, ready to take on the world. However....my mind feels blank, dead, without hallucinations, without a past, without a future, just barely presently blank and awake, brand new, freshly out of the grind and ready to take on the shits, nothing doing. Without a past, imagined or real, my mind awakes like a babe newborn into the world and barely able to cope. The peacefulness is wonderful. The rest is bleak, like a post world war landscape of death. Memories are the bricks which build our consciousness into a palatable daily life. Without memories we are but babes unaware of the rest, monkeys with a slightly higher intelligence, bipeds horny walking around trying to copulate, feed ourselves, and get some rest. With our memories, with our parents’ memories, we are sad creatures still, but at least we are three dimensional.