Spirits

Something is wrong.

When I think about it rationally, I convince myself that this is all a figment of my imagination and that I am getting ahead of myself. I’m not a rational person, so when I think about it in my fundamental state – that is instinctive, I have a feeling that something is askew and I cannot put my finger on it. It seems like I’m seeing certain signs all over the place and I don’t know what they mean. Honestly, it’s driving me insane. I do realise that I could come out of this looking like a giant idiot. But then again, there is so little room for any kind of magical manifestation anymore. If you can’t see it, you can’t buy it, or it can’t be explained logically, it is of no value. The need for everything to be plain and clear is so immediate that it’s almost sickening. Therefore, my little experience here tells me that if I try to put my faith in what I cannot explain, I will suffer a great loss. It’s really scary. Well, I guess I am on my way to being a nut case, after all.

Also, it’s so hard to talk to people about things anymore, isn’t it? Either you’re imagining things, you’re rude, you’re unhappy, or you just don’t have a social standing to talk about things anymore. God forbid if you’re not “winning at life” whatever that means. Even those close to you will not have any respect for you anymore. Clearly, I’m not “winning at life” and that’s why I don’t tell anyone anything. I just come to amarllyis and blog about whatever I have unexplained within me – things I don’t understand, things I cannot keep inside me.

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I can’t recall where I read it. I think it was in one of Coleman Barks’ books or Elif Safak’s books. I forget the source, but I clearly remember the story. In Islam, it is said that when the time of Qayamat (Armageddon) approaches, the Kaa’bah will disappear. When that happens, all the people praying will be standing in a circle and essentially be praying to each other. The Sufis believe that this is the true meaning of God – that we’re all converging our faith into a circle and praying to the good in each other. (Circles in Sufism have a lot of significance.) I’ve clearly forgotten where I read it, but this is the concept of God I’ve come closest to believing in. It makes sense to me from an ‘energy’ perspective, which also explains why places of worship feel different from other places. For me, it’s a massively powerful concept – for humans to create a God on their own by the energy they possess and pool in together.

It goes without saying that the world is completely fucked. I see how easy it is for all of us to not believe, to become faithless, and give up on hope. That’s why all this talk about meaninglessness, that’s why closed fists, that’s why hollow eyes. But I wonder, if there is a God that we are creating, clearly God’s absence is also our responsibility. Clearly, the absence of magical intervention is on us. Think about it for a moment, if humans don’t have help from the unknown and the magical, it’s because humans didn’t send it out themselves. Of course, all this is speculation, but I have been forced to wonder, and then some.

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I also remember another story I heard, on Grey’s Anatomy, I think. There are people in the world who believe after you’re born you have to go out into the world and find your family – the people who are your actual tribe. You do this by learning about yourself and then, finding the people who “get” you. Of course, I may have completely mangled this story, but the basic construct was that you go out into the world and find your tribe. For Meredith Grey, her tribe are the friends she finds at Med School (and one by one each one leaves and by Season 10 the show becomes a shit pot). Anyhoo. I guess the eventuallity of someone “getting” you is what’s driving all of us. Maybe not. What do I know?

For the longest time, I wanted to write a novel about “acceptance”. I didn’t know what it was going to be about, but I knew that I wanted to explore how people just wanted to be accepted for who they are. I haven’t written that novel, obviously. I wrote another one, about a girl who is betrayed and then she betrays herself by choosing the lesser life. Her children make their whacked out choices, too. I don’t know what happens in the end because I have not written it. I don’t know if I ever will and if the novel will ever see the light of day. But the point I’m making is that I didn’t write that novel about acceptance. I hadn’t thought about it a long time until I did on the bus ride home.

Now that I blog about the signs I don’t understand, or the God that we have stopped making, and about how I didn’t finish a novel I started, I wonder if it is acceptance I seek. Or that after all this while, even that is something I don’t want anymore.

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“I got guns in my head and they won’t go.
Spirits in my head and they won’t go.”