The trip back, though, was exhausting in a weird way. I feel awake, but my brain hasn't re-oriented itself. For instance, I know I'm in my room, listening to my usual music, but I feel like I'm somewhere else entirely. Like nothing is registering the way it normally does. I sortof like the feeling, but I can't write like this. It's just too...strange.

So I'm back, feeling strange, but good having had my actual, getting-the-hell-away-from-campus vacation. Much more later after I square away all this work.

(15 minutes later)

I accidentally left myself at the conference. Getting of the car and being here now, I don't feel like me or anything. Music doesn't have any effect, or letters, anything. I'm a pair of eyes in the sand at high-tide. The waves come washing over me, as if to fill with that familiar sting...but it passes over and along. I'm listening to the title track for Schindler's List. It sometimes brings me to tears, or evokes something. I feel nothing. It's not a bad nothing...maybe an oriental nothing, that shadow in which you find all the lost left socks of your mind; the dryer of enlightenment.

It's re-adjustment, I think. Still, no thoughts are coming. I think about friends and the images of them just pass over my mind. I tossed a penny back into the lake at the resort. I thought I'd leave a piece of myself there, waiting thousands of years for the geologists and space aliens to revere its mysteries. I left it there to recall the memory of walking alongside that huge lake, the dark silk flowing around and into itself so quickly.

I'm there now, I can see it. So why am I here..how did I get here...and who am I? I'm reading the username, "Daath," but that doesn't help. It's gone for now, just some ghost by a lake smiling like a child. Last night was special...and in those moments I just let myself float along the dark water out to the shadows beyond. In that vessel of everything is me..and it doesn't want to come back, not yet. I feel like an organic manequin buddha.

(20 minutes later)

Something occured to me. I suddenly thought of encasing someone in ice, or in a resucitative water, like Luke Skywalker in the Empire Strikes Back. Looking through the sheen of frost I see my body and my face, five years younger. I don't understand so much.

And then the eyes flew open. So you're the hate. Interesting. I kept starring at the creature in some oddly transfixed way. It didn't move, didn't breath. All I could feel was those eyes bearing down at me as if I were its ruthless master. Then I thought of other things, saw other images. It gradually began to dawn on me: all of the times I've meditated and reached some strange point of understanding, remnants existed, as if the shoot I were now extended from this giant tree lost in the night below me. I just turned on the green floodlights.

I can't adequately describe the realization of seeing myself and certain emotions, thoughts living in a frozen time. It's as if some strange hive mind calls on one or more of these things for input, taking those brain signals and transmitting them to the body. I feel disjointed because, in a way that defies reason, I am disjointedly whole. There are people who are double-jointed, popping their shoulder or wrist out of and into place, sometimes into different configurations. That analogy brushes its fingertips along the surface, clearing away the frost again; it's the only thing that comes to mind.

Is this a delusion, or is this green-cast tree 'me'? It doesn't feel like a me. It is an us. Can you be an us and not be anyone else, yet so many you's? I can't grasp it. I can at least see the shoot on top of the tree extending to the sky. I grasp it; familiar ground. I can perch here and study by the moonlight, feeling the strange warmth flow up into my body from the others. And from here there's heat along the air, other thoughts, feelings, and I see the other trees for the forest. Heat moving toward me from some other places while I twirl my pen and I ignore the suspended ones inside of me..or is it below me...is it me?

Maybe I have gone mad.

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