There’s a pond that I find myself drawn to. Water, reflection, to see myself. I look into the water to see myself. I see something I don’t recognize. She looks at me and I look at her and I know that there is something different about the way we are looking. It is not a reflection, her eyes don’t follow me. I go to place a hand into the water, to see how far the water would go before I would be able to touch her. I don’t get the chance to touch the surface at all, my hand stays dry, and there is another hand there, splashing right over the face in the water. I’m looking into another reflection that is not me, and is not a reflection. I’m not even sure anymore if there was water at all. I try to touch the face in front of mine, and I only feel a hand placed on the back of my own head before I am dissipating entirely, like ripples in water that has learned to calm. Breathe and calm down. The images in the water under my hand are gone, and soon enough, so is the water. I look up from where my hand is beginning to disappear into what can’t be water. My own eyes are looking at me, my own hands are reaching for me. All of it splashes away. I can’t bear allowing myself to see myself. I can’t bear looking into my own eyes that are looking into my own eyes. I keep trying to dissolve it all, and I only find another layer to peel back. It is not a pond, it is a dirty puddle in the dark of a room I cannot entirely see. I’m not trying to see. It is not a mirror, it is a desperate attempt to escape the self, and even awareness of the fact cannot make me accept myself. It also does not help me escape. It ties me deeper into the cycle of eyes, face, hands, water, splash, eyes, water, hands. However, if the cycle brings me comfort, there is surely no need to change it. Must we as humans crave so much to always grow. I do not wish to be a plant, an animal. I wish to stay here, watching the cycle, being the cycle, unchanging. I slam both of my hands into the water before I get the chance to wash away the image. I slam my hands into my own face, my own eyes, her eyes, her face, the water is gone. Two hands are on us both, and we violently wash away. A new cycle has begun, but nothing has truly changed. I wonder to myself, and not to the other permeations of me, if it will ever change.
Change, as it turns out, is neither something that can be waited for, nor forced. It is an odd sort of pain to be stuck in the unchanging. To recognize the pattern, to be frustrated by it, only to end up in a new and more nauseating spin. Change is worse than stagnation, but it is better than believing things can ever truly be stagnant. For that which repeats itself is only hearing the last iteration, not the line before. It has no context. It does not know that it is getting more and more off rhythm each time it sings itself. In this, we spiral down. Change will happen one way or another, but it cannot be left to its own, and it cannot be forced. So where do I sit, between the lie of perpetuity, but the lack of perspective. Where do I sit between myself and myself, all of us trying to believe it doesn’t need to get better, only not to get worse. Where does that leave me, when I can see myself in this, but cannot see anything but myself.
See, if the self is not absolute, then the self must be ever-changing. Does this imply that every version of my own self, the self that belongs to me, is separate? Separate pieces to one whole, or maybe separate pieces that are self-contained? Or does it maybe imply that the self is one entire piece, together, never able to escape from each concept and idea that is held within it? Does the separation or togetherness of the identity matter at all? Am I drifting through the universe with no ground to hold on to? Is every version of my self? Is everyone that is outside of this lens doing the same? Are we moving at all?
My hands are back in the puddles, and I can feel another self’s hands at my throat. There are hands digging into the organs beneath my skin, into my ribs. There are hands spinning me around and around, and I’m doing it all to myself, but it is out of my control. There never seems to be a solution, it’s like time and history and life are all a circle, but the circle never truly connects. We are spinning spirals into the stars, but the stars do not hear us crying. One day it won’t matter, but right now all I can do is cry and slam my fists into my self.