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The quiet mumbling caught her attention. She emerged from the letters of her book to look around. Right by her left side, on the yellow and orange seat of the train, sat a man, a Jewish man of large disposition. He glanced at her as he continued to whisper his prayer. She looked away, and back to immersing herself even deeper in the labyrinths of the General in her book. Deeper she went in, digging, mining for an invisible, inexistent warmth she wished to populate her presence with. And what awoke her from this dreamy stupor wasn't the fact that she merely fell as the train came to a sudden stop. It wasn't even the fact that the ring on her hand holding onto the pole broke. It was not even the bloody scratch that the broken ring created, and that stung bitterly. It was the pause in the whisper of the prayer, as he tried to catch her from the fall. |
The alarm, ringing in the distance. She, engrossed in her dream thoughts, attempts to awaken to the stories of that morning, filled with the rays of the sun playing on her parquet floor. Another day has come. Bright. Full of the same combination of sounds emanating from the street. The sounds of the birds, the children, the air, the leaves chattering through the breeze. She moves her body into a sitting position. Puts her feet on the floor. Feels the warmth of the sun-filled wood floor. Synesthetically smells coffee. And hopes - simply... quietly... secretly, with not much hope left in her – that maybe today, maybe this very day will be unlike all the other days she has been living. |
To be or not to be. That is the question . . . right? But to be what? To do what? To take up what? Questions, to which answers can never be achieved, at least for those who seek to live life in its multiplicity of layers of reality so to speak, than average assessment of what reality is. The trouble is that even the word or the concept reality is in itself a fleeting, elusive thing that one can never pin down, never really define, never really construct. Is reality what we see, or what we fail to see? Is it when we are awake, or is it when we are dreaming? Is it what we actually live, or the stories we tell of those lives? To be or not to be? Back to that question! Well, should I be? Or not be? But be what? When? For whom and for what? Always changing, always this or that. Never one; never can be one; never should be one, yet we are faced with the struggle to live in this multiplicity of fragments a connecting theme which is almost impossible, if not completely impossible, to find. How can you love when hate is just the other side of that? How can you call breathing a breathing, when in between every breath you hold your breath, you annihilate breath; you stop breathing so you can breathe. To be or not to be? This isn’t just the question; it is the beginning of a plethora of unanswerable questions. It is life lived, it is life breathed, experienced, sucked into our bodies, our brains, our perceptions of ourselves and others and, not to mention, the world. It is motion, it is speed, it is smell, light, darkness, sound, screams, singing, lullabies, it is the sound of the wind, of the rain, of the birds, of the people yelling, crying, laughing, whispering. It is ALL! intertwined, intermingled; forever connected in the puzzle of a Mobius strip! How can you be or not be then? |
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