Outside Looking In

This is where I am most of the time, on the outside of life, watching it go past and wondering what it's all about. I have always been an observer, and a recorder of observations. It's not really something I chose; it's a part of my nature.

Have you ever had the most intense realization about the most mundane things? Thinks like: I'm eating pizza that I made myself. I have been overwhelmed by such realizations. On some level, of course I understood not only that there was pizza, but that I'd made it and that I was now eating it. It's not as though I'd somehow failed to grasp this concept entirely. It's just that for a split second I was somehow aware of how incredible it is that a universe where pizza is possible even exists, and I was in awe. I somehow switched from 'participant' to 'observer' in my own life.

Or perhaps it was the other way around, or both at once. Perhaps I went from going through the motions to being acutely aware of my own participation in life. Whatever it was, I found myself looking at that pizza as though it held all the answers to life, the universe and everything (which is ridiculous since it didn't look a thing like 42.)

The pizza isn't the point. The point is that there is something in my nature that allows me to shift perspective at the drop of a hat. Life is constantly a case of looking at a vase and suddenly seeing two faces, and I think this is why I write. Scratch that. I don't 'think', I know. I write because no matter how much I find myself on the outside of life looking in, what I see is so fascinating that I must find some way of capturing it, recording it in such a way that I might be able to share at least a fraction of it. I write because the only other option is to sit here watching the world go by.

Do you ever have moments like this? Do you find yourself on the outside looking in? Alternately, why do you write?

Friday Flash: And the Mysteries Knew Me

Going through an old notebook, I found this little piece.  I'd say it's circa 2008, though possibly as early as late '07.  I was a bit spotty with dating my work in here.  Uncertain time-line aside, I do remember that it was one of those things I wrote in a torrential flood of inspiration and then had no idea what I was going to do with it, especially since I didn't know about flash as a writing style at the time.  So I'm posting it here, with a little on-the-spot editing and a new title.

And the Mysteries Knew Me

She sat with me all the while, singing the songs we'd learned in the empty places. Her voice shone with her wings, both lit from some wondrous source. As I lay there, listening, I could feel it. The velvet night wrapped me up in its warm embrace and carried me up through the higher planes of its silence. When I sought to look, I found that my eyes were no more, nor was my body.

The song though, was a thing I could see, a thing I could touch. Her voice became my world and my world became the stars. Light came to the deepest shadows and dark engulfed where light had been. I was ecstatic. When I laughed, my voice was that of the stars which were bells, shimmering in the highest of the heights.

Then the skies became cold, so cold. The very marrow of my being shivered and ached. I found my body again and with it, I found agony. My laughter was no more. My screams ran at right angles to my being. Her song now was a keening, a wailing despair echoing in my existence. The world trembled, and I trembled with it.

Within eternity I wept, tears running hot over cold sweat. Her voice was softening, a whisper then. The chill became bearable, the kind found in a draughty winter shelter. The song slowed. My trembling eased. My breath ragged, I returned to myself, but I was changed. Innocence gone, I now knew the mysteries and by the gods, the mysteries knew me.