The Room

The world is a Room of contempt.  It is a Room we collectively share, yet each individual takes solitude in.  It is a product of us and it produces it: a womb of humanity and all that entails.  We live in it, yet each day our lives are less the living.

The grey, textured wallpaper is made of shame: of greed and violence and hatred infused to surround us, to remind us of our deeds and our doings.  It is a grey that is less colour and more void.  The vinyl floor on which we stand is smooth underfoot but our feet remain planted, stuck stubbornly as though adhered by fear, or dread, or apathy.  There is a hanging light that extends from the centre of the ceiling, intermittently flashing but never bringing true illumination.  In the corner stands a full-length mirror; a dreary, tear-stained sheet haphazardly thrown over covers it, creased and ragged and kind.  Nobody wants to see their reflection.

Melancholy drapes frame the windows that are glazed over, barring vision of another world: a world of promise because it is beyond, outside ourselves, untouched by our evil.  One wonders if it actually exists anywhere but in our hopes.  It is tantalizing – you stare at the glass waiting for a vision to appear, an answer that will seem obvious and yet entirely unthinkable.  A key to unlock this misery, this banality, this cycle of despair.

A key to what?  There is no door.  There is no escape.  There is history and logic to prove that.  It is a prison, confining us to our mistakes and reminding us of our flaws.  Good thing that mirror is covered.

Someone thought of painting the Room.  As though interior design could fix this.  Suffering does not disappear under an undercoat.  Pain cannot be glazed over with a change in décor.  It is in the walls themselves, a part of the very structure: ironically it traps and protects simultaneously.

And I guess that’s the real tragedy of the Room.  For all of the horror that we know exists, for all of the screams and the silence, the Room is not to blame.  If anything, the Room provides a chilling sort of comfort.  A sense of constancy, of consistency, of expectations being lived up to.  It is as reliable as it is abhorrent.

No, the fault lies not in the Room, but in those who built it.  The fault, dear world, lies in ourselves.

Falling

There’s a moment that feels like falling. Forget for a moment that this moment does actually involve falling: or at least, the moment immediately following this moment. It’s amazing that something that is one thing can feel like something else: that experiences aren’t just what they are, but what they’re described as, what they feel like.

‘Falling’ is such a broad term to describe how you’re feeling anyway. It shouldn’t be. It’s quite clear what falling should feel like - a loss of your ability to stand, or a removal of the floor that works with gravity to keep you upright. But people apply it to other situations: falling in love, for example. And what does that even mean, to fall in love? If you fall in a pit of lava, even if you die a horribly burn-y death, you’ve still fallen and it’s not an entirely inappropriate word to use. In fact, it’s completely appropriate in those exact circumstances to describe the moment before you hit the lava as you feeling like you’re falling. Not that I expect you’ll ever actually have to describe that feeling, what with the chances of you finding yourself in the vicinity or a lavanous pit (yeah, I’m making up words) probably quite low. 

That all makes sense. Well, it makes a little bit of sense, if you can follow. What doesn’t make sense is falling into something that can’t kill or hurt you. And maybe that’s the point: you don’t fall into something pleasant. Or even if you do happen to land in a giant pile of marshmallows or rainbows or something equally symbolic of pleasantness, the feeling of falling isn’t the pleasant part, it’s the landing that feels good. So when people talk about falling in love, what they mean is that they’re worried that their feelings will result in them being maimed or death-ed (past tense of death) or cause significant pain. Nobody takes pleasure in saying that they’re falling in love with someone - it’s a tentative emotion, one of dread and fear. Being in love with someone is different. You’re no longer in that freefall, that chaotic uncertainty where you’re not really sure if you feel that way, or if they feel that way, or if you’ll always feel that way, and gosh I’m just so confused.

Even the people who take such joy and pleasure in expressing that feeling don’t really mean it. You know what I’m talking about: the “I think I’m falling for him/her!” types. The exclamation mark gives the illusion of excitement, but it doesn’t mask what’s going on beneath the surface. That statement reeks of desperate fickleness - an unwillingness to commit to a feeling or a thought or whatever love is in any definitive terms. Because again, you're never really sure if what you're talking about will be reciprocated, so you give yourself an out. It’s testing the waters, and that’s just so human to be cautious. I’ve never seen a duck dip its toe in the pond. They swim or they walk, and they don’t make a fuss about one or the other.

Where was I...

So, back to this moment, the moment where it feels like you’re falling. You’re really not though, not yet anyway. But you know soon you will be - there’s a realisation that comes, perhaps when the world around you starts to get fuzzy, and the outline of everybody else is blurry so that they no longer have clearly defined edges but morph into blobs. And you know then that you can’t stop what’s going to happen, because it’s already been set in motion (the motion of course being downwards). You feel your head go dizzy, your heart starts pounding inexplicably quickly, you lose control of your limbs. A wave washes over you, but it’s not a cleansing sort of wave that soothes and brings peace. It’s a destructive wave that doesn’t leave any semblance of you left, not in that moment anyway. You’ll eventually be washed to shore, ideally in one piece not too dissimilar to how you started, but the moment that water hits you there’s no reaching you.

I promise I’m not talking about falling in love.