Unzipped

It seems the deeper I go, the more I see. The eyes get bigger but sadder, but the views aren’t all cinematic.

Just look at that mouth, cut off from speaking by a hard cut. Sure does look pretty, though, painted perfectly in silence. The writing in the above right, up top, where we usually consider the realm of the ego, is so rational and vague that the words don’t even matter. They float, light and meaningless, to the surface. The woman on the bottom right is terrified of whatever might be exposed; the real fear is hidden beneath. She looks anxiously at the mouth where the secrets, not quite fully revealed, are clearly enough to cause anxiety.

The woman at the top playfully unzips and is met with immediate resistance. This is the look of cognitive dissonance? Ambivalence? Crazytown? Is this me willingly delving into this mess? Why? And why the HELL would I be smiling? At the very least, the process seems unpleasant. The first woman she encounters seems to agree with me. She looks like someone walked in on her in the bathroom doing something unspeakable.

Those eyes at the bottom have seen some things. They look right out at me, like those old haunting Edvard Munch paintings where someone is dying and a child looks plaintively out to the viewer as if to say, “Can you freaking believe this?” The woman reacting in fear seems like an earlier version, a simpler me, before I came to terms with whatever troubles those eyes. Or maybe she’s afraid to find out what’s next, what’s around the corner, what the next thing is she’s supposed to overcome so she can be “strong.” Maybe she just wants to be.

My writing on the upper right, is it writing? The thing I hold tightly to make sense of the world, my light, my liferaft, like ashes in the wind. The words, my reason, are swallowed up by fear. The more I see, the further I get from my attempts at rationalizations. The noise. And maybe that’s the point. Maybe it’s not sadness, maybe it’s grief. Loss. Because in the search for truth, or at least knowledge, there’s going to be sadness at letting go. The fears are there for reasons. They serve something. It makes sense to think that there would be grief at their absence.

Ignorance is bliss. The girl at the top is happy but dumb. The deeper she gets, the more she unzips, the scarier it gets because the more she knows. And she’ll have to widen her eyes to see her own bullshit if she wants to get better. She looks ahead with older, wiser eyes. Writing is all well and good, but the real work is out of the book and into the world.