Stupid Asphalt

If there was one absolute truth about myself, it was that I was entirely independent...

There is something uncivilized about asphalt. The color. The dissonant rainbow of oils that appear after it rains. The unforgiving nature as your heel meets the surface. No matter how many times I run up and down my street, it remains unfamiliar, cold, and inertly unresponsive.

It seemed almost ridiculous to trek down two blocks to the lagoon on that wide, cumbersome road. I ignored the wheeze of my lungs as I sprinted towards the crooked, rotten, wooden posts that marked the entrance of the local pocket of sanity. I just wanted to get off that damn road.

Upon my first step, I stopped. Maybe I didn't have to go any farther. The smell of wet sandy shores rimmed with sparkling brine was enough.

I continued down the trail, right, another right, and yet another right, always the same path, stick right and to avoid the squirrel infested jogger's path. The underbrush had accumulated in my absence. I sat on the smooth stump, polished with the sap and sanded ocean breeze.

...

Nothing.

Unfortunately I go there often enough for that place to lose the wonder it once held. It has all become... well frankly, all too familiar.

Perhaps the truest communion with nature I've ever experienced happened last year. A dried river bed. Quite frankly, flatter than a plain. Lifeless. Utterly lifeless. The earth was gnarled in its own skin, twisted and cracked in its inflexibility. The explosion of this network of miniature canyons wound their way all across the river bed. It was beyond desolation. It appeared that this was the epicenter from which life began, and as it sprung from this very spot to the rest of the world, all signs of life had left it devoid of the benefits of boasting the cradle of existence.

We had been forced to disperse into this wilderness in absolute solitude, apparently to come up with some sort of beautiful poem. I'd personally believed that it was a beautified explanation. I'm sure the chaperones just wanted to be rid of us for an hour.

I'll admit, for the first fifteen minutes, I was just irritated. The ground was covered in buffalo dung. You couldn't even take a step without stepping in feces. Some great wilderness, right?

As the anger faded, all that remained was silence. Absolute silence. The kind of silence where even a single thought appears to thunder and echo across acres and acres of this abandoned piece of real estate. I had become self-conscious about the sound of my breathing, the continual drumming of my heart, and the rustling of my clothes as I moved.

Surreal, really. I could see the land before me. I could see that I was standing upon it. But it was hard to realize that I was encased within a body. Each movement became calculated, yet more and more beyond my control. I began to fidget, as if my body was convulsing in confusion as what I was supposed to do at each and every second. There was no one to mirror, no other being to even confirm my existence.

A breath.
Closed eyes.
The rush of blood ringing fresh and clean in my ears.

Upon regaining awareness, the world had quite a different hue. There was a moment of nirvana of the highest state. Fleeting. Strong. Smooth. Clean. Eternity within a second. Yet the condition of the human mind would not allow this to be. Right behind this moment of utter bliss, the crushing weight of my previous existence nearly suffocated me.

The universe had inverted itself, spilling its innards out across the great expanse of space. The stars found themselves scattered across the expanse of earth, pulling me back with the immense strength of gravity. I found myself sprinting. I needed another human. Anybody. Everybody. The lack of another existence in the small piece of the three dimensional world next to me was not endurable. Memories of the short years of my life up to this point clouded my vision, causing me to move towards civilization in a stupor. My heart began to race, pounding at the thin walls of my chest, the insignificant barrier of skin and bone that separated myself from the world. I wanted to rip my body open and allow myself to more freely occupy every inch of existence. A feeling of want to just be.

There is no exact way I can describe that experience in words, but it was certainly the most basic, innate, and clear feeling I had ever felt. The mere strength of such a simple need for the existence of others was frightening. I wanted more than anything to dissolve into a million pieces and sink into the marrow of every person I had ever known, melt into their physical existence so that my own and theirs could never be parted. And I had hoped that in that sharing, there would no longer be those difficulties that existed when we occupied two different spaces in the universe.