Ouroboros

Diary Entry, 24th October 2023.

Wide awake at night and I am aware of how the universe can feel dark and vast and terrifying. Or maybe it’s me becoming small and lost again. Either way, there’s a cold chill travelling through a scared and suspicious heart. Tonight I welcome it.

I can change the shape and colour of the universe by how I choose to feel about it. I can make it light or dark. I can grow or shrink it. (Is it me that I’m growing and shrinking?). Yes, I’ve not been able to sleep tonight and I’m feeling a bit dislocated so I’ve put the universe on dark mode. I find it helps, when you become tired and slip underneath the distractions and minutiae of boring and repetitive life, to tap into existential dread. It’s not as deliberate as that really. On a roundabout, when you don’t have anything to cling on to you can’t stay rooted in the centre, you slide out to the edges, which is where you can sit back and take a proper scope of things. But you’ll still be spinning. At least in these moments, there is no limit to what you can examine or imagine. The entire universe is contained in a dark bedroom.

There’s light rain outside, I can hear it against the glass. I imagine there’s both nothing and everything outside that window. My eyes are open in the dark. I recently read somewhere that in a few Eastern philosophies and religions there is the common view that the ‘self’ is fiction. In other words there is no thing as the self as we conceive of it. This is simply only a very convincing illusion. That’s exactly what I feel like right now. Perhaps what is sending this chill through me. They say that the self isn’t a fixed thing, but is just the constant existence and fluctuation of thoughts. Much like walking, the self only exists in action. At the moment I feel like it has to be true, that there isn’t some source that my thoughts and feelings come from, but they exist in their own right. However, something about that makes me feel like I do in that brief second when I’ve missed a step on the stairs. Caught by surprise the stomach flips. The body braces. I guess I don’t really feel connected to being a person. I’m just a mind talking to itself.

Some of my earliest memories are of being awake at night, squinting into the dark and trying to remember or figure out where I came from. I felt very much that I was alone, but there was myself for company. There probably always will be. I fantasize about being able to read a transcript of all my thoughts, it can occupy a lot of time since I can’t possibly decide how it would begin. Is the mind one long line of thoughts, turning and curving like a snake? My whole life I have always wondered, have I really never been here before? It’s all so acquainted, yet I know I’m experiencing it for the first time. None of us remember when we first started thinking. But I have always had a sense I must have done this before. I have no real basis for this, the belief comes from powerful feeling deep in my gut - like both familiarity and dread at the same time. I think I feel the Ouroboros. Now I lie in the dark listening to the rain and squinting into the dark like I did when I was a child. We’ll always have this pastime.

Occasionally, on waking up there’s a brief moment when I have no idea who or what I am. I simply haven’t remembered myself yet, and I experience thoughts with no identity attached. As I gradually begin remembering (I am a person, I am in my bed, I am twenty five years old), I have the emotional sensation of putting on someone else’s shoe: it’s an object designed for a foot to go in, but there are all of these surprising indents. At first it doesn’t quite feel right, you have to walk around for a bit to make it yours. It’s in the space between being asleep and remembering myself, is where I’m trying to exist in for a while. I want to stretch it out and lay on it and figure things out.

I think my self might be atomizing.
I think my illusion is coming apart.
In the dark my bedroom is a serpent, devouring its own tail.