He lay awake listening to his runners' heart thump against his thoracic cage. Someone once told him the pillow was cooler, on the other side. He usually couldn't sleep looking at the cieling because that was how he did his thinking. That he could not sleep with his stomach snugly set below him on the bedding and his face buried in the pillow worried him. Sleeping on the side was never to be tolerated under any circumstance. He was either too exhausted to sleep or not tired at all, both undesirable conditions considering that it was 2:49 in the morning and the sleep for the last few days had been fitful, sparse at best.
He turned over onto his back and stared at the cieling. Thinking is what his mind wanted, yet he knew sleep was what his body wanted. He yielded to thought, mind overcoming the comfort of matress and duvet. His mind was usually the winner of these disputes anyway, since it posessed both somatic and autonomic control of bodily functions. A little action potential works marvellous wonders. Somatic would reign for the present moment.
Earlier he had tried to change his social networking profile to indicate where he had come from. But he couldn't commit to putting one location. He was a wayfaring stranger whose journey home had many stops. Each place he lived was one of them, or so it seemed because it was never a place in which he had stayed for a long period. Each place also felt like home to him, and deciding upon one place out of all the others was painstaking. Moving often and to completely unique settings each time surely wasn't helping. Why did he have to put in a hometown in the first place? He couldn't stake a claim to be a citizen of the world if he had a hometown in one locale. He would take solace in his daring to be different for now, until societal pressure to succumb to the norm would plague his psyche. For now, he would leave it alone, again, wondering if he would return to the debate and knew that he would.
He caught himself doing it again. Always the questions, never concretized answers. Perspectiveism - an answer would change based on how one percieved life in the moment of the experience. Living in the moment and reflecting upon it are two separate processes utilizing multiple parts of our brain. The brain of course is a material substance, with the capacity to be weighed, its matter analyzed with one being able to describe the elements that create the molecules that create cells that create the organelles that create the organ within the organ system of the body. The mind is not so. Though arguably reliant upon a well-functioning brain, its capacity is incalculable, and so are its limits. Its presence can fill a room or the eye of a needle. The most powerful force on the face of the earth cannot even be seen- it is a thought.
For a fleeting instant one of these thoughts occured to him - he had flown across 5 time zones and was now 5 hours ahead of his previous location. His mind, he intimated, was operating in both time zones at the same time, making his days 29 hours long, or so it seemed. Had he inadvertently found the way to both cheat and create more time for oneself simultaneously? It wouldn't be a very helpful skill if the increase in time yielded productivity. Time of course has its own agenda. It runs faster than us all; not even the best sprinter or well-trained distance pace can catch Time. Eventually this momentary lag in the perception of Time would be erased as Time would catch and then surpass. Yet we try anyway. Is it our yearning for self-preservation that drives us?
Why had he flown all this way, away from the life he had known? Of course the obvious answers flashed across the embellishment his mind created using the blank canvas of the cieling above. But why here? Why now? Why him? These were the real questions that he hoped his being here would answer. It was not the promise of the adventure but the adventure itself that was worth taking the first step forward, blindfolded almost. "Why do you want to study here?" Asked of him by the Border Agent after a tedious 8-hour journey that took 15 hours. His answer: "I wanted a new experience." It is often a good idea to embrace what one does not know in order to shape what one already does. That is the nature of growth. Much like a tree one must bend to favorable light sources to sustain that growth or run the risk of botched photosynthesis.
His eyelids were becoming leaden, the cadence of his breathing slowed. The body's natural music, a melodic configuration leading to its own repose. Rest, sleep, silence. It was, after all, the end of the day, and the cyclical play of the ascension of the sun to its throne in the center of the sky, before falling from grace and wallowing in the depths of the West, would begin again. He remembered the dull, orange glow of the street lamp casting insufficient luminence. He turned over. Then nothing.
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