Feelings

I am a feeling and there is no time. There is only space. Or there is just time and no space. I am fighting it out with all these other feelings but I can’t get a hold. There are so many other feelings to contend with and though it’s not a battle to the death it can often feel like one. They want to use me as a shell. I can’t get a hold. How long can I sustain? At any moment I will go like I never came, and no one will notice, and then a billion other feelings will rush in to replace me and it will be like I never existed and I will not get my second wind. It is bewildering how many feelings there are, and it is tiresome to think of where they stay and how they move, but also where they want to get to and at what speed and just thinking about all the space these stupid clamorous feelings take up makes my mind boggle.

I can go wherever I want within reason. I can run to the other side of the world, I can bore through the earth. I can fly in zigzags or trace fancy parabolic curves. But the world isn’t only the world and I can jump off and propel myself into the coldness of space. I am a feeling that comes into nothing invented from nothing. I make myself felt in nothing and no one knows where I start. I am artful nonsense but I am also magic. I am a feeling inside a body which is nowhere at all and I am within this nowhere so  I am in all the space in the world because when push comes to shove the only space is the space in my mind, the space I imagine, and the throb is always a dull throb inside my belly but where exactly I can only wonder. 

But I am running out of time. I never had time in the first place and how it is that anyone could imagine that I could come or go, that I could wax or wane is heart-warming to me but it lends me far too much credence, it suggests I have power, this independent existence, but I don’t and I never did, not as far as time is concerned, time which wants to make me exist only in so far as someone can perceive me changing from one thing to another, or from something which was never even a thing in the first place.

There is so much space but there is no time. There is a universe of possibility. There is all the space that anyone could possibly imagine. The space is endless and I can be anywhere inside it, but I cannot be outside it. This space is even this page, but I am not a thing that you can see inside this space, I am not an object like a table or a big block of ice, I am the supervisor or the overseer thereof, and I couldn’t care a jot for your tired tangible objects and the dust that gathers upon, I am their overlord, and what I decide, what I bring to bear, who or what I call to arms, is vastly more important than all the other stuff that appears to take up the space of which I am the master.

I have wondered what would happen to me if you cut down space entirely.  I would probably suffocate. If you closed up the sequence and made everything homogeneous, I suppose I wouldn’t have any place to go, and then I wonder if people would even feel me although this pre-supposes that there are people around in the first place -- I am highly doubtful there are -- I could be the angriest most forceful, most hateful, vengeful feeling in the world but without my space, what would I be? I am something that hasn’t quite begun and could never finish. Or I am perpetually destined to stay in the middle, meaning that if I don’t end, how can you know me, because you can only know me as distinct from other feelings, and if I won’t end, how can the others begin?

So when those other feelings come for me, I have resolved to stand my ground. I won’t run. But I’m not so thick-headed as to want to plant myself static. I am sufficiently pliable which might be my main saving grace. I will carve a niche in a tranche of infinite space, I am sure there is space or I am at least hopeful, but there are also a hell of a lot of other feelings around and perhaps that is why there are so many.