In My Safe Place

the match

I found a safe place to go to in my mind and I went there. “I am in my safe place,” I said to myself. It felt good to say this so I repeated it over and over again: “I am in my safe place. I am in my safe place. I am in my safe place. I am in my safe place. I am in my safe place. I am in my safe place. I am in my safe place. I am in my safe place. I am in my safe place. I am in my safe place. I am in my safe place. I am in my safe place. I am in my safe place….” I said this lots and lots of times until I lost track of everything and went kind of numb inside. Even though I had become numb I kept on saying it though, over and over again, kind of automatically. Then I became ossified. I became petrified. I turned into a stone and lay there for the next 23 million years…

 

Stones evolve though, you know. Stones do evolve. Stones have consciousness. They take risks, though you might not think it. I evolved over all those million years and my awareness gradually grew. It didn’t grow by that much, admittedly but it grew all the same. What’s time after all? Time passes quicker when you’re a mineral in the mineral realm. Or at least I get the impression that it did, looking back on it. With the benefit of hindsight. Maybe time didn’t pass quicker though – maybe I just remember it that way. Maybe I remember it all wrong. That could be a protective device, of course. To protect me from knowing just how long I had to be a stone before I could evolve into something else. Before I could evolve my way into the prokaryotic realm, which is where all the action starts. All the fancy stuff. Self-organizing systems, cell specialization, motility, mitosis, reproduction – all that kind of business. Heady stuff. Like a rollercoaster, it was.

 

And then before very long – well after an extraordinarily long time actually, now that I think about it – I took birth as a human being again. With all the amazing possibilities that this entails. Human again, huh? What am I going to do about it, I wonder? How am I best going to make use of this human birth? How will I make sure that I don’t waste this opportunity? I didn’t really think any of that stuff, to be honest. I’m just pretending that I did. I know that they are the sort of questions I should have been asking myself but I just never did. Far from it – I just drifted along, allowing myself to be influenced by everyone else. Who of course were just drifting on themselves. As you do.

 

Yeah I’ll go along with that, I said. Whatever. Only I didn’t actually say that. I didn’t have the awareness to say that. Maybe I unconsciously said that. I don’t know. I can’t remember. Probably I did. Yeah I’ll go along with that I said and I did go along with it. I went to the pub with my mates. Came out with ill-informed opinions. Talked a lot of shyte. Got into arguments. Watched the match on TV. Voted conservative. Voted for Theresa May, God help me. Then before I knew it I turned back into a bloody stone again…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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