A forty minute bumpy ride, with engine rumbles disrupting the air that I hear but don’t listen to and even the voices that fill my diminishing personal space are just white noise in my quiet. Somehow I’d forgotten how to lose myself in thought. I’d forgotten what escape was. I’d forgotten that this time was my brain’s only break. My only time unplugged from the power sockets, or left on standby to simply exist without working. There is no guilt knocking at my windows or doors telling me to fill the time with something, anything, because the ride is too bumpy and I’m moving too much to do anything but think.
I wonder if machines can hear their own noise because most of the time I can’t. There are brain cogs and mind gears that turn and keep everything working, and at first they’re smooth and quiet but it will turn to hammering and crunching gravel if I forget to oil them, and even though it’s so loud… I think I forget to hear it.
I miss just watching the world rush by as the familiar is a blur, and wishing I could stay until the familiar becomes strange just so I can have longer with myself. There’s a gap in time when I remember before the journey began and I remember stepping out of it and back into life and I remember the thoughts I thought but I don’t know how I got here and it’s just beautiful to take myself away sometimes. Unplugged from the wall to exist on my own and collect everything that doesn’t make sense and make sense of it. I don’t want such a jumbled mess and even if I think it isn’t, it’s just because I’ve cleared a path in the rubble and I can’t see everything else until I step back.
Sometimes I feel more machine than human. My organs are the clockwork and the pipes and oxygen is the oil that keeps me working, only if I remember I’m breathing and breath deeply because a lot of the time I breathe automatically. It’s like molecular autonomy, and I have instincts and gut feelings that feel programmed into my robot machine brain.. but isn’t that just nature? Maybe nature inspired machines and the autonomy just got corrupted by metal and plastic and fumes and clangour and it got so loud it deafened us so we don’t even realise the chaos we’re creating. We try to get too creative and complex sometimes and I wish my machine brain could be less noisy and sometimes… I wish I could be a tree. With just one purpose. Stand and soak in the carbon and give oxygen to those who need it and grow and die the tallest I could have been. I wouldn’t feel swallowed by lives that aren’t mine and I’d have roots holding me down so I wouldn’t feel like I’m floating through mine.
I want to relearn how to lose myself in thought. How to take a break from myself by spending time with myself. By taking a walk through the brain instead of being overwhelmed by the climb. I need to make time for my nature, even if it’s just a forty minute bumpy ride.
Lauren Kathleen 