This behavior is not common for me, and, due to what happened, I am unlikely to repeat it. However, it did yield a pretty darn good essay, and I am in college.
This essay is a humanist essay, which means that I take an experience of mine, and broaden my view and talk about something greater than myself. Since this is kind of how my mind works anyways, it was not hard for me and I think I did very well, and I am proud of this piece. If it is stolen, I will cause bodily harm to the thief.
Enjoy!
Pins
in a Butterfly
7:00, the
morning—I don’t feel hung-over, I feel great.
Compared to how I was last night, almost anything would be an
improvement. I slept on someone else’s
couch with my boots on. My
fake-eyelashes are gone—I wonder if anyone will find them. Damn, I liked
those eyelashes. After ten minutes of
trying to mentally re-trace my steps through the dreamy haze of drunkenness, I
have gained nothing.
“Your
eyelashes are coming off,” says the guy I kind-of know. Did I pull them off? Throw them on the floor? Surely, I didn’t think to put them in my
purse. He is smiling hugely, freckled
face twisted up at the mouth. I have no
memory of what happened to the lashes. Start where the dream begins to make sense. The next thing I remember is us kissing.
It is an
interesting thing, remembering reality like it’s a dream. I don’t remember how we wound up kissing—my
memory just starts off right in the middle of it. Later that day, when I got back to my dorm, I
would write down what I remembered and try to reconstruct the night.
Time was no
longer my measuring tool—it doesn’t fit in this reality. I remember things as happening before or
after other things. People coming and
leaving, getting another drink, kissing the guy I didn’t know, kissing the guy
I did know, and then vomiting
miserably. I had managed to stitch
together the order of events, but they could have occurred over a time of an
hour or five hours.
I always
thought that was a cliché—it could have been
a moment or an eternity—but it turned out to be very true. The monotonous procession of minutes just
doesn’t cut it. Time, or the perception
of it, is more fluid than that. It
doesn’t always go by in a series of tiny moments that make up a night—it can
turn around and loop in on itself, or just disappear completely.
Attaching a
number to an event holds it down, like the tiny pin stuck through the body of a
butterfly in a glass case. It’s a way to
de-mystify it—the ticking of minutes is a way to define the little windows
through which we look at the world. We
can quantify reality by saying this happened then for this amount of numbers,
and it is now this amount of numbers behind us—safely behind us so that we may
forget it.
7:20—I want
to go back to my dorm, and I have the capability to make it there without a
problem. I want to thank these
people—their goodwill is remarkable.
What I really want to do is write a thank-you note and leave it on the
couch, but I can’t find a pen. I don’t
want to intrude so far as to tell
someone I’m going. A note would be
perfect, romantic even. But I can’t find
anything to write on—the lid of that empty pizza box, maybe, but I still need a
pen.
In my
search, I come across the cooking pot that I had held in my lap only a few
hours prior. Only hours? It looks so foreign without my stomach acid
inside it. Someone had washed it. I feel guilty and embarrassed—I want to
leave, like an overdone actress with a Transatlantic accent—“Oh, I can’t stay here another minute!” A minute was the time it took for any of this
apartment’s natural occupants to leave their rooms, come into this one, and to discover
me.
I decided
not to leave a note, and hoped that my shabby attempt at folding the blankets
they had gotten me would do. I hoped my
gratitude would show. As quietly as
possible, I gather my purse and put on my coat, and go down the stairs.
It’s so
cold out that I want to turn right back around and go inside. This is where I’d like to fast forward
time—to where I have food in my stomach and am in pajamas in a real bed. I’d just like to skip over this whole
bitter-cold part of my day.
In a way, I
do make it fast forward. Even though it
took no fewer minutes to walk back, it seemed much shorter than it could have
been. Happiness, enjoyment, shaves seconds
off those minutes, so that when I finally arrive at my dorm, I’d be content to
just keep walking. It was a beautiful
morning. Time flies when you’re having fun—another cliché, another truth.
12:00—the
closest dining hall to me opens. I need
food. A few hours ago, I was so hungry I
got nauseous. That’s a stupid feature of
the human body. I couldn’t bring myself
to eat more than half a banana. Had I
been foraging in the wild, hungry but nauseous, I wouldn’t have lasted very
long. There’s another thing about time—how
our bodies, our minds—the things that make us what we are, come from a
different time.
Humanity
lives in a little bubble that is ahead of what we were made for. We are advanced—moving
ever towards some obscure goal that we call “the future”. It will be wonderful when our world gets
there, but it is some distance away. The future starts now, some slogans say,
but as soon as I hear the spokesman’s generic voice, I feel no different. I see no Utopian society out my window. I see ancient things, I see nature outside my
window.
To a
squirrel, years don’t matter. Whether
it’s 1853 or 2053, gathering nuts for the winter is just as important. Or what of the giant redwoods, trees older
than Christianity? Do they count their growth
rings like days on a calendar—tick, tick, tick?
Time is a
human invention, thought up to quantify our lives—to take the abstract, the
unknowable, and make it mundane. Humans
seek to define everything, to capture ideas and phenomena with words. Words can make things safe and bring them
down to a level that our brains can understand.
Maybe that’s why I like to write.
The taste
of orange juice in the dining hall is like the taste of vomit. It had been washed from my mouth early in the
morning, but the taste was still fresh.
It’s the acidity—the unmistakable taste of orange juice that is from
concentrate. Our senses conjure up
things that have long passed out of our memory.
Like the smell of the clementine tree in a Floridian backyard, something
my conscious mind would never remember, but that still surfaces whenever I
smell clementines.
I am still embarrassed of my
drunkenness, and the sight of the guy-that-I-know that I kissed makes me duck
my head and look away. There’s nothing I
can do about it—it’s in the past. I
can’t undo my actions, he should know that too.
When I think about what happened, it feels like I could have just as
easily dreamed it, but I know that it happened.
For however long before I started vomiting, I was living in a dream.
1:00—back
in my room. I will get nothing done all
day, the creeping feeling of sickness follows me everywhere. There is nothing specific I can point out
that is wrong with me, I just feel off.
I can’t
stop thinking about what happened, so I get out a notebook and a pen. Reconstruction
of Last Night I title the page, and then get to work. The ink rolls over the paper—I am being
perfectly human—trying to quantify what has happened to me.
I am seeking
to understand, to pin down like a butterfly, how an unfathomable thing works. For all my grand thoughts and ideas, I am
still an animal. My mind only wants to
see things that it can either understand, or quantify so that it doesn’t feel
threatened anymore. Despite the
potential for more reality bending nights and the insights they may yield, I
don’t want to repeat the incident again.
I am content to tick by the numbers as they pass.
this did not happen
neither did this
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