Sat
Oct
17
I can hear him speak to me. It's like a whisper. Shhh. The surf. Spray of water.
“Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water my friend.” - Bruce Lee
I try. I really try. I want to empty my mind. It’s filled with static and lightning and sparks. Yet, I feel as though I’m very flexible. Put me in almost any situation and I can think/feel my way out of it. It’s early, maybe 3am, I don’t know. I could look up to the top right corner of my screen and see, I choose not to see the time. In bed listening to Eckhart Tolle. He’s speaking to me through the tiny speaker in a small soft pillow that I have on top of my right ear. My head isn’t on the speaker pillow, because it gives me a crick in the neck, but I like it laying there keeping my head warm. Tolle is talking and we are sitting on a park bench in my dream. We have a brown paper bag between us filled with sandwiches, a Snickers and a Twix. Two bottles of water. He twists the cap of one open, takes a sip and tells me, “Jerry, you are not just a meaningless fragment in an alien universe, briefly suspended between life and death, allowed a few short-lived pleasures followed by pain and ultimate annihilation.” He reaches in the bag for the Snickers. That was what I wanted after my sandwich, but he’s eating the candy-bar first. He peels the wrapper free, takes a bite, looks at the Snickers’ insides and continues, “Underneath your outer form, you are connected with something so vast, so immeasurable and sacred, that it cannot be spoken of, yet I am speaking of it now. I am speaking of it now not to give you something to believe in, but to show you how you can know it for yourself.” There’s a pounding at the front door! Loud! I’m shocked and my heart is pounding! Is the house on fire? My throat is burning. I might have a bit of acid reflux from this trauma. I get up and as I’m sliding on my pants, I hear a woman screaming outside my door, “Jerry, get your goddamn ass up and open this fucking door now!” No way am I opening this door now! I move over to the curtains and try and take a peek. I see her walking away. Now she’s banging on the crazy neighbor’s door and screaming, “Get your goddamn ass up and open this fucking door, I mean it!” She’s so drunk she went to the wrong door. She’s so blind drunk she doesn’t know where she is. Thank goodness neither of them own a car, or can even drive. Hate it here! How have I allowed myself to end up like this? Living here. Sad. Depressed. Alone. The self hatred equals my hatred for them. Is it just a coincidence his name is “Jerry,” or is it a joke the Universe is playing on me? Every time she screams an obscenity at him by name, I flinch. The nerves tingle all over. These last few weeks I haven’t slept well. The constant fighting and yelling and screaming these two people do just on the other side of these paper thin walls. Used to fear one of them shooting the other and a stray bullet coming through the wall and hitting me in the eye, but I believe the walls are so thin, she could throw a knife through it and it would stick me in the eye, or some other delicate and important place with major blood flow. I want to be like water, so I won’t drown.