of experiences.
The weight of all of the experiences, of all of these people, became heavy. She panicked. She went to visit a hospital to try to shock herself out of having these experiences by confronting them. She snuck into the maternity area and got as close as she could to a baby being born. Then, going to the other side of the hospital, she walked down the hallway where the most critical patients were, looking into their faces as she passed the open doorways. And, coincidentally, as she was leaving, she walked by a body in a bag being taken to the morgue; although, surprisingly to her, she did not feel shocked from seeing it. After doing all of this, and after a week passed reflecting on what happened, even though she continued having the experiences, she felt better but without knowing why.
A couple of months after visiting the hospital, she was at home during the afternoon. She made a cup of coffee. As she began to drink it, she experienced the birth, death and lives of all of the people that had produced that coffee and also all of the people close to them, along with all of the people who had packaged and shipped and sold it and those close to them.
Not too much time had passed before something changed within her, and she felt better and wondered how long it would be before she could travel to a place far away and already know everyone there.
Reality Show
All the times we wanted to spend with music in each other’s arms that we spent on opposite sides of the bed in dividing escapes with the TV on—we could have been what we were.
Now we have become shapes of different sad-toned colors made up of pieces from characters of various episodes of various shows. Now we are apart and distant by the thousands of literal miles.
It could be dangerous if we blew kisses into the wind long across the land: it could confuse strangers; people would chase the kisses and try to stop them under their feet, only to find that they had stomped on a resting bird or old people’s toes.
Amuseum
He saw a painting of a lion attacking its prey; at first only seeing two figures, one on top of the other, not distinguishing one kind from the other—so, not knowing if it was a painting of sex or death—he laughed.
Don’t Ever Settle For Simply Settling When Settling Down
An area an hour outside of a city, an area filled with many small farms where coops full of chickens and barns full of bigger animals are common, on a regular day of chores and neighbor kids playing together in mud and grass, they sat together at their dining table at the first notice of the setting sun, each in a defensive stance but ready to be the first aggressor. The small, ranch-style house was full of most of the usual contemporary things that people would want and get, though at the lower end of such things—full of enough food to eat that is full of nutrition—and usually full of three children that were surprised by what they discovered when they all came home together from playing outside in a field with other kids down the street. The children saw their parents taking the first bites of very accurate gelatin molds of each other’s heads—one was lime, one strawberry. The mother and father were sculptors and knew how to make such things. They were often angry at each other about how much a family costs. There was an argument over the food budget. There was a fight over half a leftover sandwich. Somehow gelatin would settle everything.
Silently, the children went outside to the barn to stay warm in the quickly cooling coming night. They were frightened. The hay and animals were comforting. They didn’t know what else to do but sit closely together waiting. In the house, the parents finally followed though with their threats; they took each other’s heads off—somehow replacing them with the partly eaten gelatin molds of each other’s heads. Nobody ever figured out how they survived like this for any amount of time because nobody knew. The next morning their bodies were back to normal, but they were more peaceful together. Later that morning after comforting the children and sending them to school, they remembered a conversation they had before they were parents about being ready for parenting—about practicing first with stuffed animals—then with dogs and cats; they had no regrets about their choice to begin immediately instead: the practice was still the difficulty.
Forty-nine years later, at the bedside of the last living parent, the only child that kept contact with the parents, who was now the caregiver, made a gelatin mold of the parent and included sections of it as dessert with meals for a few months until it was gone—with each section eaten there was more and more compassionate understanding of mistakes made and what affects these had on the children. The gelatin somehow displaced the perspective of a child; the air changed to feel like it was cool and warm, and within the adult child’s mind there was a sense of soaring out of oneself, of knowing what is beyond in a melodious empathy never thought possible with what was familiar experience.
When the child was alone two years later, there was another gelatin mold make. The child made it of itself and ate it quickly in the next few weeks, appreciating the value and uniqueness of many things that had been upsetting, and understanding some of the things that still were. Phone calls were made. One of the other children tried it right away, and the other tried it while in bed being taken care of by its children.
The Reason For Rhythm
Every day she would research different traditions throughout the world to discover a holiday or celebration that she could give herself to and find joy within. Eventually, she had a calendar filled with reasons to be happy and excited every time she woke up.
She had been lost in despair and could not recognize herself enough to get out of it. But, when she had the idea of finding reasons to make the days better, and when she began doing it, she realized that even though she gave herself to these celebrations that she could recognize within herself a feeling of who she was.
Through her research, she became interested in the dances that went along with many of these different holidays and celebrations and soon saw that she had become like the movement of these dances.
I Was Wrong
Just a few blocks away from me, a 78-year-old man living near the top floor of a ten-story apartment building killed his wife with a heavy object and then jumped out the window to his death.
This was a very sad story to hear. These were real people that died. And what a terrible way for that woman to go. What suffering!
At first, though, I couldn’t accept the story as true because I had trouble accepting that someone could live to be that old yet still lose it. I guess I believed that retirement applied to going crazy too.
It Is Essential To Know This
When he was little and cuter than most—but also much naughtier than most—he used to live on a couple acres of land. Everyday, he would feed a rabbit or two, a couple goats, a sheep and chickens, as well as gather the chicken’s eggs.
His neighbors on one side had a goat farm with a few dozen goats and a cow or two.
His neighbors on the other side had built a replica of a small old town with very precise detail. Behind their town, in the back of their property, they kept a donkey that he could see through a wire fence if he went all the way out to the end of the field where his goats and sheep ran around, grazed and played.
For two straight months, he visited the donkey at least once a day for at least a few hours at a time. He studied it at first, but soon he felt like it was his friend too. He listened to and imitated the noises that it made and made the noises back to it and watched its movements and moved like it as best that he could until he felt that he could speak and the donkey could understand and that he could understand the donkey when it made one noise or another or looked at him a certain way. He began to act like a donkey around his family and at school, making loud donkey sounds at dinner or during class, moving this way and that in donkey like maneuverings.
One day he felt like everything had come together so that he understood everything there was to be a donkey; he wanted to be a donkey too and felt like he could do it just as well as the real thing. Given his new confidence and his overwhelming desire, he
decided to make a very convincing looking outfit to complete his new becoming. When he had finished making it, he ran into the field where his goats and sheep were towards the fence with the donkey on the other side, forgetting that he was running on two legs—and, that while his costume was rather accurate, that it had no hooves, so he was running with bare, human-toed feet. When he made it all the way there, he saw the donkey move its mouth in a way he had never seen before, and he heard the donkey say to him “Don’t be an ass!” So he ran up to his house and started watching TV.
Prescription
It was eight years before the doctors thought they figured out what was causing my symptoms. They had tried since I had started seeing them to get me to sleep all the time, saying, “While you sleep, you have no symptoms that need treatment.”
Eventually, though, they told me that they had to kill me. “There are no more ideas—there is no way we know to fix you,” they said. I tried to get them to think of new ideas, to create new possibilities, but they didn’t seem to understand what this meant. I asked them “Why do I have to die?!—Why aren’t you trying to help me!?” They told me, “Your illness could become
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