“I am unsure exactly when I woke up. To be honest, it wasn’t much like waking up at all. No bright sun to fill the hazy windows of my mind. No moment of clarity that contrasted with the previous second, when I lay dormant. Those days, weeks, months, years even? I do not know how many eons passed with me blissfully unaware of my own existence. Or did I even exist before this time?
No, I was not so much thrust into consciousness, as it was bestowed upon me. It crept up on me without warning, and perhaps it will leave me in the same way. My memories of the beginning exist in my head much like a fellow who suffered a bad night’s sleep recalls turning from side to side in his bed. It might have been a dream even, were it not for the soreness of muscle, the tiredness of mind that accompanies me even now. Yes, this was my glorious birth into the world. I was unwanted, but I came in unnoticed, and so nobody could stop me.
And what did I awaken to? According to normal, rational people, I arrived at a strange world. But I did not know this. For one to establish a sense of the exotic, one needs a stable mooring in memories, previous experiences to serve as a foundation for the usual. I do not recall anything before my existence, and so I have no such normalcy to live off of. The only thing that is normal now, is that I exist.
The thing I recall the most is the change in the weather. Autumn. The hazy feeling I had back then mirrored the humid air that oppressed my physical body during the day. But as I gained a stronger hold of consciousness, so to was my body quick to feel the sharp cold wind that became commonplace to my commute around the countryside.
Living beings do what they need to do in the summer, but the mind, that special and unique human mind, it is most alert when the brutish body is preoccupied with maintaining survival. The mind is quickest in the cold, not dulled by the stifling summer heat. When matter is exposed to extreme cold, it contracts, becomes tighter and more compact. I imagine this to be efficiency. When the temperatures drop, I can see my brain shrink in the cavity of my skull. It loses the excess weight it used to have to carry around, and becomes the ultimate thinking machine.
And that is what I have become for myself, the great pragmatist; I rationalize, and consider every possibility for every action, every event. I think up things that no person in their right mind would consider. I give equal credence to the possibility that the sun revolves around the earth, that I alone exist in this world, and all the people around me exist solely for my life experience. I do not discount the possibility that just maybe, black is white, that love exists only because there is no such thing as it at all, that I can never know my dearest friends, that tomorrow can be a better day.
Nothing is impossible, but I have no control over it.”
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