Infinite Ghosts

These infinite ghosts of my mind terrify me.

I see what could be, and those possibilities are horrifying.

It's the feeling of standing at the precipice of a cliff, looking into the deep abyss below. Stars dash across the sky, a smattering of light in an otherwise calm and dark night.

But all you see are incadescent streaks of men falling into the abyss, much like meteors darting across the sky, no different than how children draw with white chalk. One after another, man after man, the dark cavern is briefly illuminated by the screams of delusional, deranged, and aching spirits. Beautiful, horrifying despair.

And you feel this ache within you, this thing wriggling within you. The terror knowing that the mind of each unfortunate soul orchestrated the fall, except all of them are future versions of you.

It would be enough to say to yourself, "I can overcome this! I am greater than those men!" But this is a partial truth. You are those men. Those men are you. You are not immune to the disorder of your own brain.

Simone Weil said:

We have to endure the discordance between imagination and fact. It is better to say, “I am suffering,” than to say, “This landscape is ugly."

The terror of knowing this possibility, the despair of feeling each fall in your trembling bones.

The only power I have is to admit "I am suffering", but can I trust an unreliable narrator to not say "This help is not needed" my entire life?

If all things stem from the body, I must not ignore the physical in favor of the metaphysical. Let my prayer, as Weil defined, be the attention of sleeping and maintaining my body and its environment.

Hope is in the daily acts towards stabilization.