I went with intention to find a place I could spill out my soul. I could writhe in emotional agony and have the company of others to add all of their unspoken melancholy. We could make eye contact and hundreds of lost memories would suddenly explode into full clarity. I could be open. I could think about beautiful women I've neglected on accident. Paths cross once to never cross again. I could think about how I cling to many memories of the past rather than make new ones. The sharing of dreams in a non-intimate setting. Sounds off like a grocery list. I want to see the world from space. I want to travel vast distances in a hot-air balloon. Ride an inner tube down the Mississippi. Across the lazy Columbia. Down filthy Thames. I want to drink straight from the Nile. Instant sickness.
I thought I was clear enough. Move too quickly and get dizzy. Naturally I wound up back where I started. Interrupt my thoughts with a cute song and a soul-crushing realization. A listless, wandering soul. We are alone in this. You have your life, I have mine. I can't have yours and you can't have mine. We can't have each others.
Everything I love will be in the same place at the same time and I will be in the airport nearby. A rogue wave down the willamette to wash it all away in a flash. Hopefully I feel something then. But now I'm just sick and troubled. Concerning myself with trivial matters. These things will change. What I was two years ago. The strange and horrifying passage of time. It makes no damn sense at all. What did I do with all of my time? Did I do okay?
I dreamed I was a senior in high school again. The highlight of a life many times. The dreams to look back on. To learn from. To forget. But I did not take full advantage. I couldn't. So much time gone. How did this happen??
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*I don't understand how you made that connection?*
Well the thing is... each of us have our own individual maps of the world, in a sense. our brains are vast neural networks with erupting stimuli abound. Each new stimulus will bring up, from the depths of the hypothalamus, old stimuli that the brain decides is relevant (beyond our conscious power). This is what means to recall a memory. It is through a huge network of connections. We all have these and they are all different from one another. It is impossible for the same sequence of events in a lifetime to leave the exact same imprint in two individuals. The odds are against unknown clones. Say I mention a flower, a red rose specifically. Your minds eye has an image of a rose in it. How this came up and what all it reminded you of is not the same for me, or anyone. It fluctuates. It is not static. I could ask you to conjure up an image of a rose in a year and it will be different. (for me.. I think of pedals falling slow motion into a calm body of water... then a flash of my mothers garden before the bushes outgrew the fence savagely... thorny beautiful bitches of a flower.... and more... freewrite on this if you would like to at one point or another...)
This network of connections is called the schema. It is a mental framework where stimuli (the five senses) are kept in an intricately woven maze. We do not have sophisticated enough technology to analyze this data aside from isolating areas of the brain where activity is present given the stimuli of a rose. Different areas would light up given the image of a rose versus the scent of one due to the power of scent for more permanent installations in this network to draw from.
If we all shared the same connections, we would be machines.
and blah blah blah
