An Island of Me
I have a reoccurring scene for when I am trying to get to sleep.
As I lay down, my bed transforms into a boat, and suddenly I am traveling leisurely down a river illuminated by the night sky, bordered by sloping grass embankments. The boat moves on its own on a slow current out into the unknown. I imagine that it goes out into sea and deposits me on an island alone.
I’ve been struck by an urgent desire to run, an eerily potent need to leave everything behind and start over. I get this feeling every once in a while, but my rolling fevers over the past few days have accelerated this desire, stoking it to an almost obsession.
Leave. Leave. Leave. Leave.
What do I want?
I want to drive forever until I can’t anymore. I want to go to a place where no one knows me and set up a new me. I want to escape the confines, both perceived and real, of my identity. I want to know other lives, other versions, other peoples of myself.
In midst of all this, I want to become something new. I want to get rid of this version of my self, plying and stuck in her life and circumstance and go. It is a great frustration that we cannot live many lives, that we cannot become the people we want to be. I feel myself rooted, that they have sprouted beneath me and hold me still while other things build themselves around me. Sometimes I think I should run, but the roots sprout anew and dig their way into the unforgiving earth.
I wish I could take the me, that is me now, and crack her open and let the cold essence of myself ooze out like a paste. I would collect her and put her in a paper boat and sail her down my imaginary river. That she may go to this island and make herself anew, a freer version of myself.
This desire hits me like a panic attack. Sudden. Breathtaking. Illusory. I want to shrivel up into a pocket universe away from noise and light alone with the hideousness of my thoughts.
What a travesty that we cannot live so many lives?
It’s only my husband and my cats that make me feel like staying. Like remaining me. They are the supportive tethering to all this.
But I wonder what a me there is. What a me absent of the holds to this identity may be free to do. I am burdened by the undoing, by the painful realization that the more people that know us, the less we are able to change. And I am desperate for change.