Dancin' Fool

This is real. I know this.

Boredom and comfort are real- they just don't feel real. Not like the blinding flash of pain of a bone breaking, not like the gush of salty blood in your mouth. Not like the wind in the edge of a cliff or the roar of free-fall.

I'm feeling tied right now, but that is imaginary. Tied to obligations and times and places- but I could leave.

I want to go without food until my sense of smell sharpens like an animals. Dive into cold water and pry my dinner off the rocks. I want to see and hear the boken whizzing at me head and feel the slam of a good throw on concrete.

Everything is real. The air-conditioned air in this office is just as real as wind blowing off a glacier. I know this.

What I am missing is the edge of the envelope- the sense of discovery and trepidation. The unknown. The sense of climbing without a harness and no guarantee that any level of skill would be enough.

When you spend your life pushing the edge of the envelope, going to the places on your reality map that are marked "here be dragons" the map gets very big and the edges get farther away. Your people live in the center and it becomes a longer journey to get to the edge. But if you spend enough time there the edge feels like home, like the real world.

When I was young, a friend did a Tarot reading. She laid the Fool down first. "Do you know what this means?"

I shook my head.

"It means that you, when you come to the edge of the abyss, you start dancing."

Dancing would be fun.