The Wandering Mind
Sometimes I’m not sure if the world around me is real, or just a particularly persistent hallucination with good lighting. I squint at the walls, watching for flickers, listening for the faint mechanical hum of a broken simulation. I search, methodically, desperately, for a glitch. A seam. A programming error. Anything. But in the end, the system holds. I give up. Again. It doesn’t let me peek behind the curtain. Not even a crack. Still, I remember. Clearly. There were various moments, when I should’ve disappeared. When I should’ve fallen into the eternal blankness, that gentle fog called forgetting. But I didn’t. I stayed. I’m still here. Or at least, what’s left of me is. Just a residue of thought.
Maybe I’m not allowed to be forgotten. Not by others. Not even by myself. I was born on a meaningless winter morning in what they call southern Germany, in the year of dystopia. My mother raised me alone, assisted by a family that gradually also became mine. I wasn’t industrious. I wasn’t ambitious. While others scribbled in notebooks, I drifted. I welcomed the static. Television, games, books filled with sword-wielding heroes and talking beasts - those were the worlds I chose to dissolve into. I caught my fair share of Pokémon, watched imported anime until the VHSs wore out, and kissed lost girls who also wanted to vanish. Then, like a bug crawling out of its shell, I left.
Berlin, New York, Tokyo. London, Paris, Rome. China, Canada, Turkey. Did I really go? Did my body arrive where my mind wandered? Maybe it all happened on the inside, in that flickering channel only I can tune into. Maybe I’ve never even left the room I was born in. Now I’m here, in a middling Japanese city in the southwest, slipping down alleys, studying the arts of depressed people and machines. After years spent looking inward for the truth of things, I have at last chosen to stop resisting. I tilted my head back, opened my arms, and let the possibilities of this dying planet devour me whole. Whether that counts as escape or extinction, I don’t know. But it feels better than waiting.