“I guess this one’s nonfiction?”
Hey, so happy birthday to me! In an interesting coincidence, this blog post is my 50th post on this website, which is pretty cool! It’s a neat little landmark there. And to coincide with that milestone, I also turned 21 just a day before writing this post up. And you know what that means. I got lit, as my friends say.
Long story short, it’s been a time-and-a-half this weekend. I had a fantastic 21st birthday, and I’d like to thank everyone who wished me happy birthday on the day of my birth or some time within that vicinity. And while it was great, it was also exhausting, and right now I’m running on fumes, pizza bagels, and a dime bag of crushed-up smarties. And I’ve got an assignment due on Tuesday. Neat.
I’m going to take a break this week to celebrate my birthday and lay low while I recover from a wild time, so I hope that this short little essay should suffice. As I’ve learned in my creative writing class, writing blog posts is basically just writing a bunch of creative nonfiction essays. Though the word essay gets a bit of a bad rep, true (not school) essays are joys to read. Maybe I’ll talk about them more one day. Essays can be interesting and informative, heartbreaking, and more. I don’t know what this one is, but I had to write it for class, and I thought it turned out alright.
Don’t you give me that look. It’s my party and I’ll write what I want to. Oh, and speaking of that, I want to share this picture that I forgot to include in last week’s blog. My friend Kenny and I carved a pumpkin and put it on my head and took some cool pictures, a la Deadbolt. Like Kenny said, that’s how much fall matters to Midwesterners.
“Birds in the Wallpaper,” a Brief Essay by Andy Sima (2019)
Do you ever stare at the wall and start to zone out a little bit, and the weird shapes and forms living underneath the layers of paint seem to spring to life? Or, at the very least, take on new, holistic forms? Sometimes that happens to me. I’ll be staring at something, thinking of nothing, and then my eyes will glaze over and suddenly, boom, there’s a face. Or it’s a raccoon. Or a tree. Or a house. Or a monkey doing a handstand while juggling bowling balls. There’re birds in the wallpaper, and if you look out of the corner of your eyes, you can see them flutter about.
The catch with these weird, fleeting images is that you can’t focus on them directly. Or I can’t, anyway. I can acknowledge that they’re there, see them through the film over my eyes and through that strange veil that falls over our conscious when we’re bored, lost in thought, or about to fall asleep. Like half-remembered dream, I can pick out the details of these imagined images, baked into the walls or the carpeting or the space between leaves. But if you look at them, really look at them and blink and focus your eyes, they’re gone. And then, in my waking moments, I can’t pick them out again.
It’s a weird duality, of existing in this liminal state between clear consciousness and total emptiness of thought. It’s a bit like how I imagine subatomic particles must feel, as they zip and zap about and spin and spun and span around each other, existing and not existing at the same time. They play with each other, pushing and pulling, becoming one thing or another all at the whim of some cosmic roll of the dice.Â
Sometimes you can see these little particles, if you smash beams of light together hard enough. If you can magnetize miles of vacuum-sealed tubes stored underneath the ground, hollowed-out chambers below the earth that smell of science and radiation. Like throwing a cuckoo clock from a twenty-story building and then trying to figure out how it worked. That’s how particle accelerators work, as it’s been explained to me. How many protons does it take to get to the center of a tootsie pop? It depends on who’s observing them.
You know they’re there. I know they’re there. We all know they’re there. They must be, at this point, and we just kind of realize it after a while. That there’s something beneath our feet, that there’s something under our skin, that there’s something over our heads and behind our eyes. But they disappear as soon as you look right at them. Blasting them with light from your eyes knocks them away, observation changes the outcome, and the images disappear and fade into the ordinary. Maybe you can look closer. I know I try to, try to recall these transient things and hold them in my hand, even as they hold me.
Maybe that’s what consciousness is all about, then. Trying to figure out what you know is there, trying to see it. To comprehend it. Destroying the universe, piece by piece, to get a little bit better look at the birds in the wallpaper.
