I don't know why I wrote this...
"what am I here for?"
Whispered into the breeze, torn like smoke from a ship tossed at sea.
"Where can I go, what can I do?"
Looking down upon the mettalic city far below, he was struck by how much it resembled an infestation of fungus.
He squinted at it, idly comparing progress to fungus. Sitting up on this hill, cross-legged in the grass, it was easy to imagine that his body did not exist at all. That he was some sort of spirit presence floating above the ground, observing a strange alien culture that had developed in his absence. "Strange." remarked his spirit-self, "this evolution is completely backward."
Now he was not a spirit in the grass, but he was the grass. "I am the grass that has grown on this hill forever" he thought. "I once grew on the ground where that town is, some day I will grow there again." "These people are no match for my silent perseverence."
He was no longer the grass, but a hole. A space-time dimple. Perhaps it came from watching too much tv. His eyes felt like windows, like telveision cameras. Glass eyes sucking in the light of the sun on the grass and the city, transmitted to some never-land, some other universe where his real self sat alone, entranced by the flickering light.
Except he was no longer entranced. At this point he was not even bored. The light was just there. It sometimes changed, sometimes it looked like he was floating down the street, sometimes it looked like two hands tapping at a keyboard, sometimes he observed an entire body beneath his window, dissappearing up to connect behind, doing bodily things like showering, pissing. As if he were... in the body?
Strange, he thought. This body stuff. Exactly where am I if not in a body? I don't feel IN my body. Is it mine? Am I here on this grassy knoll or is it a figment of my imagination?
Thoughts floated through his head without sound or image attatched, they just were. It was like the swirling eddies made in water when a fish darted by, except there was no fish to be seen. Thoughts were transparent forces, they had no effect he could see, hear, or directly grab on to- unless the senses were filtered through them. Then he might decipher the currents. "So" he concluded, "thoughts are like prisms."
They were white noise over his hearing, flickering lights behind his real vison. He thought to dismiss them and simply BE the view, BE the sounds. But then he realized that this too was just a thought. "One, two, buckle my shoe. Buckle your own shoe. It never goes away."
He felt the breeze, dry and cool, picking up against his face. Now he was a stone edifice, a great forgotten monument being erased by the weather. Mindless creatures nested in his pores, knowing nothing of the signifigance of he, the monument. The grass, green and straight, bowing in the wind- it was a jungle. The dirt, brown and clumpy, became an expanse of infinitely mysterious ruins. The people long gone, not even skeletons- not even dust. This jungle-city went on forever.
Staring into the grass at his sneakers he saw the strange monsters that inhabited this deep jungle. There was a spider, big enough to devour en elephant- back in the real world that didn't exist. These was a caterpillar, a sectioned schizophrenic monstrosity, green and pulsing, making its way up the steel-tube joints of a peice of grass. Dizzying heights for a man to climb, if there were any around to try.
His gaze moved upwards, and he tilted his monolithic head to accompany it. He could feel the crackling of his granite joints, could feel the roots of trees groaning as his head tilted up, up, to see the expanse of his secret jungle. The wind, a cooling summer sigh in another universe, was a howling flood of lost souls against his cliff of a forehead.
Row after row of swaying tubular trees, broken by a mountain of a rock here and there, unrolled down around him. Abruptly the vision was nullified when it encountered the side of a tumble-down barn, miles too high for the immense grass/jungle. "Dang." he thought. His head felt like a head again, his feet were no longer stone, but flesh, in cheap leather sneakers warmed by the ordinary noon-day sun.
In the distance the sea sparkled like a churning desert of broken blue glass. Immense clouds scrolled by overhead, solid and white. They looked heavy enough to crush this whole valley if they broke off the sky and fell. The grass dipped and swung in waves, sending him the cool breeze that idly tossed his hair. Back in this reality, he felt to ask his question again.
"What am I here for?" As his mouth shaped the words, the breeze took each one and scattered the letters meaninglessly about.
He looked at the grass, demanding an answer.
"What else can I do besides eat, sleep, and work?" he whispered at it.
The grass waved him off, dismissing his question. "Such silliness" it said to him. "I am but a field of grass. Another version of order imposed in the mandelbrot chaos of the raw universe. I contain no answers OR questions, I simply am. I need be nothing more."
"It that how I should be too?" he asked of the grass.
But the grass did not reply.
The answer, he assumed, was blowing in the wind.