the anxiety

How do you know that things exist? Can one define existence? Is there even such a thing? Can existence exist? Does non-existence exist? You see, when you say the same word time and time again, it loses all meaning. Exist, existence, exists, non-existence, exist, exist, exist. Five silly little letters. No. Sounds. No. Ideas. No. Nothing.

When I am asleep, I have dreams. I see and hear and feel and think and care. Why is that not living? Why is in not my life? Why is it wrong to say that two nights ago I was married to an ordinary stranger? That I was in a library, that shifted into another? You might be thinking, it is impossible, but how could it be if it happened? When I am dreaming I do not know that I am dreaming, maybe I am even deprived of free will, but maybe I am not, because in my dream world free will may be something else, in the dream world things are everything at once and why wouldn't that be? In my dreams time stretches and compresses and five seconds go by, and then a century, but things no longer have speed, they are not slow or fast, they just happen, they just are. Just like in our world. Things happen. Or they don't. And that's just fine.

And the thing is, I could be dreaming right now. And I wouldn't know. Because it is just the same as living. And if you tell me dreams are unreal, only figments of my imagination, meant to please the senses while my body replenishes, then this is also unreal, since I cannot distinguish it from my dreams. How much of what I do or think or feel or perceive is my own creation, unseen by anyone else? A tenth, a fifth, half, three quarters? If I say a dresser is a tiger, how can you prove me wrong? It may be a dresser to you, a tiger to me, a tree to another, and something we aren't even conscious of for someone else. They are only ideas after all. And do ideas exist? Are we only ideas?

If words only appear when I set eyes on them, people only speak when I am within hearing range, just like thoughts and ideas are born spontaneously in my mind, how can I not be anxious?

This is the anxiety. It is knowing I am nothing but an idea. Nothing but my mind. But what if my mind is poisonned and mangled? I am in a cage and there is no way out because there is nothing else. My mind creates the fear of the future and the pain from the past. In the present there is the anxiety. In the present I am me and I am the anxiety.

This is what makes me still, my eyes wide-open, staring into nothing. This is what makes me shudder during the day and squirm at night. This is knowing that I don't know what can save me. This is knowing that I don't know. This is not the lack of faith, this is the faith in nothing.

This is the anxiety.