Chocolate half-moon cookies were my favorites as a child. I loved the soft cake like texture of the cookie balanced with the fluffy white sweetness of the frosting on precisely half of the cookie while the chocolate glaze is flat and shiny, coating the other half. I loved the moment before I took my first bite when I had to choose which flavor I’d eat first. For what ever reason my first bite was always from one side or another, I never started in the middle where I could taste both the chocolate and vanilla. I always ate one side completely before starting the other. How simple life was then. I had two options, chocolate or vanilla. Black or white. In hindsight, I realize that I thought eating from both sides simultaneously would somehow change the flavor and lessen my enjoyment. Even as a child I was conscientious of obtaining as much pleasure as possible out of a world full of contradicting experiences.
Life is a half-moon cookie. We can taste the chocolate or we can taste vanilla, or we can taste them both. Yet, if we choose we can look beyond the finished cookie and perceive the chemistry involved in its baking. The eggs and sugar dissolve together forming something new. Add some butter and some flour, salt and baking powder. Don’t forget the chocolate, perhaps vanilla too. But then it takes motion and friction to blend it all together, heat to bake for precisely the right amount of time. If one measurement is off, you don’t stir enough,or your oven is too hot your cookie will be ruined. Long gone are the days for me when a cookie is just a cookie. It is the sum of its parts, plus the environment around it. Is it hot or humid making the cookie sticky? Or is it cold and frigid, making it firm and chilling it more quickly? Then I know that the cookie can only taste as good as I perceive it. If I have a cold and my nose is plugged the cookie will never taste as good as when my nasal passage is clear and I can breathe in its sweet aroma first. Once you realize you can eat the cookie appreciating the intricacies it is hard not to do so without feeling like you are missing something. But this way of being can be so fatiguing. It is exhausting experiencing everything so intensely. Insight has its cost.
I read the book “The Time Traveler’s Wife” several years ago. It intrigued me at the time, I thought perhaps the reason was because it tapped into the romantic ideal that there are other worlds and lives around us, occurring all the time, the tapestry of life, interweaving with each other, passing without knowing…the mystery of life. Often, pondering the possibility that there could somehow be another me in existence, in a different realm, in a different life has been a way I’ve dealt with painful moments. Sometimes I wonder if I’ve ever crossed another “me’s” path. There was one moment where I swear I almost met myself, again at the park where I walked the wooded path practicing faith that with each step my direction would clear. I would go so deeply inward within myself that it was as if I found a portal to a more vast and expansive world. It was like taking a drug that intensifies colors, scents, and sharpness of vision. My focus funneled into things so acutely and to the point that the weight of being able to see each atom of life became so heavy that it fell in upon itself. As if there were some force sucking and pulling me and everything through some tiny pinhole in the fabric of time and projected me into a different world like space where the gravity was different. Our earth remains unchanged whether we view it upward from the depths of the ocean floor or whether we look downward from a crater on the moon. It is physically the same earth, but yet it is very different. How can a simple human contain the paradox and vastness in the awareness of such things?
The view of the ocean and the view from the moon are two very different worlds. If the world can be not one, but two contained within itself, why can’t it split again and be a third, perhaps the view from a mountain? But if it splits into a third you can begin to see the infinite reality of life. As a child I used to like to open the medicine cabinet in our bathroom and position its mirror so it reflected the image of the mirror on the wall. Looking into a reflection of a reflection…of a reflection reflecting back going on endlessly. I sat transfixed, amazed and intrigued an hour at a time. Each image got smaller and further away but yet no different from that. “How it could be?” I wondered. Did each me feel the same or did each one have a different life? Which one of me was real? Was I real? I did not know and had no one that I could ask.
Now I realize why I liked the book “The Time Traveler’s Wife.” His time traveling was so much like the way I dissociate. Living a life, engrossed in a moment then sometimes without out warning “poof” I’m sucked into another world, another emotion, another place, another time appearing naked, exposed and vulnerable, vomiting and weakened by the change, never having control of when I’ll come or go. Some times the time travel saved him, sometimes it put him in great danger, sometimes it brought him love and joy some times it brought emotional pain. It is far more romantic to fantasize that time travel exists than to admit I have a mental illness. The problem with dissociating to the degree that I do, is that it goes beyond the harmless daydream to the extent that I just get lost in thought so fully and intensely it’s as if the me in this world disappears for others. I remember the first time I realized it was what my mother did as well. I watched her leave this external world and disappear right before my eyes. I remember how painful it felt for me; that I had been the one to trigger her; that she wasn’t strong enough to deal with what I was saying; how angry and hurt I was that my feelings, in that moment, simply didn’t matter; but yet having pity and compassion because she was so fragile and fragmented. I now hold the knowledge that I’ve done this to others, that when in moments they’ve needed me to be present to comfort their own pain, I abandoned them like the time traveler and simply disappeared in the middle of their sentence. My head hangs low, my throat burns and my stomach feels queasy, I hate who I have been.
leighcannon 