Just a blank, empty stare

BY DOMINIQUE JAMES

There are days when, you can’t do anything much, and just stare out into nothingness. No matter how you try to snap out of it, you just can’t. You feel enveloped, and engulfed, in an inescapably locked and numbing embrace. You sit unmoving in one place, looking out. And sometimes even without blinking, there is nothing infront of you that you can see. You stare an empty stare. Everything is right there, and yet, nothing is there.

The world, you are aware, is passing by, second-by-second, minute-by-minute, right before your very own eyes. And yet, for a stretch of time, nothing of that holds any measure of meaning. Everything that’s right infront of you is a magnificent whirling blur. Though your eyes are wide open, your entire consciousness is not where you are. You are detached from your immediate reality. You are somewhere else but not really anywhere. While you are physically there, and while all your bodily functions is connected to the environment where you are, mentally, you are absent. You are not really there. You are just there looking, of course, but you are not seeing.

Is this clouded state a form of coping mechanism? Is this the way to escape the reality around you without going anywhere? Is this a reflex of shutting down everything within a wide radius, so that you can hide in that place inside of you where, even for just a moment, you can be alone while in the middle of everything?

No one can say how often this will happen. We cannot even predict the possibility of it happening. And most of the time, we cannot even “will” ourselves to make it happen. We cannot enter into this state any time we want. The door only opens when the conditions are right. When what we are thinking combines with what we are feeling, and the right mix of thoughts and emotions exist, that is the time that we enter into a zombified state. How long this lasts, no one can also tell. It just goes on and on, and we snap out of it only when we are ready. This state is like a “breathing space” that allows us to temporarily take leave of our reality, for a time live in a suspended state of animation, and then ease back into our real physical state of being.

In and out of this state we weave, coping along the way. We experience moments of lucidity, interrupted by muddied and clouded moments, and then back again. This is the state of our existence.