NOEMAYA

How disturbing and gut-wrenching, to find no tongue of one’s own in the midst of life, to realize that in one’s supposed home, one has been living as a guest and driven by invisible forces and subliminal cues, the so believable patriarchs with obscure figures and convincing whispers, the echoes of the old!

With all the accumulated glamor and seeming decor, this has been a haunted house all along, and I got acclimated to it as a man can get used to anything, even his own absence. One simply believes all claims of agency that come from god knows where, the labels that proclaim “this is yours.” And again, one gets used to the habit of taking up all the lost items, taking in everything that washes ashore from this stream.

It is said that at the summit of spiritual realization, one realizes one has always been home, but one must first go through the shocking and painful realization that one has never been home with what one thinks one is, with the provisional personality. To become what one is, one must let go of absolutely everything one thinks of oneself, to go fully dark and dead to the old.

And I see from unfathomable depths that nothing has been mine, not a single thought, nothing that is not untainted by the ruthless call of hard labor to prostitute one’s essence for the sake of an acclaimed semblance. I have worked hard in this sweatshop all my life to support the maintenance of a complex, invisible corporation that is now going bankrupt. I was told not to ask questions, to do as I am told and to carry the world that was dropped on my back without my permission, and to carry it precisely in the manner it was dropped. “You can’t change posture or make adjustment in your torso for your comfort lest your weight falls on the other’s foot,” the they said. I listened and followed, with much integrity and pride, the fantastic and ethical semblance that I am. I am bankrupt to the core. I am exhausted and my back hurts; I wish to drop all this and go back home and lay down on the fresh grass like the old days and before I was told I needed to be urgently protected.