The Worlds Come Again

The worlds come again.

They nucleate at the bottom of the cauldron holding the turbulent mass of my mind. Their bubbles rise and pop, filling the air above my head with the umami aroma of miso broth and green vegetables. Perfect tiny globes of rock, water, jungle, air, vacuum, and spaceworthy vessel rocket through my mental soup. They demand attention.

After a famine of ideas, they are as welcome as a bountiful oasis shimmering in the desert's heat.

The worlds come again.

They jumble and blend at the edge of my consciousness, filled with characters deep and complex. Each character trails a story through time, each one's thread braiding, fraying, and knotting. They take time to find, time to develop, and time to craft in the way that makes them true. Each bubble, each scene a separate world shooting skyward toward self-destruction. Frustration races wonder, each threatening to overtake the other in the rush of a creative drag race.

How can I possibly capture even half of them?

The worlds come again.

World-shaped bullets rip through the borders of Me and Beyond Me, fraying the veil between reality, otherwheres, and elsenows. I know what is real, but my consciousness fits into those cozy bubbles of alternate perceptions so easily. Third person omnipotence bleeds into first person self-awareness.

The question is not "Where do you get your inspiration?" The questions is "How do I focus on developing just one of them?" What gives me the right to be fiction's gatekeeper?

The worlds come again.

Insistence and impatience mingle as the bubbles pop, never to be recreated in quite the same way again. Guilt's trap tightens its noose around my thoughts. I am a poor steward of the bounty I have uncovered. I am too slow to capture the nuances, to honor the spirit, to make the worlds flesh.

Tears of past euphoria and current emptiness fight their way down my face, jumping from furrow to wrinkle like trench-bound soldiers.

And just like that, the worlds stop coming.

The boiling of my mind maintains its fevered pitch, rumbling with the cares of adulthood and age instead of the boundlessness of potential realities. Anxiety settles in like a long-lost mother-in-law coming home to nag. I ache for the headlong rush into the not-quite-real to sweep me away into the maelstrom of time which has no meaning.

Will my human voice be too slow next time? Will I lose all those wonderful realities again because I am too weak to gather them? Am I truly the impostor that I pretend to be?

Will the worlds come again?

They seem to leave me, and yet they remain, always with me but ever elusive when I won't open myself to them. I know they will be there whenever I exert my will and look away, like gneeches darting around the corners of my sight at the first inkling of tunnel vision. They still come and go at a frantic pace, just waiting for the next time I squint through the crowded thoughts and cares of mundane existence.

Between now and then I remain: lunatic, lover, and poet. I hone my art, sharpening the barbs of my words on the lathe of time. I practice, as if there's a single obtainable pinnacle to writing, but the mountaintops stretch off to the horizon and beyond.

I proudly strut and fret my hour upon the page, and then I will be heard no more.

Coda: Sharing Thought

How long must we make do with mere words, a clumsy and low-bandwidth medium of empathy and clairvoyance, rife with misinterpretation and projected meaning? How long must we wait until we share thoughtscapes with each other? How long until our thoughts are truly free in real time and space?