A Conversation With Myself

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From Firefly, aboard the spaceship Serenity.
Engine broken. Life support failing.

Inara: Mal, come with us.

Mal: Can't. Four to a shuttle, Inara. Four.

Inara: One more. You know it can't make a difference. Not now.

Mal: I'm not leaving Serenity.

Inara: Mal, you don't have to die alone.

Mal: (Pauses.) Everybody dies alone.

---

That's something you've been realizing more and more in the past few years.

When you were five, and you cried yourself to sleep as you thought about
how your parents would eventually die, you didn't realize, but it wasn't about just them.
It was also about how the sun would blow up after millions of years. Your sister tried
to comfort you...saying that we'd all be long dead before that ever happened.
So, you would look up at the ceiling in your room at night and hold on
to your stuffed animal...it was a dog...and you would think about how
everything would be gone. Everything you knew. It would all leave you.
But what you didn't realize in that five year old head, was that nothing
was ever really with you.

You tried to find a way. You thought maybe close friends would help.
You lost yourself in fantasy. Some violent. Some romantic.
Some sexual. All appealing to your need to be a part of something.
Your imagination grew. You thought maybe
a girlfriend...a soul mate would help. Community, love, hope.
You started to write.

And it seemed to work. But every now and then, you'd find yourself
staring at the ceiling. Alone. It seemed like the curse
of consciousness...to be trapped. A solitude that would only end
when you were dead.

You sought an audience for your work. Poured out your feelings into
your writing. Thought you could connect with people. And I'm sure
you did. But you came to realize that the audience goes to their own homes
to sleep. They go to their own lives to live.

Its presence grew. Every night...whether there was someone sleeping
next to you or in the next room over, you would feel the distance. Because
they weren't really there with you.

You developed relationships. Grew close to people. Made good friends.
Became intimate with some who seemed to know your mind, or seemed
to know it better than you ever thought possible. And the closer you got,
the more you felt the depth of the distance between people...between you
and everyone.

You wonder about other people. If they think about these things. And if they do,
how do they cope with it?

You've grown to accept that that's the way life is. A part of consciousness...a void
that cries for something more.

So, that's why you've stopped looking for an audience. Stopped looking for someone
to be one with you in your consciousness...to be one with you in your very existence.
Because it's not a role that any person can fill. And you wonder where
you got the crazy idea in the first place...that it could be possible. At any rate, it doesn't
matter to you anymore, because it's just not important to you anymore.
But you wonder about your friends. And wonder if maybe they think the same thing...
are looking for the same thing you were, but just don't realize it.
You think maybe they don't realize it because they don't like thinking about things you like
to think about. How someone is dying every second. How someone is being tortured right now.
How it could be us. How we could drop dead any second. (And why shouldn't it be us?)
How we all die alone. How we all really live alone. Trapped in consciousness.

These thoughts make you smile now.
Because you've also come to realize, that it's important to you to wrap your heart
around that which is beautiful and that which is horrible. You seek to always cling
to both at the same time, feeling the full power of both. If you lose beauty, then
you become cynical and bitter. If you lose the horrible, you become naive and ignorant...
no more effective in the world than an overdosing junky. And if you lose your heart
well, then you're pretty deranged and probably need medical attention.
These thoughts make you smile too.

You decide to post this online, knowing that most people probably won't get to this part because
most people don't bother fully reading long entries. And even if they did, they probably wouldn't
understand or wouldn't relate. But that's okay. Because them reading it doesn't matter to you
the way it used to. Because their audienceship doesn't matter like it used to.
And that makes you smile too.
Not that that matters at all.
Not that that's the point at all.