Sometimes, very very late at night, when I’m awake by myself and writing or reading or staring at the ceiling from my bed (or someone else’s as the case has been in the past), I feel this sensation that’s so overwhelming it’s all I can do to hang on in the midst of the sensation. It’s that whirring, whooshing, whirling feeling/notion that everything that could have happened already has, that everything that’s going to happen is just about to, and that everything that can happen is happening right this second. I can’t explain it, really, but I’ve sensed it in the quietest of moments, in the darkest, calmest moments of solitude, ever since I was very young. It’s deafening and inspiring and exhausting and envigorating all at the same time and it feels like the most tangible example of Life and Truth I’ve been exposed to.

It’s like during the first chance my mind has a chance to stop observing everything and just exist, it gets caught up in this delirious, pulsing flow of the world and all of It. It’s far above flashing cameras on red carpets or towering mountains above cities or Christmas morning glee or first love tingles or the great blue-light-inducing arc of orgasm or any of the other stupid, tangible, visible things humans seem to think make us really involved with life. It’s just this buzz that would seem frantic if not for it’s consistency in intensity and it’s unwavering intertia. It’s huge and yet it’s strangely familiar when I hear it.

And I realized recently that this strange whooshing is only familiar because it somehow whirrs quietly in me every day, whether or not I choose to acknowledge it. Even if it’s whirring to drive me into the ground or buzzing to push my spirit upward, it’s always there and yet I don’t notice it until it’s very quiet and dark and I’m alone and not trying to be or feel anything I assume I’m supposed to be. It’s the most prevalent when I’m not busy trying to find it. Figures.

I’ve always had a hard time that this wrenching, captivating, thundering intensity exists only to me at 3 a.m which is why I’ve always perked up when people mention that force “that keeps them up at night” in cheesy scripts and wondered if it’s pieces of the same force that makes rejected lovers “sob themselves to sleep” at night. I wonder how close I can pull this force into the daylight without seeming like a brainless eccentric and I wonder how I can slow my mind down enough to have access to it when I have the freedom to act on it. I wonder why people try so hard to sweep it under the rug. I wonder why nobody talks about it except in cliche films. I wonder if everyone else has learned how to deal with this and, only as my mind is starting to stumble back into functionality am I able to focus on it again. (And then, of course, I wonder why I always assume that everyone around me has everything figured out years before I do.)

I wonder if I should just shut the hell up for once, quit trying to overanalyze the shit out of something mystical, and just enjoy it on a level without language. I’m thinking that’s the one.