In life there is a disconnect, a gap between the world that is and the world that we see. What exists in true form, wholly independent of observation or thought, counts for nothing. The world is not built by God or evolution. It is built by us and what matters and what is truly relevant is this thing that we create: our world. However, it is not really our world as if we all collectively shared in it’s design and its intentions. It is my world and your world. It is these worlds that we create, the ones we invent with our own thoughts, perceptions, and experiences, the one’s which only I and you and her truly know, that are up front and center. These things, these conceptions, these are the world and not the swirling stuff out there. The people, the buildings, the history books, the spaceships, the relationships, these are the things that are the building blocks for my world.

In life we are all creators of galaxies. We build the planets the move about our world; we control their revolutions in our solar system; we decide their place in our scheme of existence and all that moves around us. No world is the same, no mental creation insignificant. That is the beauty and power of the individual. It is the innate process of creating the world around us as it is taking place, scooping up as much as we want from the earth of reality and sprinkling on the amount we deem right from the dust of fantasy, that defines us as one person.

My world is much like this, an assortment of what I deem fit, a balance of reality and fiction, a collection of fugues with no repetition. It belongs to me. Up in the heavens I place high everything I deem noble and worthy and on the surface, all that blossoms and shines with dull familiarity, and bellow are sins and other such treacherous things. I have shielded my world with routine, tradition, and antiquity. The bedrock I made out of faith, reason, and Socrates and the law of the land is the yet to be written charter of my morals.
I made the wind sing classical music and Fleet Foxes and Andrew bird and other things that reminds me of lore, legend, and beauty. In my world anxiety is forbidden and every week or so one must stop and listen to the overture that sings at the break of the sunrise or sunset, a remnant, sacred chorus left over from the dawn of creation.

I think my world is quite good. It is happy and orderly with every thing in its place. I’ve worked on it hard and improve it with every mistake and I am quite content to lose myself within it’s unseen walls. Yet so absorbed can I become in my world that I forget what’s around it, what exists out there in reality, and then I sometimes ask myself if I have traded this life we all live in for a wishful fantasy. It is moments like these when I feel myself looking out over the ocean with a sunken heart and asking myself where I really am if anywhere at all. I was sitting over the water thinking “God, why my world and not hers.”

Yes, my world was not hers. My world’s was the stuff of novels and myth. Don Quixote was my errant night, Mozart my sage, Hesse my tutor, Candide my faithful companion, God as my senate and the devil as my house of representatives. My world was populated by Charles Dickinson characters, complete with running character narrations, all fighting villains and it was us against the rich. And then some days we would all be Fitzgerald’s sketches with the world gone mad while the less fortunate burned under Joseph Conrad’s pen. Claude Monet colored my cities while David Friedrich did the landscapes and all the while Frank Sinatra quietly danced in the background with some dame in glossy, smacking red lipstick. That was the world as I saw it or at least as I liked to think I saw it. What could beat it? What world was more beautiful, more full of intrigue, heroism, color, mood, and passion? My kingdom sat smugly superior, high above all else on some towering precipice in the rarified air of finer things, safe from material worries and resistant to life’s tedious storms. But it is only in that moment when world’s collide, when the sharp, penetrating reality of another’s world breaks through the fortified walls of your own, that radically new perception is gained. From that moment your world can never be the same again. And so it was with mine.

We really did come from two different worlds. Her world was more then foreign and alien to me. It was more then different. It was quite near an antecedent to my own. Her world was harsh and real, sharp and pungent. It was a vast, complex sea of emotions, a swirling thunderhead of vibrant commotion. Her world was reality. There was pain and hardship and suffering. In her world parents weren’t always so nice and people used you for what they could and left. Her world was a skeleton, no, more like a bursting shell. And in it rested all humanity, colliding like atoms and reshaping the world with fire and light. There was anger and rage, sex and lust, jealousy and betrayal. Her world bounced with throbbing music, forbidden things, powerful things, and war. People fought people, and struggled and emotions boiled over and emptied out till just when nothing could be left new feeling welled up. This was life, strong with a sense of urgency, shaken by each birth, grounded and wrestled with in the dirt, and it contained all you could see.

She and her world were intoxicating, potent, vibrant, hell bent. She was a sharp scent in my nostrils and warm honey on my lips. Her world was the world or the world as it could be and not as it was but as it shouldn’t and yet should. Her world was morally repugnant and captivatingly desirable. It wasn’t just that everything was forbidden and nothing couldn’t be taken. It was that everything was real. It was awful. It was emotional. Messy. It was damaging, scaring, powerful, sensual.

And that brought me back to it all while my heroes of old, my epic romances, vengeful victories, solitary monks, and vagabond advisors sat sulking on the bench. Not even Quixote, nor Lancelot, nor Don Juan himself would urge me to go after her and you could see the fear on their faces and the unrest in their shifty eyes. Wasn’t my world better, my goals loftier, my dreams sweeter, my days hot and my nights cool? I was happier and she was not. She suffered while I triumphed. And though my spirit sunk with the weight of the thickening air filling up with foreboding, my heart beat violently. For what was this esoteric world, this mirage, to the tumultuously wild wilderness that was real life? I saw them both, scraped together by the same foundation and stacked high upon the same frame work. Yet there they were. parted by an ocean sized gulf and everyone just ended up longing for each other. No one could be complete. Here I stood for some time staring down with dread and desire. And as a waited, slowly, my lush moon started to dim and stars extinguished themselves and the world closed in.
But after a silent, bitter winter it occurred to me meaning, among all this. The key is leaping down or up from the one and grabbing the other. It is in dragging the two, kicking and screaming, and bringing them together. In this way she and I were side by side on the same path, converging on each other from opposite directions and blindly stumbling forward without hesitations. Then I took her hand at that moment and she shut her eyes tight. I tied a rope around my waist and tethered it to the temple at that center of the world which was mine, where God, goodness, art, and all the other grand, noble things rest. And then I leapt, plunging down, down into the night, down into insanity and where I land remains to be seen. Pray the rope doesn’t brake.