448. Imaginary Bliss

The only time he feels completely comfortable is when he’s lost in his own imagination. The real world is never comfortable. It has endless demands that require him to be or do things that he does not want to be or do.

Even when he’s relaxing at home, watching videos in bed, he isn’t truly comfortable. Even here, his body demands something, some state that is better than its present state. But this demand is impossible to satisfy because he doesn’t know what the required state is.

When he reads he sometimes feels comfortable. But this is only because he slips silently from the text into his imagination. The activity of reading becomes secondary to the world of the book that lives in his head, and this means his body becomes irrelevant. But this blissful state is only temporary. Eventually he remembers his body or something real demands his attention. From the comfort of the imaginary world, he is dragged back into the real one, the one of perpetual discomfort.

The problem, he thinks, is that he simply cannot stop himself from paying attention. He sees everything, hears everything, feels everything. He wishes he could numb his body so that it wasn’t so heavily influenced by everything happening to him and around him.

Even when he’s alone there is still the sound of the neighbours upstairs, the hum of cars passing by, the birds singing, squawking, chirping. Even his body is not silent, with the noise of his stomach digesting, his joints cracking, the air passing through his nostrils, in and out, over and over again. Sometimes he can even hear his own heart beating, slowly at first, and then slightly faster after he locates it.

In his imagination, he is safe from all of this. Here, he is only an abstraction like everything else. Here, there are no perceptions or feelings to contend with, only the perfect form of each and every thing, placed exactly where he needs it to be. Here, his only experience is bliss, for he never wastes his energy imagining anything less than what is most joyful. And how can reality ever compete with that?