Disconnected
Disconnected said the British voice over my headphones, the bass humming through my jaw. It was 1:12 AM.
I took the headphones off, my ears unsealing from the world those two black circles had created. The trickle of the fountain outside my window took over the engineered sound from the videos I’d been watching.
Two disconnections at once.
Disconnected is where I had been, in the world of stories carefully constructed to create big feelings. Disconnected was where I wanted to be, in that world where those stories contained resolution. Whether good or not, whether I agreed or otherwise, they were already set. I knew they would end the minute I hit play.
But now I was disconnected from my intentional disconnection. Now I lived again in my own mind. To the fear of a story to be lived with unknown length and an indeterminate ending.
Perhaps more frightening, to where my decisions had a stake in the unwritten future. They may have been large, they may not, and that was another variable in the equation.
That I had some determination in the future was frightening. That I had no control over it was equally so.
Because in video-edited, soundtrack-crafted worlds, something as small as a miscommunication can be a bump in the road, not its terminus.
Most of what I watched on that screen that night was people loving each other across time, bad decisions, and desperate insecurity. Any one of those three could and has torpedoed things that “could have been” in my past.
So maybe that night’s disconnection served to re-connect me back to those threads of lives that actually could have been. To the multiverse of me. Which can and is bittersweet under the best of perspectives – and soul-crushing in the lower moments.
That night, I took flight from myself, sitting in a bedroom in my hometown. The disconnection managed to bring me full circle, through a collage of past wants, and back into the deep, quiet morning of possibility for what is ahead.
