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 created by those two cushioned black circles. 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, the endings already written.
But now I was disconnected from my intentional disconnection. Now I lived again in my own mind. Back to my story - one to be lived for an unknown length and with an indeterminate ending.
Perhaps more frightening, to where my decisions had a stake in the unwritten future. 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. Such certainty is nowhere to be found in the world with the fountain burbling in the past-midnight dark.
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 the threads of could-have-been. To the multiverse of me. Bittersweet, in the best of perspectives, and soul-crushing in the lower moments.
That night, sitting in a bedroom in my old hometown, I took flight from myself. The disconnection managed to bring me full circle, through a collage of past wants, and back into the deep, quiet morning of possibility.
