Harmony Of Dissonance

I sleep the sleep of ignorance, the sleep of the dead. Dreaming that my life is orderly and neat, controlled and fulfilled. Yet at times there are glimpses, moments of wakefulness in which I am exposed to the terrible, beautiful interwoven reality of our existence. I see the rest of the world slumbering along, blissfully unaware of the harsh truth that surrounds humanity at all times. I can see clearly the lies that I tell myself, the walls that I build around my heart, the blinders I hold over my eyes. I am alone and the solitude leaves me hollow, but I recognize that this loneliness is preferable to the numb illusion of the dream. Deep inside I can feel it calling to me, the dreamscape of self deception, dragging me back to the comfortable death from which I awoke.

I see now that the walls that once filled me with comfort were, in reality, smothering the breath from my body. Exposed before me lies the unfathomable bedlam that was masked by my orderly world of illusion and the beauty of its intricate chaos steals the strength from my soul. It is tempting, the sirens call of the abyss. To return to a world of black and white, of good and of evil seems preferable. The human mind has been adapted to organize and compartmentalize, and so I find myself drawn back by the sterile order of an existence in which reality can be cut and classified, boxed and labeled. But I cannot. A bell once tolled cannot be unrung, so I too cannot lay my head down and resume my slumber. She that once rested here is gone, I am changed and the exhilaration of this recognition terrifies me.

See, they return; ah, see the tentative
Movements, and the slow feet,
The trouble in the pace and the uncertain
Wavering!

See, they return, one, and by one,
With fear, as half-awakened;
As if the snow should hesitate
And murmur in the wind,
and half turn back;
These were the "Wing'd-with-Awe,"
Inviolable.
~ Ezra Pound