Alive

The small drone of an electrode moving along the copper wires embedded against the walls of your bedroom tosses you to an abrupt awakened state at 2 in the morning. Suddenly, it hits you that you can be dead. The humdrum sound ensnarls your head, and your eyes remain close. But as you maintain the steady, unmoved weight of your body against the pressing drowsiness, the mellifluous sound grows into the sound of a metal scuffing against the concrete walls. It feels like standing along the tunnel with thousands of careening cars passing you by and fiercely crashing on one another in a sight distance.

You are alive. You open your eyes to peels of orange lights coming from the street lamp post just outside your room’s window. There’s a drunken man singing dramatically at some empty blocks not far away, perhaps wobbling along with an empty bottle on his way home. An ambulance wails its siren on the next street and it says that somebody is dying at the moment. You hear everything in deadpan: stray dogs sniffing on garbage cans, mosquitoes playfully buzzing over your skin, a neighbor stifling a cough. This is another morning, too early in fact, for one mad mental experience, to hear and find nothing but endless conundrums on uneventful but existential things.