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She lay there. It was day outside but her room was dark. She made sure she was real and knew she shouldn’t be in bed. She rolled over. There was a frozen image of a once-real person on her computer and she silently punched his pixelated, unreal nose. When he didn’t move, she punched him again and stared at the ceiling. She decided it was real.
The window was open and she had woken up because somewhere children were screaming. She lived on the eighth floor of a real building in a very real city. She wondered what floor the children were on and why she could hear them so well. They were still screaming. She couldn’t go back to sleep. She loved babies and children and all sort of young, unreal lemmings. She snuggled into her blanket. The individual voices of these unreal disembodied creatures slowly merged into the leviathan roar of a very real monster. It sang her real lullabies to sleep.
After a few hours, she pulled herself up and read a book. It was by an unreal person she had to meet next week; a poisonous book about real people who felt unreal and did terrible and beautiful things. She felt a bit nauseated. The book was lovely, but stories unreal and words neither and so she shut the book, lay down and fell asleep again.
Or perhaps she was awake. She was in a very real hospital car park and got into her mother’s car, which was also very real. An unreal man sat inside. She didn’t know him. He said her uncle hired him and he would take her home. Home seemed like a real place so she let him. They cruised down a familiar but unreal highway. Halfway through she panicked. She didn’t know him and he was real. Frighteningly real. What’s my uncle’s name, she asked. He looked at her and stabbed her shoulder so she flung herself out of the car and trailed blood back to her surprisingly unreal home. Her unreal father tried to be real and got mad at her. You lost your mother’s car, he yelled. He drove her back to the very real hospital to look for it while she bled her unreal life out.
Later she got up to go to the supermarket. She walked out into the very real, very dark city, passing all the unreal people to be with the realness of packaged food and fluorescent fruit. They made her happy. She stepped out of the supermarket and back into her unreal bed, which floated her real world horizontal. She decided she liked that, and closed her eyes again.
...
<untitled ii.doc>
Here is a fact: I look up the birth charts of random people on the internet. Their numbers have a mystical significance. The luminous light of the screen reveals the shiftiness in my heart. My mind fidgets like an ant across the surface of a sugar trail; I cannot stand still in my head or in my body.
Stillness has little meaning in a reality in which the head is an empty room. When I sit with myself, there is sometimes nothing but the space between me and myself, and I observe myself; a figure, an abstracted I in the unreal space of being. A single digit.
What is it to be? To be a person, to be real, solid and impenetrable. I wish I could be as solid as the people in books. To be solid like the adults who walk the waking world with the surety of newly wean babies navigating the world of being.
Sometimes I forget the solidity about me. I bang into door posts and into walls. In my head, there is nothing but a vacant space where my attention should be. I am continuously dreaming on another dimension, my thoughts filter forth from another galaxy. Being present is an entire life's work. I walk the pavement suspended on a thought.
Who am I? Am I the physicality of my body, the concreteness of my thoughts, the permeability of my spirit? What are the boundaries of me and world? What is it to be but what the world tells me I am?
I am a series of actions, an abstracted digit in the ether of webspace. I am- a me, tiny, sitting in the stillness between here and there.
<untitled i .doc> by Kathleen Ong
<untitled ii.doc>
