in the margins

i've written myself right off the page, out into the groundless air, and wave my limbs about frantically as if trying to find a way to be propelled in the nothingness. it's a foolish game, trying to recall the moment when my feet lost touch with the ground, about as futile as trying to walk out in the open air. so i'll do my best to float, to stay moving, to keep from taking that fall that many a deep thinker take, into the depths of the very substance of being, an agglomeration of every bleeding heart's blood and every flowing lung's breath and every thinking brain's tick of electric current, a viscous sea that cannot be seen or heard or felt, that cannot be traversed, that cannot be quantified or codified or broken down into constituent parts because the parts are infinite, because it is nothing more than a creation of hyper sensitivity; because it is nothing, just a very deep center of the human psyche, as space equally as small as it is large. its the center, the smallest pinpoint wormhole you can imagine, and its the entirety of the air around our heads, the 360 degrees multiplied by every degree in between. ie, something that is everything, but in reality only something to the mind-travelling wanderer who makes it into something traversible, something that starts in the margin where ink ends and life begins; and that is a very wide margin indeed when fear and focus fuse into thought. but its also the smallest margin imaginable, an eye's blink, a brain's twitch, a moment of indecision when the world keeps right on flowing, and if you miss the margin you're stuck out in the formless sea with no vessel, struggling, struggling so desperately to catch up to the turning pages before they close you out or close in and bury you, and the best you can do is to send bottled messages, sideways glances and silent genuflections in the hope that someone would recognize your plight, toss a rope and pull you in before life pulls away and docks at some foreign port where people speak in wild tongues and dress in wild colors. i get the strong impression that this has happened quite a bit in my life, that the world somehow shifted through epochs in those moments my back was turned, that in those tiny yet universally magnanimous margins i was asleep in the forested mountains of my brain, some kind of cerebral rip van winkle, and when i turned back to face the glowing fray i didn't recognize a thing and the world didn't recognize me, and the more this has occurred the less recognizable we are to one another, the world and i. i suppose it comes down to security. the security to float alone on invisible waters without a vessel for what feels like an eternity, to be alone and foreign in a familial world, and to understand that i'm not the only one that drifts in the spaces between pages, that we're all just planets in space and time waiting to be colonized, waiting to collide with other planets and be broken down into something smaller and relatable, not so grand and elusive.