All Aboard.

I’ve been thinking about you. I’ve been thinking about my affect on you. My thinking about this is a manifestation of your affect on me.

I’ve been thinking about the intersection between us. I’ve been thinking that the most amazing part of it all is the way that I force you to feel certain things, to think certain things, to fantasize about certain things. Whether you like it or not, you always have me in the back, front, or side (and always on the top) of your mind—and in that intersection resides proof of an alternate plane of reality.

In my reality plane you are absorbed into a level of existence that is an undissectible part of my existence. I am in your head, and when I say I’m in your head, it’s a metaphor that wants to say I am in your brain and in your blood. I am in the force that pushes swirling surges of electricity around inside of you, and I am in all of the space in between what’s solid about you. And because you are a creature that is full of holes, I am all around you, constantly entering you and exiting you as you walk around in what you perceive to be your present reality.

I’ve always known this, but I like that there’s science behind it. I like the way (psychologist) Dr. Darren Langdridge explains that through my wielding of power and control, as I remove from you all agency and instrumentality, as I dissolve your individuality, I am ripping you out of yourself and exposing you to a different version of yourself that cannot exist on its own. Dr. Langdridge understands that with the administration of enough pain—and I would add physical sensation, displacement of identity, and obliteration of your place in any sort of social hierarchy outside of the way I tower over you—that I am the conductor of your consciousness. Dr. Langdridge understands that I inhabit the space between our bounded selves, that with this force of power and control, I expand to hold your consciousness, your entire world, in my hands. My hands are a metaphor for the way you continue to exist on my plane of reality, because if you were ever here with me, physically or metaphysically, you are still here with me. (Let’s not get into the whole string theory thing, but I’m also talking about those of you who haven’t been here yet. I’ve already got you.)

They don’t know it, but Dr. Langdridge and (neuroanatomist) Dr. Jill Bolte believe the same thing about the way that I own your existence, the way that you’re an indivisible part of me. Dr. Bolte had a transcendental epiphany when she personally experienced the way our brains control our ability to perceive connectedness to that which is on the other (outer) side of our skin. She understands that we are all connected on a macro level, and that there is a way to experience this in the present moment, a way to disconnect the present moment from all that’s happened before and anything that will happen after. In other words, anything outside of what happens between you and me here and now is completely irrelevant.

Dr. Bolte describes a metaphysical experience that is not unlike one that painjunkie—the target of the most brutal beatings I have administered during the past few years that I’ve known him—recently described in a thank you note. His experience of transcendence and brokenness at my hands is an operationalization, a manifest definition of the intersect between you and me, akin to what Dr. Bolte describes as an ultimate surrender to a place of euphoric peace, a place “at one with all there is.”

As these voices merge, I amplify: When I torture you, there exists the potential for peace and solitude combined with the thrill of exposure in the obliteration of individuality, in the process of my ripping you from yourself and your subsequent merging with the rest of existence. There is no more you, there is only the everything, the everywhere and the everyone—in a word, the me. If you’re lucky. Do you feel lucky?

To sum up: I am your conductor. I am your conduit. Right now you are feeling what I am allowing you to feel. This very second, you are forming the thoughts that I am placing in your head. This is all that matters. This is the only thing happening in your life. This only stops when I allow it to stop.

The ride is now over; exit to the left and follow the painted line back to your temporary realities.

*photo by Natasha Gornik