This time, I experienced disco-waves: first blue and green outlines of a more contemporary hip-hop club against black, then purple figures dressed in afros and bell-bottoms dancing to disco. I started dancing too, and had visions of dancing at a gay club with drag queens. As I was dancing I started making sounds with my mouth - playing with the sounds I could make, being very silly with it. L sounds, vowel sounds, hard and soft sounds. Opening my mouth more or less and moving around my tongue. I even laughed in a bunch of different ways.
I played with the sounds of different words - saying "No" and then "Yes" in different ways. I also sang. "Yesish" singing was high and bright and happy, while "Noish" singing made me so sad I wanted to cry. I tried belting out opera-level tones with "Oh" but my voice broke and I laughed.
At one point I sat up and launched into a very enthusiastic discussion with an imaginary person (I suppose you could say an alien, since they didn't have a face like a human even though they were human shaped - feminine, even, in their hair and dress) talking absolute gibberish. But I was speaking confidently and making gestures. We were catching up at brunch, on an outdoor patio on a sunny day/ I would call the cadence I was using "American," a little Valley Girlish - though I wasn't speaking English. Mostly. Some English words and phrases slipped through - "Yes," "Oh my God," and "What?"
When I realized I didn't understand what I was saying, I got frustrated and started trying to speak English but it didn't work. I was fighting with myself a bit, wanting to speak my own made-up language but then I grabbed my mouth and forced it to make English words so people could understand me and I could understand myself. But I didn't want to so I smacked myself and I cried. I felt like a child who had been having fun making silly sounds and a grownup forced me to speak "proper". The English won out - I stopped speaking gibberish for a while.
I lay down for a while contemplating what just happened. The gibberish was fun but also just sounds. It didn't mean anything. And the scenario in which I used it was one where you don't tend to mean what you say (just a casual conversation with a stranger who you pretend is a good friend but you're not sharing anything important). Except some words, some words stayed in English. Yes. No. Oh my God.
I got stuck on the word "God." I realized how important this word is, how it really encapsulates everything that we do not understand. How it is separate from religion. Religion is fake. I still believed that. I thought about my friend J and her religiousness and how it is fake and how religion is used to separate people. I cried about that. I thought some more and realized I believed in God, and I wanted to get people to believe in God the way I believed in God. I rejected the notion immediately, sitting up after lying down - "No way, I'm not gonna be a cult leader!" - and I picked up a card I had left by the bed and turned it over, refusing to follow the instructions. (The instructions were to let the experience happen) I sat up and thought further about the meaning of God, outside of religion. God is the word we use in English to describe the otherwise indescribable, the awesome power of the world and of life. It is not a word for religion only. God is not a man or a woman. God is no human. God is everything.
I contemplated language, saying different words to see how they felt. I finally understood the Czech word for God, "Buh." I had some fun saying it - it kind of sounded like "boof" or "boo" depending on how you said it. I thought about how you really needed to get a feel for a language to really want to speak it. My fundamental connection to English developed only because it was the first language I learned to speak, which attached words to meanings and feelings. This is what makes the first language different -- the specific sounds and vocabulary get attached to the emotions, experiences and thoughts that before you learn it have no words.
Words such as "What" and "How" also felt charged with meaning. I tried the word "pregnant," and though I had ecstatically declared "I'm pregnant" during the Godfuck I felt nothing now. My body felt uncomfortable, digestion at work, my need to pee growing. I was becoming more aware of my body. How uncomfortable it can feel sometimes. From some point in the afternoon I started having digestive problems and at various points I became aware of this discomfort. I sang the "rock a bye baby" lullaby but of course there was no baby. I was rocking my bladder instead.
I also considered the words "religious," "spiritual," and "mystical." None seemed fit to describe what I was experiencing. I landed on the word "actual." That seemed to fit. I said the word in German, which means "current." Later, at night when I was going to bed, I thought the word "current" also works, in both senses of the word in English: being about what's happening now and the idea of flow.
It might have been this time, too, that I really felt a strong wave of loneliness and sadness that I will never experience so many things, never know so many things -- flashes of my dad and nonexistent high-school friends went through my mind. I wept. I wept so much. I let myself feel like no one cares about me, and cried about that belief even though I knew it wasn't true. And I told myself, "I know it isn't true, but I feel it anyway" as I cried. I cried a lot on that bed. This might have happened around the time I turned into the lonely tree.
Following the thread of religion, I thought of Trump and how he and his supporters are going to further harm people. I scoffed at American culture which helped create this strand of selfishness, that no one matters before yourself, and then thought, no, it's not necessarily American. It is just the name that I've given it. I started thinking about all the things that I did not choose -- my name, who my parents were, where I was born and grew up -- and contemplated how so much of who I am is beyond my control. I wondered about how I got to this place, existentially speaking, and couldn't backtrack. I was here now and that was that. I couldn't trace back to the "cause" because I would inevitably go a different way. There was no going back.