Article: Questions by M Teresa Clayton

Questions

Article by M Teresa Clayton

I ask myself a lot of questions these days, about life and death, and everything in-between. I want to know where it all begins, where I’ve traveled, why do I have to wait for things I’ve never seen. I want to know how it all ends, what lies beyond that horizon and in the end, is everyone’s experience with death the same? I want to know before I die, will I remember everywhere I’ve been, will I recall all the happiness and forget all the pain, will there come a moment when I will forget your name?

It cannot be the same for you and for me, you can’t possibly understand me any more than I understand you if you know what I mean. Do you think you and I possess any real choices? Are we just pawns in someone else’s game? I do hope this is all a creation of my mind’s choices, what I’ve become should be credited to my own imagination. Tell me, do you ever hear their voices calling the next play, even though we are still in the darkness of our yesterday?

Questions are asked by the mind that seeks to comprehend its own existence within all the rubble and trash, the obscured treasures that it might find out there where light and sounds bend within something we call experience. Do you suppose we already know the answers and simply avoid the truth; do we propose options that fit our needs before we go and search again for lessons we should have learned in our youth?

Answers. There are many answers to one query and yet we keep asking the question, discarding every answer we get until we become so weary that we find ourselves settling for nothing, some deserted bastion. Here we will recover and fight the good fight to protect our mind from whatever it uncovers in the dark of night - in the darkness, so many unanswered questions to find buried ‘neath the bramble and brush, the moon watches from the blackness of the sky as we ramble on in a rush to escape what is real. That is not the answer, and again we ask “why?” we cannot see, cannot feel.

I will keep asking and I hope you will walk with me for a while. Perhaps you are searching for something. We can talk about it and count off each mile as if it were another notch in the rope that invites us to ascend... just grab hold and using hands and feet, reach upward towards hope and that which unites us with the end.

Friend, do you understand this insanity that has held me for so long in its grip? It seems to be another strand of destructive vanity that just might be the very thing that causes me to slip. Down I will fall, I will fall down to the ground and there I may realize this wasn’t the question I wanted to ask, after all, the answer to all my questions were found and I know now that this is where a man lies down, no longer seeking answers. Answers mean nothing to the man who finally surrenders and dies.

Do you remember? It was all lies, nothing but lies that buzz around your head like flies, making you feel crazier and more alive than dead. Did you ever understand at all? What made you answer the call or did you tag along because you were alone and suffering from fright?

Did the darkness enter in and cause you to choke on your own bile? There really was no appeal to this madness that would pick you up, dust you off and suggest you try to keep up, measure your steps and when you have walked until your feet bled you could beg to be free from this quest. You did your best. I did my best. Doesn’t seem as if we got much rest but I think it is time for you to take your leave from me. Lie down. Rest, yes - rest and avoid the brink of your decline. Remember the questions you receive from me - believe in what you cannot see - do not seek to be free.

Free just means you have no walls to hide behind. Free just means you have no thoughts to obscure your memories. Free just means you leave the security of your own mind and remember the impure irregularities that will haunt you as long as your ears can hear useless summaries, you’ve lost the feeling in your extremities, you can’t remember any of the melodies, you cannot smell the recipes that choke you as you wipe the tears from your eyes searching for the horizon that will only show you your disparities. There will be nothing you can do about these... these humorless parodies.

Answers matter not when, in the end, questions were all we got. Questions always remain and it is the question that drives a man insane.