When I was four, I often dreamed about death. In it, I would witness someone close to me getting shot, and I would wake up crying and begging my dad to not leave me.
On a daily basis, I would feel a sense of dread when the night came upon us, as if the end was near. When we went to the movies, I felt deeply every word of “the beginning of the end”. My surroundings would darken, the screen would brighten, and the sounds would boom, but I knew that two hours later we would walk out into the darkness of the night.
I was hyper aware of the oddity of my existence and how the world that I knew would cease to exist the moment I died. I was aware of all of this before I knew how to put it into words. I didn’t understand why I existed in this world, in this moment in time, in this body, in this state of being.
I guess I just wasn’t used to being alive yet.
As I’ve grown older, I’ve never fully shrugged away the hyper awareness of my existence. It becomes more pronounced when I find myself misplaced in a social setting. Why am I here? Why am I alive, in this body, in this moment in time? Yet at this age my mind is calmer, as if tamed by the experiences of aging.
I think back to when I was younger and I remember a mind that lived in fantasy land. Worlds I created with my imagination, because the real world was still foreign to me. My mind entered dimensions that are now inaccessible to me. I did not know I was stepping into them when I did, but that was the magic of being four and not knowing a whole lot about the world.
The older I get, the more defined by my past I become. I fear that this will only exacerbate as time goes on, leading my preconceived fears to determine my next step. So I must forget. With conscious effort, I must forget all that is confining me to who I believe I am, so I can be free to become who I want.
Perhaps my desire to live a slow nomadic life is a wish to regain my chance to live unfettered by my past. The constant need to reinvent myself, as if my life depended on it, is a struggle to regain the innocent self I once was. I do not know what resolutionI intend to achieve with this pursuit, only that my identity insofar as I know, depends on it.