the point is to just be

I’m in love with myself on the second day of spring walking across the street holding oat milk in one hand. I live here, I thought. This street is like the foyer of my house. New York is like my palace playground. I take the elevator up. Someone blasts Etta James from their car and “at laaaaaast” wafts into my open window. I am vibrating inside my studio. I am rested, I am feeling caffeine’s dopamine tingle all over my temples, my intestines are moving as they do when I finally relax.

Everything, from my toes to my kidney to the tip of my earlobe to the corner of my eye to the inside of my amygdala — is the same. I am one big vessel, connected seamlessly. The organ of my whole being flattens, its kinks and knots uncoil, and lets out a flattening breath.

It’s like God is begging you to let go — the way everything is about sleep. She wants you to rest, she wants you to let go of all this reality and descend into imaginary sedation. And not just once in a while, but every single day, for a third of it. A third of your life — in my case likely more — spent in unconscious un-reality. “The point is to just be,” people have said to me several times. It appears God agrees, and tells us repeatedly: none of this really matters. Not one single ounce of it. And how freeing is this knowledge, Lord, the most freeing knowledge possible. That the point is to be here — just be here! Many disagree, of course, and I pity them.