Sometimes it feels like I’m looking into the eye of a hurricane. Bathed in eerie stillness while everything around me is thrashing and heaving. I realize that I’m just “another Indra,” a speck in the timeline of history. Life existed before me and it will continue to exist long after my bones crumble into dust. And I wonder, how can we know that we’re alive? When everything is moving so quickly and violently around us that we can’t even hear our own hearts beating? And then out of nowhere, something hits me. I feel warm blood caressing my cheek and I look at my feet on the ground and suddenly feel the full force of gravity. I can’t concentrate on anything because of the aching in my jaw and this nagging awareness that I’m trapped by the laws of the universe. I want nothing more than to go back. float through the clouds, believe that anything is possible, that love is real, the universe is made up of dualities, and God exists and molds human beings out of cookie cutters. I wake up one morning and realize that I have two choices: lie down in agony, refusing to cope with the weight of the earth’s pull, or let myself bleed out– wash over the bruises on my neck and the scars on my wrists, clean out the poison he spat into my veins, and the salt from my eye lids. Give it a name, a body, a spirit, breath into its mouth and watch its chest inflate and its eyes pop out. Let the thick black goo dance over my finger tips, glaze my palms and finger nails, drip like candle wax onto the porcelain tree bark [like my thoughts, making handprints on the walls], until finally, you can no longer deny the reality of my existence.