Somehow one screen wasn’t enough. You could never take it all in. The volume of pleasure, the entertainment was more than we could consume but somehow never enough. It rushed in through the windows like a car gone off a bridge, sinking in the river. And yet we drank and drank and drank because we still felt empty inside. We felt this ever present sense of loss deep in the heart of us and all we could do to soothe it was to distract ourselves, to look away. The screens were like a mirror we could imagine ourselves in, like a coloring book where the images are all perfect and all we had to do was give over everything we had to be someone new. We needed to go on a “wilderness intervention” to save ourselves by remembering ourselves, who we were before. We went away, to the woods, and slept on the ground. We had to sleep on the ground to remember what our bodies felt like pressed against a hard surface, the exacting equilibrium of the real world. We carved wooden spoons and bathed in cold water streams. When we came out it was like a rebirth and we drifted through small towns on the outskirts of the wilderness, places with names you could never remember that appear on the edges of maps, where the roads trail off into canyons and the faces of the townspeople are real and not real at the same time. We drifted through these towns together again as a family, trying to find ourselves in the old pattern of our ways. Who we were before we got so distracted by all this. All this entertainment and allure, all this feeling we had to be somewhere else. When all we could do was be here again. And remember what it felt like to love and be loved, what our bodies always knew.

Categories: identity, prose, writing

Tags: creative nonfiction, existentialism, White Noise