The Distance

A brilliant blue made room for Roquentin's Nausea in the dimly lit pub, cool sand shifting about my feet. An eerie ocean wind pitched a perfect withdrawal into his world, but the foreigners held me back. A French party of no less than eight had settled merely a yard or two above my head, the elderly and infants residing near the towels while two older children and their parents did their best to emulate a game of American football on the capacious shoal beneath me.

I couldn't focus. My eyes were transfixed on the off-white pages, but the rest of my head was stuck to the beach, tied down by immaculate French and severed English.

--

I can't write anymore. What I want to describe has struck without notice. The only way to overcome it is to embrace it - entwine it with my words - watch my fingers exhaust themselves. My vision keeps going blurry. I can control it, but I don't.

...that's it! Embrace it! In the words of Roquentin himself, "What is there to fear in such a regular world? I think I am cured."

--

I gave up. There was no hope in breaching the reality mes amis had delivered. I lowered my book and arched my neck forward to loll and mind the game. That's when it returned. I was no stranger to it, I knew it well, in fact, but it had never felt so real, so palpable, so intrinsic to the human mode of perception. I suddenly had no presence, no substance; I was a simple vantage point. It seems existence really does precede essence.

What was I seeing? It felt like The Sims - a quirky, four person family vacationing at the beach. I managed to follow the dialogue only by recognizing certain words and phrases I had experienced in their appropriate contexts countless times before (this was the French!). The Sims cast and caught the ball so gawkily, just as they always do. A touchdown was followed by a victory dance so outrageous; if I wasn't sure it was a video game, I never would have believed it. The pixels were perturbing - I couldn't see them, but I knew they were there! I was an inherent panorama of a seamless dreamworld. I had no control, no power, no authority. I was there to watch.

This "distance" haunts me almost daily. I can't elude it. Though routinely ephemeral, it takes its toll. It usually comes when I'm alone, devoid of anything amiable, any camaraderie. It's not as if I'm going mad, but fading away, dispersing through the rifts of physical space. I can't feel during the spell, and that's what hurts the most - I don't know if it's good or bad.