How To: Leave Your Body 

Have you ever

met a feeling inside of you that extends through your inner goo, past your skin, under and over your hair? A feeling that stands before you that delves and dips inside itself. Drawing out thick colours of paste, and butters itself between the air and its surface that surrounds you and your air? A feeling spread all around me that will follow when I spin and spin and spin. I can describe the feeling as being like pins and needles, prickling invisible pins around your heart and twinkling in an even bigger shape, a shape that isn’t even a “shape”, over your head and to the person across from you and on to everything in front of you. And everything that is in front of you has and, is the pins and the needles, too.

That’s how my insides felt when I left my body.

It was almost like my body was due to be left. Over-due. My insides wanted to jump over and out and all the way about. It was like my fibres inside had been knocking for what seemed like forever. Only I did not hear them as clearly as I could have for a long while. Tapping away, I unknowingly carried on. Because sometimes you have to go backwards before you leap forward. I guess it could not have happened any sooner than when it did. The particles do what they do when they particle. They happen when they happen. Because everything is just happening, and we decide whether we want to be aware of the happenings or not. We can decide if we would like to make these happenings become something or fall to nothing. We make a mirror happen. And the reflection it projects back. That is a happening. And that happening can be something or nothing to you. If you make it. Like butter.

And that is what it felt like when I left my body,

Like mirrors disappeared. The feeling felt like if I were to wander past a mirror I would see my insides looking back at me. Not a skinless me. Not my squishy organs or my veins blobbing around. I would be invisible. I would be a part of all of the particles that make up the big particles, and the big particles that make up all of the things we think we are. And I would be a part of the wave where all of these particles live together. Buzzing.

Because the feeling that I was feeling when I left my body was invisible, but it was buzzing. Undefinable. Like when you don’t know but you feel it. Because I wasn’t seeing or knowing or touching. I was feeling. So I’ve never felt the need to describe it and stick it beside a word that it doesn’t need.

Because words didn’t exist there and that’s how it felt when I left my body.

If you leave your body you can do many things. Like forget that your teeth are crooked. And if you leave your body why would you want to stay in the same place? The place that is inside of yourself. And when you are inside of yourself everything around you apparently has many to do’s, to do with your face, your face begins to bore itself to death. Your heart starts to feel sure that it wants more. Because there’s more outside. Bigger fields to gambol in. Fields where mirrors are imaginary and so are all of the things they shine back. Fingers or toes or crooked teeth. Fields where everything is imaginary like how you think you look while you’re walking down the street or that feeling of embarrassment that’s completely irrational. Because it’s imaginary. Imaginary like a hairbrush if you’d like to think so. Because sometimes we forget to brush our hair for ourselves. Sometimes we brush our hair because it helps people imagine a likely perception of us. Because people love to distinguish things and make them digestible. Something unfathomable cannot be real to the fathomablers.

So how did I find myself leaving my body?

I wore black. Because not too many of my thoughts went into that. My fingernails were abandoned and left with what they were given last. And what they were given soon became rubble. My nail polish corner became cold. I forgot where my makeup lived. I asked myself “who was I trying to look pretty for?”. Because “pretty” is a lot of effort to go to when you don’t even know who you’re feeling pretty on the outside for. I stopped trying to impress my imaginary audience. I stopped wanting an imaginary applause. I read more than I thought I could even read because that is what my feelings told me to do. They told me there were other things to do rather than looking in a mirror. Because what the mirror gave me was not anywhere near enough of what I needed to see of myself. I needed to go to the place of imaginary. My place of imaginary. The place I thought I had lost when I was busy doing other things that I thought fed me. I was alone. Occasionally lonely. Though no one can ever know your insides as much as you can get to know them. So that is why I left my body.