Illusion of Reality – Poem

By Rei Tanotsuka, 29 June 2019

Prelude:

What is life? This is the philosophical conundrum many have sought to understand…..

There will come a time in most people’s sojourn in this evanescent phenomenon we quaintly mark with 4 letters, where they will think is repetition, life?

I see myself everyday……I brush my teeth, eat food, joke with my silly husband, text, read, work, go to the gym……and then, I do it all again the next day. Just like my mother does in her life and my grandmother and her mother did in theirs.

This contiguous line of ephemerality, will eventuate in the making of history, is this what we contribute to our world? Are we only characters to allow the ultimate reality to be penned? In which case, how real are we? How real will we one day be?

I can’t help but wonder, every time I read a historical period, if the people then, could conjecture that one day they would be written up as characters which bear little resemblance to themselves and more like a caricature of something antiquated, obsolete and removed from the author.

This is why I wrote Illusion of Reality……despite everything I experience which gives me meaning, I can’t help but acknowledge that one day this will no longer be real……..but that’s ok. If this illusion so given to me, is what will enable me to feel elation, disappointment, love, fear, anger and every nuance, then it is worth it.

The best dreams happen when you realise you are dreaming.

Illusion of Reality

So I am told, none of this real, from my first cry when I entered this world to every modicum of joy I have ever known, it was never there, for it never really happened.

From the first day of school which bolted me to fear’s side, to the last day of academia, a certificate in my hand, echoed by shouts of congratulations ……….. those feelings were also fleeting and hence, do not belong.

All the tears I have ever rained, every false smile rendered for the world to conceal any pain, none of that would matter because they do not cast a permanent shadow against the eternal day.

Every feeling of melancholy and defeat, the elation of all the success in one life time achieved, would be bound between a false reality and that which simply does not exist.

Have you ever woken up to this dream and understood with clarity, how it is you who decides the meaning?

Or have you slept and then reached the awakened state that you were in fact, never dreaming?

The illusion of reality which is my life I’m told, only serves to keep me in a life of carnal bondage.

But….trapped as I am in this 5 sense reality and knowing that who you now see, is in fact, not really me……I can not help but become attached to my false identity.

A life time ago, with music rampaging my eardrums, an image of myself lost in a song………. a vision in a cemetery plot draws me near.

Each step towards the plot is met with both resistance and gravitation…..until I finally reach clear view.

There lies an entire family, the youngest, a girl of 6.

If life has ever decided to bestow a moment upon me to question my existence, then this would probably be it.

Why?……Why would an entire family be taken at once? Even the innocent is not spared. A family, just like mine and yours, their story which should be painted with triumph and tribulation, all, not spared.

I promised myself to never ever find the reason, for the fault in the end is not life itself, but it would be through my interpretation.

I don’t ever want to be left knowing that there was no reason for this family’s ending…..for that conclusion, would in kind, mean that I too, have no reason for being.

Even now, after all these years, I’m still running…..running away from what is most frightening……but motion towards one thing because of an aversion to another is in itself, a fruitless journey……..for fear is still the primary enemy.

I have spent, almost as long, bathing in light arising from this shroud of darkness that I am now ready to take this luminescence straight into the abyss.

To become whole again with the twin of faux separation and accept that what causes the greatest sorrow will also give rise to the greatest exaltation. I am now able to look at my infinitesimal life through eyes of a different being………still me, but with a different realisation.

I do matter. This is real.

The happiness and sorrow, given and received, despite being inconsequential in the grand scheme of time, is there for only me…..at this point…..of one life…..

So, thank you. Thank you everything and everyone for granting me the grandest illusion I will ever witness.

My Life.