Metsa #Wattys2016

Maybe She's An Alien Too

Whenever my Inner World felt like it was about to tilt too slightly to the left or right, I was able to get it back on course by repeating this following line: You are an alien. Like magic, when that phrase was repeated, everything before that was previously off balanced, would become balanced again and my Inner World would sit comfortably snug, back on its axis without even the slightest wobble.

You are an alien.

What kind of alien was I? A giant, muscular reptile in cahoots with the Illuminati, a bulimic gray stick with an obese diamond head, or a tiny green slug using a human's body as its personal navigator? It didn't matter what specifically. All that mattered was that I was an alien. And nothing could ever completely erase that thought. Because that thought in of itself became less of a thought and more of a feeling. A sort of, spiritual mantra that would cause every string of my existence to vibrate with awareness, keeping my Inner World completely intact, safe from the Outside World trying to knock it off balance.

You are an alien.

I come from the planet Glodia that resides in the supernova nebula, Tevitonne, part of the lenticular galaxy, Eeiphetis. On Glodia, both sister stars are far far far away, thus always making it night time, but due to the bright rings orbiting the planet, (Glodia's primary source of heat) the sky constantly looks like a village of supernovas slowly being tortured over a giant, invisible barbecue pit in the middle of space. Might sound crazy, but all the lifeforms on the planet are actually helium based--not carbon--and were brought to the planet-when it was just a frozen moon flipped upside down and backwards on its axis-via a comet's tail--fell off, mixed with the atmosphere creating the first lifeform--an awkward one celled organism that would eventually--after millions of years--evolve into the master species of the whole universe...the Glodians.

I was once part of this ancient, noble race.

With bright, purple skin, silver eyes, and long, beautiful turquoise hair that flowed like our helium river, the Glodnile, we were known far and wide throughout the cosmos for our beauty. We were a very spiritual race, always seen wearing crimson robes and praising our God "Glod", who created the whole universe and ordained us--the chosen ones--as its gatekeepers. Despite our spirituality, we were also very technologically advanced. We could manipulate time and space and used our technology to make our spiritual beliefs come true in reality. We could heal every type of sickness and made sure tragedies like hunger and poverty weren't an issue. We had no government, no class of ruling. One single race, country and religion. Everyone was joined together in an almost idealistic utopia.

But alas, not all of this can be a pleasant story!

As advanced as we were, we failed to see the giant asteroid that was sent through a wormhole. We had little time to prepare for it.

Many Glodians stayed on the planet with the blind faith that our species could persevere and stop the asteroid or at least survive its impact somehow. Most of the Glodians, however, chose to separate their minds from their bodies and send their consciousness out into the cosmos.

I was one of those Glodians.

While many of my brothers and sisters were content with becoming a sort of, collective consciousness without physical form, I found myself unable to live without physical feeling. I needed to feel, smell, even taste my surroundings again. I thought about going back to Glodia, but I was too scared. I had never been that brave of a Glodian, and so my consciousness staggered along the fringes of the cosmos until it came to a planet that hosted at least somewhat intelligent life. Earth.

That's when I found the physical vessel that I am now locked in--Terry. A struggling college student that just got out of a boring three-hour lecture class and is now walking down a cold street in the middle of the night, heading towards a local coffee shop to buy a drink before going back to his one-bedroom apartment where he'll immediately fall asleep and wake up the next morning to repeat the mind-numbing routine. Believe me, if I could find a way to separate my consciousness again, I would do so and leave this planet in a soulbeat, but as things stand...I'm stuck in this damn Terry, my only salvation being a narcotic concoction of caffeine and sugar.

There was truly nothing unique about the cafe; slightly better than a standard chain coffee shop, tradeoff being less options, but that really wasn't an issue as I would always just order a standard, medium mocha cappuccino. Really, the main reason that I would come here almost everyday, was that it was the closest coffee shop to my apartment and, conveniently, the closest coffee shop to my college. It sat in the middle between the two locations. Well, middle was a bit inaccurate. In reality, it was closer to my university by about 20% or so. Of course, there were coffee shops located inside my university, but I made it a habit to separate my brief moments of peace from my hectic school schedule. Of course, the two would converge into each other frequently as I would wonder, what was I exactly doing with my life? The dreaded question we ask ourselves every second of our existence. What am I doing? In another semester or so, I would have to declare my major. And what would that be? Communications, maybe? Pretty much the bottom shelf of majors. Even worse than choosing your major to be philosophy. At least a philosophy major shows you have some sort of interest in life, either in philosophy or just saying, "screw it" and throwing your career into the blender before pouring it all over the system...then mopping it up when it turns out that Janitor Jan is more needed than Philosopher Phil.

I mulled over that metaphor that pretty much deflated into meaning nothing while I sipped on my medium mocha cappuccino. Quickly, I began connecting names with other jobs and careers, but unfortunately they didn't go as well as "Janitor Jan" and "Philosopher Phil". Architect Arthur was the first semi-acceptable one as the best name I came up with prior to it, was Secretary Susan. I stopped at Construction Worker Conner. Out of gusto, the existential crisis continued to bare its fangs down upon me, and there was no word association games that I could play to help me ignore its pyramid teeth piercing through flesh and drilling into bone; I would have to wait for the poison to spread to every soft morsel of my delicate frame, numb all feeling, then I could have my peace even when slowly dying on the inside. Hmm, maybe my drink could use less mocha and more vodka I thought to myself, mind stuck between performing a one-man comedy show of depreciating humor and just good ol' fashioned deprecation!

Something did have to change...

Yes, I told myself that every day, but like 99.999999% of the pathetic human race, I never acted upon it. Why? Fear? Social conditioning? Other?

Nothing about this suits me...

So why am I doing this when I don't want it...it doesn't suit me and I don't want it.

But of course I don't want it. Nobody wants it.

How can I logically say that I'm different than any of the other shit-for-brains people that go to my university--any university? Or just life in general. I know for a fact that I'm no better than them. Maybe no worse, but definitely no better. But surely I'm different, surely there's something unique about me that no one else can possibly have. Something, which is intangible. Something, that can't be detected even with the strongest microscope. Or if it could, then no one would understand it. But what is that?

I'm an alien...

I turned my gaze from my hands wrapping around my hot mocha, and into the cafe's crowd, as if I could find a fellow alien to usher me away into our mothership. Instead, I found people who all seemed to have some sort of purpose. A lot of them were faces I recognized from my university. Not people I knew, but people whose faces I recognized. Groups of twos, threes, fives, sevens, chatting with each-other, every single one of them having a voice, something to say, something to contribute to the conversation, even if just nodding their head or laughing along to some shitty joke. All of them were connected by something. Some sort of aspect beyond just the surface stuff. Same school, same class, same taste in music, etc. Surely, there had to be something more that connected them all together. Some hidden variable that I yet couldn't see that caused all of them to resonate deeply as one.

Maybe just maybe they were going through the same struggles I was...or maybe they weren't. No, they weren't, I decided less than a second later, probably before the thought appeared. What I was going through was a struggle that isolated me from everyone and everything else. Maybe on some distant planet, parallel universe, higher dimension, it was normal, but here, it wasn't.

Maybe there was only one other person that could relate...