Edge of Reality

Today is one of those days where I don’t know where I am.

I drove to work and as the sun came up to my right, the clouds started to glow red and pink and purple, texturized with airplane contrails. I stared at the colours and thought, we were meant to be free, we were meant to fly. But I was surrounded by hundreds of others like me, trapped in small metal boxes, on our way to even bigger boxes of glass and wood and steel.

I drove by a plain sign that said Toronto Warehouse Outlet and grew confused for a moment. I’m in Toronto? Yes, I’m in Toronto. This is not New York or Vancouver or London or Reykjavik. Something so familiar to me was, for a second, wholly unfamiliar. Where is my mind going? What other lands has it been travelling to?

I thought, I need more coffee. I took a big swig from my travel mug.

I’m now old enough that I can look back at the breadth of my life and see an almost infinite amount of decisions and choices that were made. I see an infinite number of parallel universes, all the roads not travelled. Then I spend my spare time wandering other roads I can never travel, the ones that involve spaceships and ancient magic and flying like a bird. At night, my mind fuses the two together. I’m living in Accra as a writer and a part time real-estate agent, when suddenly espers emerge from the ground and wage war on humankind.

I’ve been obsessed with the end of the world lately. It started in such a silly way. I was watching an LP for Final Fantasy XIII-2 months ago and I found myself weirdly & excitedly haunted when Serah visited Noel’s world, its grey dunes and roving monsters and dying sun. Imagine being the last person alive. Imagine living on the dead husk of a planet with only shadows and memories to keep you company.

There is a hairline fracture that separates us from the fantastical. Those early morning hours, when my mind hasn’t quite locked onto reality, I peer through a cloudy film and squint at the layers of the world. We are somebody else’s storybook. The storybook is one stroke away from coming to life. Who am I? Where is my mind going?