Running from the Zombies

For a while, I’ve been wondering

Just what would happen if I just took off?

Without explaining, planning, packing or making reservations…

And I would fly on the wings of drunken dreams

Full of half-remembered DIYs on how to survive

The zombie apocalypse.

But I’ve been a little late to start

And already I can feel the odour of rot

But they say in the kingdom of the Moon

One can be healed.

So, I had this dream last night where the enemy was attacking using a zombie front and there were rather detailed, stepwise directions on dealing with it, but of course I don’t remember any of it, so don't look to me for help when it happens. But I think the reason why zombies go for brains is because at some deep level that they can’t access, they must be raging because they can’t have thoughts of their own. To be not able to think or feel, to be left with the empty husk of yourself with absolutely NOTHING inside, that is a terrible curse, one that we all fear. Isn’t that why we try to fill our heads with love and hate, art and anger and greed and hope and judgments about right and wrong- in order to not have to deal with the pain of being just left with ourselves?

I was arranging my bookshelves last week (again), and found a whole host of my old diaries- daily journals from ten to fifteen years ago. And as I turned the pages to take a look back at the girl who recorded her thoughts there, I couldn’t help but be surprised at how nearly *alien* she sounded. Young me had filled pages praying for victory in a cricket match that she wasn’t playing, ranted about voting systems on reality shows on behalf of contestants that she didn’t know- it was not so much the type of thoughts that was strange, but the degree. There was so much intensity in those pages- as if her life depended on those events. The thing is, it did. It does. I have often wondered in the past why fans of Bollywood actors get so violent in YouTube comment sections, and I now think it is because their lives depend on it. It is why someone paints the Monalisa or someone composes the Moonlight Sonata and why someone stacks crayons to create marvelous pixilated portraits and why I ramble here week after week here in this wilderness of a blog, and it is why people obsess and judge and hate and kill. It is why we worship our heroes, and burn their effigies when they fail us. Because it distracts us from the fear of being zombies, it keeps us from screaming inside our heads. It so happens, though, that some ways of filling up the void is better than the others, and the joy and beauty of life lies there.

And I don’t know what went inside Ed Sheeran’s head when he wrote Lego House, but I read it as a song about surviving the emptiness by filling up the void. We are all building castles out of Lego pieces in order to escape being devoured by zombies.

(Photograph from Pinterest: Courtesy Brie Zeltner, no commercial use intended)

And before I go, here’s a thought for the day:

Come to the edge, he said. They said, "We are afraid." Come to the edge, He said. They came. He pushed them. And they flew!- Guillaume Apollinaire.

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