vertigo.

It's all spinning. Around and around and around. I see the pieces moving through the air, intricately entangled, beautiful in the dazzling light of summer. And yet, when I reach out, I grab hold of nothing. I see it there in front of me but somehow it remains faintly out of reach. I sink farther down, watching as my world passes me by.

I wonder what it would be like if it all stopped, frozen and glittering in the sun. What it would be like to sort through all the fragments, to examine them one by one. To know each part of my life intimately, in a way that brings understanding. Sometimes, I think I have finally closed my hand around something, I think I have finally stilled just the smallest part of my ever spinning galaxy. But alas, it wiggles just out of my fading grasp, just short of being contained for even the tiniest fragment of time. And I watch it quickly spin back into orbit, whizzing into the familiarity of the unreachable and unknown. 

I see it all happen around me, and I feel distant--cold even. The madness does not feel like it belongs to me, that it is even a part of my reality. It's both fascinating and frightening to observe, all those pieces flying about. It seems as though they should catch each other, collide with a brute force that is bound to blow up the entire universe. It seems that it all is headed for impending doom, for a black hole so deep and so dark that no light will ever escape it.

And then, silence. A pause. Stillness again, all those particles floating about, each in its own place, with its own journey, its own purpose. However could they all belong to me? No one person could contain all the burning stars, all the fury that these lights and litter contain. They can't be mine, they shouldn't be.

Then, with no warning, it begins to reverse, to spin around in the opposite direction, to turn everything upside down and impossibly backwards. It's all a jumble, a wild turning abyss that threatens to swallow me whole. I reach out to stop it, to flail wildly at the wind, to cover my eyes, my ears, my face, to pretend that its not really there at all. 

I find the lever. Push it back, turning turning turning with all my might. I set things forward, but not right. It's not the same. It cannot be. It will not be. 

But on and on the spinning goes. And so I recline, fade back into my existence, into my place as spectator. As removed from the calamity as I can be. I open my eyes. 

Vertigo.