Breaking the Mold

Chapter 4: Born in Exile

Being born conscious is what it means to touch the veil.  Who was this child whose life I would replace?  Where would the life inside of him go?  These were questions I didn’t know how to answer.  The being that I was, I didn’t care enough to answer them because “right and wrong” and “up and down” are corporeal concepts that are limited to the creatures that are fallible because of dimension and mortality.  I experienced neither and the only thing I truly feared was that what humans know as god and what we know as, “the benevolent and unexplainable force that allows us space and consciousness as pure energy”; or that’s how one would describe it if it weren’t more of an understood concept than something definable. I feared that this might one day not exist and I would cease to be.  I enjoyed existing and I think, as humans enjoy not being dead, so too we enjoy existing.

               Death is not a concept known to one of pure energy.  How can one fathom an end when there is only a sure time of beginning with patches in between that can only be defined as a loose concept?  As I remember being born, I think of the struggle that it was just to become a living thing.  There are hundreds of ways that being born can kill you and I suppose the same can be said of the process that made me pure energy.  One wonders how many others, who tried devices to teleport themselves, simply exploded and were no more?  How many of them simply met death and that was it?

               I digress as I ask too many questions in my story but life is full of more questions than answers.  A person’s day can go, “I woke up, had some cereal and played video games until I went to bed,” as many of my childhood days would be in this life I was about to undertake, but then there are questions within something even as simple as that.  How many opportunities did I miss by not interacting with other people?  Would this young, portly version of me have been better with a walk rather than a video game?  What percentage of my enjoyment of said video game were my own enjoyment and what percentage was enjoyed simply because I was able to connect with another human being who had spent the same ill-conceived day as me, on this video game?  Then there were deeper questions that human beings never asked such as was this part of some greater plan?  If I had gone outside those long days inside, maybe I would have gotten hit by a car, suffered heat exhaustion, been hit in the head and lost the ability to conceive my own ego.

               So many questions that make up our lives and we never ask or answer them because it’s easy to worry about things known. I know I can get hungry; I know I can die; I know I have a strong sexual urge and that the girl telling me to go into the tent alone with her might lead to satiating that urge.  This is the simplicity of the average human and with this corporeal form I had taken, I realized that I had come in contact with a civilization that was far less interesting than my own… or was it?

               By mid adolescence, I had begun reading books that evoked emotion and I began to experience wonder in the most mundane things.  With the birth of my human child, I experienced love in a way that no energy being ever could.  I experienced a different more shallow and animalistic view of beauty than my people ever had.  The passion of these beings was unmatched and as an enlightened one, I had long debates over things that were higher minded than video games and as my groups of friends evolved so too evolved my toys.

               The most interesting thing about humans to me was their hesitation.  When there was a decision that could benefit the whole of their society, they weighed concepts and liquid ideas with decisions.  There could be the most elaborate order in the chaos that was man. 

               A question like should we take unused stem-cells and use them to cure diseases like we never were able to before, was debated in courts rather than a small gathering of arbiters making decisions based on absolute logic.  To humanity, life was not a puzzle; it was a painting and one that took the entirety of their existence to paint.

               In my 27^th human year, I began to recall what it was to be a Taylorn and then also what it felt like to be in this foreign form. I remembered the feeling of power and prowess that came from being high born and yet as a human I was serenely focused on being unfocused and different with sore spots on my back where I felt my wings should have been.  I remembered my beak and felt it like a phantom limb the same way I perceived my wings.

               My empathic abilities were also intensified as a human. As a Taylorn, we had the ability to sense others around us and their intents as an instinct; as an energy being, we communicated telepathically so empathy was simply an added bonus because energy beings do not have emotions but humans have them like an overflowing teapot.  A telepathic connection, however dulled, could easily pick up on emotion and they were everywhere.  The little child pining over a fallen ice cream scoop, the investor pining over a net loss of $500,000.00 and how he would pay his child’s tuition; the great sorrow of humanity was overwhelming but there was also great joy.  A child who gets to go out for their birthday to the water park; a man who catches his child’s gaze for the first time; such joy as the latter could never be described as just joy but the point is made.  Experiencing a walk in the park was a dizzying experience for me if I did not distract my mind and senses with something.

               Then there was sex.  Taylorn women and Taylorn men had sex as an animal instinct.  It was no different than the rage of battle or the need to breathe air when one has been submerged underwater.  In this right, men and women were prone to having concubines for the soul purpose of sex and nothing else.  Did my father love my mother? Of course he did.  He did not want anyone else to be with but when she was having issues that made her not want the sexual urge, he went to places and others he could relieve himself with and they understood this in written contract that came with all Taylorn marriages.  Human beings have such great passion and emotion that it does not surprise me that they channel at least some of it into their sex lives.  Who damns the success of a man quite like a woman can?  Pitiful creatures…  Both sexual urges were archaic to us when we became pure energy though.  Sex was not required as energy is constantly created and destroyed in space as the parameters of physics allow.  There’s no need for sex and even the urges of a solid being are weeded out so that neither species that I have been is included.

               Questions and opportunity, desire and want, a sensual nature; all of these were paltry pleasantries enjoyed by man.  The Taylorn shared some of them as well but to devolve to something so ephemeral was, at best an experiment in futility.  Why did we exist was the question that human beings always asked and if I had to answer it, I would say, “…because the will of the universe which is conscious and alive provides us the space to exist and to ponder.  At our very core, it allows us to experience things that we might never have thought possible.” That was my answer for humans and Taylorn alike but my answer for what I never could escape, the energy being, the highest form on the evolutionary scale which I had experienced was a world of difference.  Why do we exist? “Energy beings exist because of a mistake in a matter transporter which gave us the ability to be a part of all things.  We exist to lubricate and experience existence itself.”

               I stopped in the park where I sat on a bench under a blue light and looked out onto a vast pond, pondering all these things.  “We exist to experience existence itself…”  In a way, I was experiencing existence by looking at things through a human’s eyes.  The only reason I even made it this far out into the universe was because matter and energy existed here, similar to that of my own planet.  On our planet, we had an Oxygen/Nitrogen balance in the air that we breathed and our sun also gave off ultraviolet radiation which caused temperatures on our planet to stay between 50* and 90* depending on the season.  There was also electricity in the air that was similar to earth.  Through the clouds, great bolts of blue lightning struck the hillsides in times of stormy weather.  There was rain and there was water and the elements were in sync with the planet.  Although I never ventured to the oceans on our world, I imagine there were currents similar to those of the earth and that life existed similarly to that of the earth although its inhabitants evolved differently.

               It was because of these things that I was able to adapt to the earth and look in at human beings with the desire to try and become one.  It was because of these things that I did become one and as I looked through their eyes, it was because of these things that I missed the energy being I would have to find out how to become again.