Eat Your Heart Out: A Cavity to Remember

She consumed all the sugary luxuries of life. She did not know of moderation, or if she did, she did not find it appetizing enough to consume and after all the extreme nourishment she continuously fed herself, she soon wouldn’t be able to digest moderation even if she ventured to sample it.

Her consumption was incessant and she favored the richest flavors that could only be attained through the highest order of artificial creation: that which could only be manufactured by the mind. She consumed dreams of tragic and epic love stories that she spun from the most flavorsome threads of sonnet and song; of myth and true tale. She imagined herself falling in love with some fantastical creature whose hopeless love for her would induce him to tame himself. It was these sorts of stories of impossible worlds that Phantasia thrived upon — the ones that she could only experience alone, safe from any tainting by the limitations of the physical world. Of course one can see how a true sweet tooth would seek this form of isolated consumption, when the sweetest thing that can be conceived is not necessarily the sweetest thing that is physically possible or available to experience with another soul.

Such delights were not only infused in roles of love, but also in roles of heroism and martyrdom. She imagined dramatized scenes of a faceless loved one about to be crushed by a speeding bus on the street ahead of her and saw herself zoom over at super-speed to push him out of the way, sacrificing herself in an act of heroism. And as she would indulge such imaginings, she allowed herself to feel the fear, love and passion that she imagined she would in that exact scenario — simulating the scene with forced emotion that tricked her body into a rapid heartbeat and a wide-eyed expression. Phantasia’s mind was brilliant and her heart was bound strongly to her mind, such that she could convince herself of anything when she withdrew from the physical world. As she indulged her palate for such sweet intensity that could only be cultivated in psychological isolation, she began to explore more of what such a world had to offer. In a single moment, she was a firefighter saving a school full of children and a lawyer getting an innocent man off death row. She was the driving force behind a new ecological organization, at the forefront of global efforts to improve health and wellbeing for all living organisms. She could wake up as a visitor to a foreign planet, connecting with beings of a different kind and then fall asleep having multilingual conversations with no particular recipient.

It’s a thing of wonder to live so fully within the confines of the mind. She had experienced such a range of emotions and desires and could continue to do so without stepping outside herself, let alone out the front door. And sometimes she wondered, “What is my reality?” And she would get lost in a conversational monologue…

“Hmm…Hypothetically…If I were to spend my whole life inside my head, such that every experience I’d know would be unbeknownst to any other person, even if their figure had featured in my mental oasis…And if I didn’t interact with other souls beyond this world I’ve curated in my head…then what is my reality? Are the lives that I lead in my imagination a fantasy, with my reality being idleness and changelessness? Or is living in my imagination some sort of a reality? Well what if I considered the height of fantasy living: dreams. Dreams versus waking life, aka ‘reality’. When I dream, I believe I can see, feel, touch, taste, hear. The same is true when I am awake. In a dream, my belief can be reenforced by other individuals in my dream who interact with me and appear to be distinct from myself, as in waking life. And if I can remember my dreams, do I not learn the same lessons I would from that experience through feelings really felt, as I would, had the same experience taken place in waking life with the same emotions yielded? I feel sure that there are many differences between dreams and waking life that some scientist or philosopher could draw, but it seems to me absurd given all the parallels of the experiences, that it could be said that a person who lives in their imagination is not experiencing any form of reality except idleness. It is widely acknowledged that people’s views of the world and their experiences are subjective and shaped not only by physical senses but by a person’s psychology and past. When I see a blooming sunflower, I see it differently to you, because we are not only looking through mechanical eyes, but also through lenses of memories and learned associations. I believe that is part of the reason why a thing so beautiful to me could be so off-putting and horrendous to you. A body’s vision is never naked, but always cloaked in the soul’s lens. But this lens only exists in the mind, the same place that a person like me chooses to live most often and so doesn’t that mean that the birthplace of imagination is also home to a necessary ingredient in the batter of our ‘reality’? And if that is true then is it not also true that where that ingredient exists, also exists a part of reality and if this ingredient and my imagination live together in the mind, then they exist in some element of reality? To disagree would be to disagree that one ingredient of reality carries any remnant of reality on its own, such that organisms with simple perception of the world not cloaked in any psychological elements could not be seen as experiencing reality. Alternatively, to disagree could be to disagree that the psychological element is on par with the sensory perceptual element of experiencing reality, but how could that be so when the diversity of the way in which individuals see the world so largely shapes the way in which individuals and societies and systems function and evolve?”

These were the sorts of inner ramblings she would fit in between falling in love and saving the world. And as she lived here, in her little world of infinity, others lived out their lives in their larger worlds of bounded possibilities.

And whilst these creatures would stare, from the tiny windows of their larger worlds, at the only glimpse they could attain of Phantasia — of her physical composition, consisting of awkwardly changing expressions cloaked in deafening silence… and whilst the passionate patrons and stewards of ‘reality’ grimaced and judged her for her idleness in a world where change and movement were revered, Phantasia’s soul smiled in her invisible infinity. And if they were not so blinded by their flags of ‘Carpe Diem’, they would have seen her magnificence: She who lived a full life each and every day so that she felt more satiated with life than any other, for she had lived a million lives whilst others had not yet lived just one.

As it goes, however, one cannot expect to compulsively consume so many sugary delights without consequence…

It was a typical experience after a long day of sweet, sweet indulgence, for a wave of sugar rush to wash over her, as she co-dependently absorbed and set free all the emotions and lingering imagery from her hearty meal. Eventually, all would magically drip off of her in a sweet sweat, slowly diffusing into the background, ready to be absorbed by nearby dried-up sponges of individuals, secretly and not-so-secretly desperate for these tiny droplets of Phantasia. It was a real service she did for the world, allowing them to soak up her second-hand sunshine, but really it was for her benefit, as it left her cool and renewed — fresh for new experiences of a whole different sort…‘though sometimes she did cheekily recycle a favorite fantasy or two. Phantasia knew in some casual sense the importance of renewal and not sinking her teeth so far into the sweetness so as to get stuck in it. But as time went by, she gathered little favorites and sweetnesses that began to amass and harden themselves in the nooks and crannies of her being. There were some that she’d hide so deep inside, they could not be sweat out of her, but would rather have to be dug out to be removed. And the digger would need to know what he was looking for and where to find it: a true professional.

A hoarder was thus born in Phantasia — one who grew attachments to her sweetnesses to such a degree that she felt she needed to meld them into her being for fear of their loss; for fear of having to share. She had lived in blissful sweet consumption before, for her ability to release and absorb without loyalties and without fear. Now, things were different and as she felt a hoarder growing, she also felt something being eaten away, ‘though she knew not what. And so she did the only thing she could do: she went to the professional to see about her dental health.

In this new age, dental health was becoming a very prominent issue in society — people were constantly in and out to see the doctor to fill a void, remove a pain, or to rebuild and replace that which felt broken. The doctor even saw an odd few he privately referred to as the “Pigs in Red Lipstick”, looking for a quick fix to cover up an ugliness, which whilst he felt it to be beneath him and offensive to his art, was also his favorite sort of customer because they were regular, easy and asked minimal questions. The doctor never could understand their logic for the quick fix, which was essentially not to spend too much time or money on such a spoof as dental health, when they could get a quick and cheap version masquerading as the apparent benefits of good dental work. The flaw was simply that the cheaper masks wore out quite fast and needed regular upkeep. And for his worst, most annoying clients of this sort, the doctor would sometimes plant seeds of doubt in their masks, which would have them returning for their renewal all the sooner.

Phantasia, however, had no prior experience with anything dental health related — she never had any issues and never needed to pay much attention to it, for her nature had always been self-preserving up until this moment. So, she laid herself down on his bed of inspection and her whole self opened wide, revealing all the hoarder’s hidden sweet treasures for the doctor to see. And he gasped at the sight and he saw that it was bad. After a grueling lecture on the importance of flossing out remnants of old deliciousness and the benefits of taking the time each day to purposefully wash out oneself with liquid freshness, the doctor picked up his tools and got to work. He chiseled and pulled and washed and brushed and finally he delivered his analysis to Phantasia. He explained that he had removed all the sweet chunks that had been stuck to her all over the place and that he had also removed some icky gross elements that had been collecting overtop the stickiness of the sweets she refused to give up. He explained these ickinesses were probably contributing to her foul inner feelings. But there was more. He had cleaned her up of what was there on the surface, yet the effects of these long-time visitors ran deeper. The sweetness that she had been consuming and guarding there had begun to erode parts of Phantasia that were now gone or crumbling and she now was living with a large hole in the mouth of herself. She insisted that he fill it — that he fill it right now! But the doctor, he answered frankly: that his filling? It just kept falling out. So, he did what the doctor struggled with most — he wrote her a prescription — and he forgot to put the dose. He forgot perhaps because for what he was prescribing, he imagined only one possible dose — he had prescribed her a sense of self and he’d never seen two of those. But then again, he had not yet met such a compulsive consumer as Phantasia.

She took her prescription and left, smiling ear to ear, thinking how lovely that the cure for her insatiable appetite for sweetness was to eat even more of it. The doctor had not explicitly described what defines a ‘sense of self’ and what it entailed and in the industry of dental health, it was certainly looked down upon to attempt to qualify such a prescription, since every self is different. And so it began, the consumption of selves. And as she consumed all these stories she prepared for herself and as she allowed herself to live these stories with feelings and physical expression, she became not one but many characters with many stories. And as her stories and the complexities of her many personas amassed, so her identity and sense of self withered all the more. One by one, Phantasia plopped in stories of the kind of person she saw herself to be or could see herself to be or wanted to see herself to be or wanted to want to see herself to be until she began tumbling into a never-ending whirlwind of selves, soul flailing all over the place in a dizzy dance of muchness. Spinning. Flipping. Twisting and falling and breaking and jarring and skipping and sliding and diving and sprawling. And then.

She woke up.

Choking on selves upon selves as they poured out of her outstretched mouth, Phantasia gasping for air and yet unable to breathe for her selves were multiplying at a pace far beyond the outpour. She had woken up to a new reality — one where the mind had entered a world of physical limitations and this bounded world could not contain the infinity pouring out of her and yet she could no longer be wholly contained by her mind because she had awoken. Her whole life, she had lived in a blissful mist of mind and reality, where nothing was truly defined because there was no plan — no purposeful direction in which she was trying to move. Focusing on her dental health, however, had drawn a part of her back into the bounded physical world, where her infinite muchness simply did not fit. She had overdosed on her selves. She had not known it entirely at the time, but the reason she had been able to survive as an infinite creature in a bounded society was because she had never allowed the two worlds to coincide. By seeking to fill a void that was visible in the bounded reality, with a filling created in her unbounded imagination, Phantasia blurred her planes of living such that she no longer knew who or where she was. When she awoke to the realization that she had lost her identity, her essence blinked into nothingness. And just like that Phantasia erupted in a sparkly explosion of powerful sensuality; tiny shards of the most wonderful selves finally finding their way to the ground. One moment, she was and the next, she wasn’t.

Yet, tragic as her loss may be, she now could enter the eternal sleep, where she would live satiably ever after in an eternity of deliciousness that would know no end.