Some sort of coffin-shaped device on a ship moving through space.
It is not important where I am or where I’m going.
What is important are the tubes on the outside of my space pod that are part of the design because they are what connects me to the ship.
The thing about these tubes is that I have always received and expected to receive certain necessities via these tubes. These include such things as: Air, Food, Medicine, Love, Guidance, and Energy.
The main tube, the largest tube, is my direct source of Validation.
Now, on this ship, I have always felt sort of…uncomfortable. And somewhat afraid. And even though there was a time I became aware of this discomfort, I was always too afraid to address it — to actually do something about it. My best reaction has always been to just sit there quietly and not draw attention to myself.
But here, recently, the ship experienced a bit of turbulence.
And even before that, I was experiencing my own sort of turbulence. And then there was a moment in which my personal turbulence and the ship’s turbulence were perfectly in sync, and those were very dark moments.
But, the thing is, I couldn’t have lived without them both.
In fact, the personal turbulence prepared me for the turbulence the ship encountered and, in turn, the ship’s turbulence informed me on how to apply the new feelings and ideas that were shaken loose from my personal turbulence.
I learned these things the hard way.
These feelings and ideas were things that had been inside me the whole time, but I was always too afraid to look at them and touch them, to call them by their names.
But now I realize they were just parts of me I didn’t understand.
The whole point of what I’m saying is this: I have been imagining these tubes and the sockets that connect me to them and them to the ship to be the thing that was keeping me alive, but here recently I have started pulling them apart with my mind.
And I mean that seriously.
I just envision a tube — any tube, even the one providing Validation — as , twisting loose, disconnecting (there’s a slight hiss and gases are released) then falling weakly to the ground in front of my feet.
And every time I do this I also imagine my eyes opening just a bit.
And the more I imagine these tubes and see them disconnecting me from this machine, the more I start to see myself as always having been separate from the machine. And the more that happens, I feel myself starting to notice that it’s the ship itself that was pulling from me the whole time. It needed me.
But not any more.
Because now I imagine myself differently and that is all that matters to me: How I see myself.
Brad Rhone 