| And he woke up. Lying on his side on his bedroom floor he returned to the world of the living with a splitting headache. He got up slowly, one hand on his head, a kind of mental placebo, doing nothing to soothe him, and made his way to the bathroom. He was thirsty as well. His throat ached. After six glasses of water his thirst was satisfied, at least for the moment, and his headache had dulled. He rested his chin in his hand and felt stubble. How long had he been asleep? Then he remembered the orb. His eyes darted to the center of the room…empty. The orb had gone without a trace. And part of him had gone with it. After experiencing the orb he felt hollow…he sat for a few minutes…maybe a few hours, then got up. He looked at his phone: 13 messages. He pressed erase. He went to the kitchen and made a sandwich. He took a bite and threw it away. He wasn’t sure what he had put on it. He wasn’t hungry. The mail had piled up under the door. A few days’ worth was there. He picked all of it up and dropped it in the trash on top of the sandwich. He slept and dreamed of the orb. He dreamed of himself, swimming through a sea of confusion, trying to reach the orb, never making it. In the morning he went to work. He wasn’t sure how many days he had been away. Away from reality, in the world of the orb. It didn’t matter. At work he thought about the orb. The orb was perfection. All those Buddhists, all those Hinduists trying to attain enlightenment, striving to reach nirvana, they couldn’t even fathom the orb. The orb would be like some kind of drug to them. But to him it wasn’t some profound, transcendental experience; it wasn’t enlightenment. When he was inside the orb, he just was. And that was enough. He went to work every morning, sat down in his cubicle. He knew he could never begin to tell anyone about the orb. He wanted to so badly though; he wanted to tell everyone he met that there was something so much better, there was so much more than…this. But he could not; it would be impossible to try to share the experience with anyone. So he kept it to himself. But everyday he had to fight the urge to stand up in his cube and shout at his coworkers, “What are all of you doing here, wasting your lives? Is this really all there is?” One day they handed him a status report that he had turned in the week before. It looked like this. He laughed at it. They asked him not to come back the next day. |
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