Running Away to Ephemera

And the award for Most Abstract Writing Topic goes to…

In front of me lies a vast expanse of green. Serene, peaceful. It feels like a fever dream, like a faraway place, untouched, idyllic. Somewhere along the edge of the universe, on a shore only my imagination can touch, I have found this place in all its iridescent beauty. But alas, I must come back to reality. Only for a very brief moment of time, I stood in some ephemera, where reality couldn’t impose her constraints. Reality had loosened her grip on me, and so had I on her.

Now, having come back to my chair, I think to myself — was I escaping from reality, or was she escaping from me?

Ephemera is certainly a beautiful illusion — but that’s exactly what it is, an illusion. It dissolves the moment we reach for it. But the transient tenacity of it all hounds me with the question, if the escape was so fleeting, was it any less real? Or was it more precious? Was I escaping, or was I meant to find it? Finding those moments in real life isn’t too hard. Sunsets that paint the sky a scarlet red, laughter that echoes in your heart, the subtle warmth of a cherished touch, that glimmer of a dream before waking up… all these are transient too. Maybe we chase these things not because they last, but because they don’t.

So maybe the point of ephemera is in its impermanence. Reality pesters us, swathing us with her unyielded truths and her suffocating confines. In our imaginations though, there seems to be a place where the light bends a little differently, where we live in the space between the seconds. Nothing lasts — but perhaps that’s why it feels like home. We long for that place because it gives us a chance to see ourselves. I guess I want to escape not to run from myself, but to find out who I really am.

Reality seems to demand that we pour ourselves into labels, roles, expectations… but in the temporary, in the fleeting, we are limitless. In the real world, we are bound by gravity, by consequence, by the weight of our own names. But in the ephemera we seek to escape to, we are only our motion, only light, only the whisper of a feeling too vast to be named. Maybe it isn’t about avoiding reality, maybe it’s about choosing a different one. Maybe reality herself wants to show us something by undoing her shackles and letting us roam free for a while. Maybe she sees our longing and pushes us into a fleeting version of herself.

And just as quickly as she pushes us in, she pulls us out. When we return, we aren’t the same anymore. We change ever so slightly in those moments — perhaps we realise something about reality, or she touches our minds in a way she hasn’t before. Maybe ephemera follows us, lingering around in the corners of our hearts, in our memories and dreams, waiting for reality to push us in again.

We let go of our sentinels and look — are we chasing these things, these feelings… or are they escaping from us? The world can be quite obdurate, but in ephemera, we find the agency to be who we really are; to be who we want to be. And when we come back, we realise that the universe is quite heavy. But now we know where weightlessness lives.