thought control

I: B U T T E R F L I E S

Do you remember the first time someone told you how to feel your pulse? I remember it being somewhen in elementary school but my mom probably told me how to do it even earlier.
And I remember getting so frustrated as I sat there in biology class as we learned about the human body because I could never get it right. It just takes two fingers, your pointer finger and your middle finger. And your wrist. Or your neck.
I remember ghosting my fingertips over my skin that wasn't damaged back then and I pressed down where I was told my main artery was. I remember joking with my friends, joking about how I couldn't find my pulse and that maybe, I was dead already and just didn't know it.
Innocent jokes back then.
I don't exactly remember where I was or how it happened or when I felt it for the first time but I remember exactly what I thought the first time my fingertips felt these little vibrations under my skin.
Like a butterfly brushing its wings against the underside of my skin, me sitting there, eyes closed, not even breathing at how hard I was concentrating on feeling these soft, almost not feelable vibrations.
I knew it was my blood I felt and how it was rushing from my heart into my extremities.
Back then I described it as a butterfly twitching it's little wings but since then my feelings towards these vibrations under my skin has changed.
That moment when these two fingertips press into the soft skin of my neck, right in between my windpipe and the muscles of my neck. It's to be felt really clearly, you can almost feel the structure of the huge blood vessel that connects your heart with your brain. Organs are a weird thing. They're so refined through evolution and in most cases they do exactly what they were meant to do. They digest food or enrich blood with oxygen to make all these other things in your body work. They are perfect, they grip into each other like the gears of a high-tech machine. But there's one organ that isn't like the others, or maybe it is but in a different way.
You know, when you take philosophy class and learn about all these things that great minds like Aristoteles or Descartes have come up with all these centuries back, you learn that your brain isn't what makes you think. It's an organ made out of tissue and I'm not a biologist so I can't exactly tell you the biological name of this tissue but what I do know it's that it's matter. It might come in a different form but it's as much matter as your bones are, or plants or your muscles and skin. Your hair. Everything you find on this earth is made out of matter.
Matter doesn't start thinking on its own. Your arm doesn't suddenly decide to do something, it doesn't suddenly become aware of what it is, it doesn't start to do things by itself. Neither does a plant or a single strand of hair. So, at least that's what Aristoteles and Kant and all these other philosophers think, your brain isn't what makes you think, what makes you have consciousness of who you are, you as an individual. Because it's matter. And yes it works with neurons and a lot of other things I don't know of because I might not have paid enough attention in biology and physics class. But as it's all matter, there had to be something that somehow made humans able to think, to have the ability to have a sense of self, to develop languages and build up infrastructure and all these things we've accomplished over time. I don't care how you want to call it. Call it a soul or a spirit of some sort, that tells your brain to shoot these neurons out into your system and make your arms move and legs walk. But still, the brain is matter, as well as the heart.
I've always wondered how two things made of the same kind can act so differently. Your heart keeps you alive, it keeps breathing, it keeps pumping blood through your worthless body, this vessel that is you. That's what all organs do and they don't ask why they do it and how they're supposed to do it, they just do it. The brain is different. Or better, the thing that makes the brain operate.
How can the brain and the heart do things so opposite from one another? I can feel my heartbeat every night when I try to fall asleep. I can feel it beating against the mattress beneath me, beating in my chest. My brain is different. Yeah, it still does what it's supposed to do but why do I keep hoping my heart would just stop? Why doesn't it stop? Why can't I control it like I can, more or less, my thoughts? Why is my brain so different from all these other organs in my body that have the sole purpose of keeping me alive? Because I don't want to be alive, I don't want my heart to keep beating, keep pumping this liquid through my veins that I can feel beneath my fingertips if I just sit quietly enough.
You can't make the brain shut up without making the heart stop beating. You also can't make the heart stop with the brain still thinking. These organs are so deeply connected to one another and at the same time they feel like they don't even belong in the same body because how can something that I can't exist without make me feel like every breath I take is worthless, a waste of air, a waste of effort and time I could be spending somewhere where I don't have to think anymore. I don't want to think anymore, think about how my brain and my heart work and how they're connected to each other. But I have to because yet my heart is still beating, it's beating while I'm writing this, I'm breathing while I'm writing this and I wish I wasn't, but there's just one way to make it stop and I know the pain isn't enough apparently. How much worse does it have to get? People who commit suicide, how much worse do you have to get until you take that final step? Because I can't imagine more pain than I'm in right now and I feel like I'm breaking but somehow I'm still writing this, writing about philosophers and how bodies work and I know that I'm tired and I should go to bed and forget for a few hours that I have a body and a mind and one day all of this is going to be gone but I feel like I'm sleeping away all of this time.
I don't have an end for this. I'm out of words and maybe I should've been out of words a long time ago, but apparently, I'm not, so I'm still here writing this whilst my blood rushes through my veins and makes the butterfly brush its wings over the underside of my skin.