The Wall Fly

WARNING: SELF-INDULGENT

Do you ever have the experience of looking at yourself from a third party perspective—the “fly on the wall” approach?

You sit, having a conversation with someone. Then instead of being invested in the moment, you are up above your own head, watching yourself, like a fly on the wall. “Lookee here,” your fly says. It evaluates the environment, your body language, the way you are interacting with your partner. It approves or disapproves. It is an outsider, a judge.

I am a fly tonight. But instead of watching myself engage in a fight, instead of shaking my head in disbelief at a ridiculous antic, instead of applauding the way I handle a high-pressure situation, I watch myself lie in bed and think.

I don’t begin as the fly. At first, I simply lie in bed, on my stomach, eyes closed. I think about tomorrow. I think about getting up at 6 am every day. I think about being a cog in the wheel of the machine. I ask myself how I can turn my life into something I love instead of something I tolerate. Then I become the fly.

“If anyone were to look at you right now,” the fly says, “they would see a girl, lying on her stomach, face turned to the left, eyes closed, by all accounts sleeping. They would have no idea about this torrid world in your fully conscious head. They wouldn’t see the vibrant colors of brown rats dashing perpetually forward on red wheels in grey steel cages, churning, churning, and going nowhere. You would convey nothing but a vacant vessel of recharging atoms.”

The fly’s thoughts make me feel omniscient—I know the truth! I am recognized for who I truly am, what the outer world cannot see!

And then, the shock. I am not outside of my body, looking down on a steadily breathing girl with closed eyes. No. I am inside my body, inside my mind. My fly judge is just as trapped inside me as the girl it watches. After all, there is no evaluative activity outside of the brain. The fly bangs against the inside of my cranium. “Let me out!” it screams. “I want to go back on the roof! I want to watch her sleeping and thinking and trying to make sense of the world!” It finds it cannot crash through the skull bone and migrates behind the face. It moves behind the sclera, the soft casing that prevents the eyeball from popping out of its socket hole in the hard skull. The fly wants to scratch its way out.

No, fly. You never were on the roof. You were always in my head. You were always in the bubble of thought you thought you were observing. You can’t get out. No, until I get up, until I write my thoughts down, there is nothing to see but a sleeping girl, even if she does not sleep. She sleeps. So jump up, sleeping girl, and tell the fly to write this down. The only way to get outside of your skull is to get inside someone else’s!