Escape: An Essay on the Urge to Flee
Escape. The word. The vowels. The pronunciation. When I hear the word ‘escape’, my mind immediately constructed a mental image of a dark tunnel with a slipping light far at the end of the tunnel. A person facing right to the source of light. It is automatically crafted in my innocent little head as a basic visualization of the word ‘escape’ and to this very day, i don’t know why.
Perhaps I see escape as a solution. or a salvation that needs to be perpetually done. And those steaming hotness of the little lights that emerge through the darkness spark their own meaning. That the bright light at the end of the tunnel interpreted as a my way out of things that scared me all along.
In life, we always try to escape from things either we realize it or not. Often we call it a vacation. A break. A leisure time. A desperate need to change our front view. A scratch on our back which had been itchy all along. Or a time to paint ranbows on monotone walls, with unicorns climbing over Eiffel Tower that is now stand tall in Eastern Africa. We love the abstract just as much we hate it. We can never pit ourselves in a situation or place where we feel uncomfortable forever, so we build all these scriptures and creates Gods to stick with comfortable denial, then these Gods we tell to our friends and families, and billion years later, they live in minds of billion people but reality. And those people who believe in their imaginary realities, kill men who don’t. Maybe that’s how religion was created. The disaster that came from our urge to surpass borders of the unknown.
In most severe cases, we also have the tendency to escape from ourselves. That is a period of time when our bodies does not seem to fit us anymore, it won’t do justice to us by doing what we really want to do. We escape because we feel trapped. But those ingenious, vile, and obvious traps are the one we never really care to acknowledge.
You cannot flee from yourself, yet you can only drain out some parts you own. Do some masturbation when you feel a little bit Freudian, who needs some smelly silky white liquid between your legs anyway? A film to watch to make you happy or to make you cry is also a good move, a good escape. And by those examples, we clearly see that no matter what we do, we always find a way to wiggle, to move, and ultimately, to escape.
It leads us to one co create question? Is escaping really safe? Are we built for it? We use books, some unread, to be the attribute of our sometimes nonexistent, unstitched, knowledge.
Escape is often celebrated. Take a look of an escape artist slash magician who intentionally put themselves in danger, for instance; being buried in the sand, or being kept at a gigantic fish tank with overflowing water. The next time they appear safely, people would wildly congratulate the man. Our eyes are always watery whenever we see people who made it to escape from poverty, abuse, or general life’s misery, and secretly wish our fate would be like theirs.
Escape almost always mean that you are moving yourself away from horror or potentially ominous calamity. Escape is the most wild, wild, thing a man can do, but also the most ordinary. So let’s actually realize that the earth escapes from the sun by circling, and the plastic bag drifting through the wind is surely fleeing from something we don’t know.
Doomed are they not knowing where or when to escape,
doomed are they who don’t even know tha they have been escaping.
doomed are they who don’t even know they need some escape plan.
Lucky are those who reach their final destination from exhausting years of escaping. You did it. Such content must be incomparable. And I wish you could find your way back home, if you want to.
