How to disappear and come back

Have you ever felt like you just want to go away, like really go away right there and then, and leave your old life for a while? I think I have that all the time.

Everybody knows, i think, that I'm the sort of person who loves crowds. I like being around friends and attending parties and gatherings, and a person who knows me would tell you that I'm really as loud as you can get.

I'm secretly a dreamer, I think. There are times when I wish to just be still. You know, just to be still and watch the world go by. Like in a party, there are these moments, when I'm sitting down with a drink and everyone is doing everything around me, I suddenly feel lost. Not lost in the sense that I don't have any friends or a date, but just lost as in everyone is doing something and moving, and I just want to stop doing anything and watch the world moving by itself without me in it. It's so busy, I think, with the world chasing nothing and me racing through my life.

So this is what I do. I'll just lie on ground. Any ground, and lie of my chest with one ear intact with the floor. Sometimes I do it on a cold day at a green field, where the grass smells like flowers, or sometimes just on the floor in my room. Then I'll just lie really still, and listen. I could feel the world pass by, I really could. The cars outside my window passing by with speed. Some unidentified sounds from the distance, maybe birds or just the pipes in the walls. My housemates going downstairs for coffee. TV blaring.

I wouldn't go to sleep. It's impossible, I think, to go to sleep when the world is passing by with such speed, and you're left behind, stuck there in that time when you're lying down and listening to it leaving you behind. Somewhere, in some other part in this world, I might think, right there and then, when I'm lying there and listening, something big is happening. Like a child being born, right that second, or a person whose life is taken away, right that moment. Or even more, that someone else, somewhere, is doing exactly what I'm doing, just lying down somewhere and just listening.

You wouldn't believe how long one could actually do that. Just hours, and I wouldn't feel much time has passed. And when I sat up again, when I start to live again, it feels totally different. Like I've been somewhere, and came back. Someplace when nobody knows me and time stops, and now I've come back to the busy world.