Because of Him #1: Essences and Icons

The only thing that I can think of that really resembles being on the verge of passing out is dragging a computer icon.

You know, it leaves the real icon there, right there, where it was before--but you've picked up an essence of it with your mouse. It's a little shadow of the icon that your arrow can drag around your desktop, without the real one moving anywhere at all.

Let's say you're the icon. So you're quite yourself, sitting next to your icon friends. Then the arrow comes along, clicks on you, and takes out your 'essence', leaving you with nothing but a shell.

Let's also say that this happens quickly. So you're minding your own business when BOOM ARROW BOOM ESSENCE BOOM GONE BOOM SHELL. And you are so awestruck by this hasty happenstance that you have nothing to do but try to regain yourself.

It's like that arrow swiped half of your insides. Only a single hemisphere of brain is left to mind the collection of thoughts for you. Those thoughts--they're hardly thoughts, they're whisps or shadows of thought--drowsily drop into your head. You can only process a hint of what they mean before they lazily lift themselves back into the atmosphere.

All the world seems unreal . . . or, rather, you yourself seem unreal. The tips of your appendages tingle and the only thing that occupies your energy is trying to stay awake. Your body is desperately reaching out to grasp that essence that so quickly left it. Everything else around you is nothing. But you are frightened, because everything else around you used to be something. And with all your heart you are hoping with fragmented hope that you don't have to leave it all.

Then your essence comes back. It's only bit by bit, but slowly, those chunks of brain and lung and esophagus that you were missing fix themselves back together. You are real again; real thoughts and real loves spring back to you at full force.The arrow drops the essence of icon back onto itself . . . and all is well.