A new dawn breaks on the horizon. Golden rays shine through the sheer face of the looming mountain. Horses graze in confined pastures, do they think their free with the room they have to roam, or do they know that they are subject to the whims of their owner? Do they know that they serve a master? Do they know their master? Do they love their master?
He rubs the sleep from his eyes, but it doesn’t do much good. Sleepless nights and an active mind have brought him to the brink of insights and have nudged him close to madness. “There’s nothing more to say, just shut–Just shut the fuck up!” there is a bang at the door. He looks through the spyhole across the narrow breezeway and watches as his neighbor opens the door, looks left and right, and closes it again. No one there, he thinks.
He paces and speaks aloud to himself, he’s been at it for about two weeks now, and far from a broken record, his a wheel of synonymous thoughts. He repeats the same logical arguments, follows the same lines of reasoning, but each time he does it, he changes his wording slightly, as if the alteration of words in the same order will somehow change their meaning.
Computer open on the desk, falls into sleep, the screen dims and goes black. “You just need to fucking write. What are you doing? We’ve been here before, we’ve been here before, we know that we’ve been here before. It’s the same fucking story, what makes you think that talking about it is going to change anything.”
In a moment of inspiration, he sits at his computer and wakes it from it’s slumber. The cursor blinks on a blank word document titled: The Grand Life Vision of T-(redacted for privacy reasons). He types the first paragraph.
I want a life less ordinary. I want a life of mastery and success. I want a life of complete and utter social and seductive mastery. I want a life of wealth and abundance. I want a life of fulfillment. I want *a life that I’m in control of. I want to live life on my terms. I never want to be here again. I never want to**live this story again. I never want to feel these pains again. I never want to be here again. I never want *to be here again. I never want to be here again. I never want to be here again.
“All fine and fucking well, but you still haven’t defined what you want. If you don’t decide on what you want, you’re never going to get anything, you fucking CLOWN!” he slaps the laptop shut and resumes his pacing.
Dimly, but not fully aware, he takes to pacing and talking to himself. It’s comforting to him. Years ago, as a boy, he was often alone, so he’d interview himself aloud. Trying on masks and personas, he’d work to find the mask that he most liked. The trouble is, he became addicted to the game, never fully embracing one mask or another. Now, the very game that gave him solace as a boy, is the very game that’s preventing him from becoming something greater. He’s fallen into comfort and delusion, unaware that his endless prattling, is only worsening the ruts that his mind has fallen into.
So in spirals he goes.
The same problems, the same approach to solving them, and no closer to a solution.
When that higher self, be it the voice of god or the objective observer within, speaks to him, when it gives him solutions, he rejects them all out of hand. Where is he? Who is he? What is he searching for?
He’s driven by a madness, a need for perfection that superseeds the confines of the world around him. He’s searching for something, and answer, something that will save him.
Hours have passed, the sun vanishes on the horizon, tomorrow, sure as day, it will rise again to greet the horses and wake the crows.
The following day, he awakens from a dream of the woman that he’s just abandoned. Smart enough to see the problems, to weak or stupid to solve them, he left her and ran back into the void that proceeds manifestation.
“I fucking this!” he exclaims, waking to find his bed absent a second. “I never want to fucking be here again.”
He opens his phone, and Miike Snow’s “Genghis Khan” plays on it’s own. “How the fuck…”
This isn’t the first time he’s had an experience like this. You see, in the previous years, slowly, he began to develop certain “talents”, and technological glitches that defy logic and reason are nothing new to him. They always come as a surprise though. No matter how many times a man has witnessed the non-solidity of physical reality, the confrontation with it fluidity is always shocking to say the least. He’s gained the ability to keep his mouth shut in public though, more often than not, pointing out the blatant “glitches” never seems to bode well.
He knows what the message means.
“I can’t do that,” he says softly to himself. “We know why I can’t do that–I can’t, there has to be another way.”
He takes the day off from work and drives and hour to spend time with his family. Exhausted, drunk, and trying to make merry, his sister–who had been the resident DJ all night–plays “Genghis Khan.”
Chills run up his spine. No! he says internally.
A week passes, now on a road trip to see his brother off. His brother had just relocated, so he tagged along to ease the process. On the drive back, somewhere in middle Tennessee, he switches on the radio.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” he says softly.
“What?” his sister says, turning it up.
“Nothing,” he says, tightens his grip on the wheel, and looks across the water feeling a bit sick crossing the Memphis Arkansas bridge.
So be it, he mentally affirms.