Trapped between serenity and tumult, a thought came to mind. It was a thought of my own. I thought it to be superior, for it came from me...
Imperiled between waking and slumber, a series of images flash onto your mind('s eye). They cannot be deciphered. They're slippery instances, racing through a beguiled imaginary space.
Imperiled between waking and rebirth, a series of images flash onto a mind. They're foreign, novel, and implacable. They're from a forgotten past. They're about a non-existent future. Trapped between reality and higher reality, the non-existent future emboldens a most vile affectation: hope, eternal hope.
Imperiled between slumber and ecstatic artifice, a series of images rush past him. They melt and give way to forms - abstract and unknowable lines and obstructions. The flash of images appear as imagined pasts, deprived of material, floating in fanciful ether. Suspended, they project fatal futures - fatal inescapable futures - in timespace undone.
Imperiled between a calm river and raging rapids, a series of images slowly roll by. He feels oppressed by them. They're images he cannot recall, but which are no less haunting. There's an old man slouched, seated on a rocking chair. An infant comes into view, partly obscured by darkness, cackling uncontrollably. The old man slumps off his throne and onto dry cracked earth. The infant's laughter ascends from innocence to mania with every rising decibel. The infant turns to meet his eyes. He averts his gaze, aware, without having to gaze into them, the eyes of true evil are now upon him.
He turns and walks away - the distant laughter grows with every step. An expansive meadow comes into view. In the distance stands two malformed trees, standing far apart. He walks toward them. As he approaches, he notices a tiny river running between the two. The deafening laughter goes silent upon his arrival to the river. It is narrow and immature. He sees the purple tributaries, five in all, scattered along it. On the furthermost tributaries sit flutists playing identical wooden instruments. On the most immediate tributary sits a young girl. The girl sings. Her soaring voice rises from the tributary up to the deformed branches hanging above the river. They sway to her voice, straighten up, and stretch toward the sky. The branches point sharply upward. He looks up to see the eyes he tried to avoid. Loud ever present cackling silences the flutes and the girl. A torrent of crimson pour down. The river widens. It devours its tributaries and the musicians. He takes flight. But it is of no use, the relentless downpour gains strength. Knee-deep, he struggles to move. The liquid rises past his waist, above his neck...
Submerged, he remembers something someone told him, "Evil lurks beneath innocuous surfaces." Sinking, a wide, anxious, stretch of uncertainty separates him from sanity. Sanity, lucid reality, spirals from sight, fades beyond earshot, and he enters the waiting dark depths. "Concentrate, concentrate, old friend...concentrate," a voice from his past echoes inside his skull, which begins to succumb to unbearable bodily forces. "Concentrate, concentrate, old chap..."
Not yet, it wasn't time quite yet. Not yet. Time stopped, went in and out. It was out of joint and then not. The spiraling figure, suspended in darkness, dared to look up at a sliver of blinding brightness. The torrent halted. The surrounding liquid began to solidify and excreted him skyward. From his peripheral view, he caught a glimpse of the sky. The eyes were still there. But something changed; everything was silent. The laughter was gone. In place of the boundless mania that he had imagined overflowed from the eyes, he thought they may now be calm and a tad perturbed. He was nevertheless unwilling to gaze upwards. The time was not right; it was out of joint and, just as quickly, not. Gravity, forgotten gravity, tugged on him and he returned. He landed and tumbled on dry dusty earth. The tumultuous torrent, the trees, the river and its tributaries, the girl and the flutists; they vanished.
He sat there for a moment, looking at the large inexplicable orange shadows casted onto the ground. There was nothing around and he stared shadows, which shifted according to winds. He concentrated and focused, but the shapes and forms made no sense to his eyes. They were without origin or logic and were mere distractions for his weary state of mind. Soon he grew bored and got on his feet.
He watched the dry soil shift below his feet. With steely and resolute eyes, he was determined to will a lush virgin sprout from the parched ground. He wanted to create. "Concentrate, concentrate, concentrate, my dear friend..." The soil just continued to blow away and swirl in an aimless fashion - but no sprout, no virgin birth. Gazing with loathsome, resentful eyes at the increasingly cracked soil, he could still sense they were still looking at him and his impotent desolation. The very thought of eyes, cackling in silent delight, stoked his anger. But, not yet, he couldn't yet. He couldn't look up, not quite yet. "Don't look up. Don't look up." Resolute and unflinching, he continued to futilely will life from dead dirt. "Concentrate, concentrate...you bastard..."
Fixated, he fixated on a murky remembrance, a wispy outline, suspended in space. It may have been a bloodied infant, enveloped in fire. He heard nothing but laughter, his own.
Projected onto the back of his muddied mind was a single image. It was an image of his inevitable death: a figure slouched, almost supine, onto a divan. Trapped between an irretrievable past and unattainable future lies an ineluctable fate. In order to be, in order to exist, one evolves both as body and mind. But natural fragility dictates that eventual decay is both unavoidable and cruelly abrupt. Insufferable are the chambers of the mind that house intimate, tender, memories. They house pleasant remembrances - those comfortable instants that anesthetize the decline. They also house regrets about an incomplete life. They house silent disaffection.
At the end, a life appears incomplete, leaves one longing for now impossible fates. At the end, all - including death - remains unalterable and the person, the body and mind, feels a most profound, if not primordial, impotence.
He awakens to the infant child's plaintive cry. It wants mother. But mother's gone. Mother dangles lifelessly in the backyard. He holds it in his arms. He looks into its tearful eyes. "Swear," he heard an inopportune whisper. "Swear..."
He holds the child. The crying stops and the child is placed back into its crib. He looks out into the yard, spends a ponderous moment focused on the dangling body. Soon, he no longer can bear the sight and shifts his gaze upwards toward the empty starless night sky. Alone, alone again with accursed thoughts. Alone, alone to concentrate, concentrate, concentrate...
