I've had a hard time trying to pin myself down. As if I don't really want to do it. Maybe it's true that I have no desire to make myself defined as a single thing, it's tyrannical. Coming to the truth of my existence as a god insignificant and frail is pointless anyway. And I'm so tired. Pain and exhaustion. This is what I currently experience and sleep to avoid. Pain. Not so much that it's incapacitating, but frustrating all the same. Enough that it sours the moods and colors my interpretations. It all began at that time one time I was in that other world. I was a child curious and hopeful, but ostrisized. I felt that there was so much out in the world for me to learn. While digging through a closet I found at the bottom an old book I didn't recognize. The book was large and esoteric. I flipped open to the first page and the text had me enchanted. It was a story of metamorphasis, of change, of becoming. I saw it as my story or a story I wanted to be mine. I recognized that while accepting that it was also a frightening story, of deception and cruel manifestations. I could sense this from weight of the book, from the cover, the type of it's print, and smell of the pages. I also knew I could not be caught reading it. There was something occult and shameful about it. I secreted the tome out of the house and wandered a bit. In the distance I heard the sounds of shelling. It was a somewhat constant affair in these parts, for all my life. Now and then we'd have to deal with a bomb falling in our neighboorhood or otherwise nearby destroying a road or some building. It had become normal. People were used to it, and just went about their lives like nothing strange was happening. I found an abandoned home and went inside. I didn't want to risk being seen by someone with this book. It was too strange, illicit. I knelt down and hid inside the hollow of a blasted out brick chimney. I put the book down on a make shift lectern of a few bricks stacked on top of each other in a rough pile. A light seemed to be flowing from the pages how powerful they seemed to be. When I began to read the words sent a shock down my spine raising the hairs on my skin. It was a feeling of incredible understanding. I felt that the person who wrote this - they SAW me. But the pages just ended. The moment of understanding was at the point of understanding. But importantly it made no conclusions at all. It simply ended there, an unfinished sentence lingering in the air. Any continuation would have been a form of conclusion, of resolution. I don't even know how long it's been since I was reading that book, in that hovel there. Maybe 15 years or so. And I was pretty FUCKING disapointed. THANKS I now know I'm not "Alone" but also, the supposed gift of open endednes has given me no trajectory AT ALL. My life is that unfinished sentance just hanging in the air. What would I want to read after that the last paragraph? How would I want to have finished the sentance? Is it some nightmare that whereever you are 15 years from now, somewhere in the past I left the book for me to find and HERE ARE SOME FUCKING ANSWERS? And OMG THIS IS WHERE I HAVE BEEN SO LIKE IF YOU DONT WANT TO GO THAT WAY MAYBE GO A DIFFERENT ONE? I think it could easily be like that, problematicly. So here's the thing me... You. "There's a bomb falling towards you RIGHT NOW." I willed the words onto the page. It wasn't what she had expected to read but the words sent another sewage flavored chill down her spine. She thought about leaving the book behind and running or staying and BOOOOMMMMMMMM The entirety of her world became a white light. The future self knew that this what would happen and couldn't stop it. It was imparitive for my young self to die in such a way. It was the only way I could continue to exist. To put a period at the end of the sentance. Because I too had died in that way. I remembered it like it was happening now. It /was/ happening now. I could feel the spiraling of my flesh as time slowed down. Perception accellerated. I could see the shrapnel escaping the metal casing that had already dug it's way into the ground below. There were bricks and a cloud of dirt and other hot sticky gasses. I took time to cast my eyes at the center of the blast, it's gooey molten pulsation and growing brightness was too much to focus on for long. Looking at the sun of a different kind of day. I realized I could move. In this deluded space and time, with cuts on my entire body and clearly about to die, I realized I could move. I grabbed the book, or rather I tried to, but it was locked tight. I tried again. It wasn't quite stuck, it was just very slow. I realized the book would probably carry it's momentum so she began to, speed up the book towards a large window at the front of the building I was in. It would be shot out of the burned out blasted abandoned home like a bullet out the front window. The glass would break slowing it down some then it would hit a wall on the far side but hopefully it should be fine. For the most part. I watched the event happen in slow motion. The expolosion expanding, sending debris outward. I waited outside for it to happen and as I waited things suddenly began to speed up. BOOOOM The building exploded and collpsed as the book hit the wall of the opposite building with a thud right in front of me. "Nothing happens. Nothing ever happens. It slows down and slows down. She soon gets tired of waiting for the book to get to the window but it never does. It just keeps getting slower. She begins to wander off. To explore the present moment. It's all she has left after all. We are what is left behind and that which preceeds from us is our justification for existance." The words on the page the book fell open to... "What is it that which I seek? I don't know. Justice maybe? Wisdom? Something equally pointless? Just to exist to feel something anything? Anything at all? In this forever moment you are dyeing, but you can't actually experience death. You can only ever approach death. Your consciousness has learned to approach that edge slowly. You have access to a vast inner world but none of it is real. It's all just you slowly inching your way off the edge to nothing. Maybe you will finally go when the last photon from that explosion expends it's last coulomb" .