THE TOWER OF BRAHMA: Chapter 19 - Treading Trembling Tolstoy (edit)

05/13/04

Spawned from children, ideas of a world that is ideal and stamped with a singular love of itself, burning with the intensity of long lost love, summer daydreams, and a friendship cut down in its prime. Dormant in my skull is the map to this place, a hollow key born of madness, carved from my bones.

Spider grabs my brain, smooshing his fingers through the membrane of my frontal lobe, and grips tightly to my cerebral roots. Unearthed in mind, I am freed. Free to be dragged, stumbling, wobbly, trying to find my legs as I tip toe towards the future. I laugh and giggle as we careen past the games that everyone keeps changing the rules to, the one game that has become a game for all. Folding cardboard lives prop open all around me, the contestants all vigorously moving their pieces about, reciting line after line about how the game is to be played, what I can and can not do.

"Poor fools.." I mumble to myself, half delirious on the vapors of metaphysical-fictional travel through the ether of cosmic chum.

The smack of a thousand vengeful teachers resonated on the side of my face for years after Spider had let loose with the blow. I remembered the smack as if from a third person perspective, seen as if through the eyes of everyone but myself.

"What makes you think you're better than they are?" His words had been the most painful part of the reality lesson I was experiencing. A de-bratification if you will.

"They're doing what they think is right, some of them. Maybe they don't see past the game but they're trying and that was ten times more than you were doing. They have the drive, they get it done, they make the changes. If you pity them, you might as well pity the wind or the sea. Each does it part, every crack covered, and every detail taken care of in its way. It can not even be any other way. They must play; their ups and downs are the mechanism that keeps this fire burning. They empower you with their will. Be good to them and you will not be denied."

He left me there, sitting, trapped in the muck. It's funny, once you are submerged, the pain and relief is like a gift. It's the struggle that keeps you running. It's the suffering that makes or breaks you.

Solve the riddle of birth, the unification that rests in your own soul, the merging of two to one.