....in july of 2016 i found myself at a birthday party somewhere in the middle of estonia. my sister had invited me and the woman i was dating at the time. she knew the birthday girl. i knew the birthday girl. everybody seemed to know everybody. it was one of those gatherings where friendships overlapped in strange ways and half the people present had at one point or another, accidentally wandered into the same chapter of life.
the party took place at a cottage beside a lake. if you've never experienced an estonian july... the easiest way to explain it is that the sun never truly leaves. it simply lowers itself towards the horizon, has second thoughts and lingers there for hours. darkness exists mostly as a formality. the evenings stretch endlessly between gold and blue and time itself seems less interested in moving forward than sitting down and having another drink.
people kept arriving throughout the evening bringing beer, guitars and increasingly unreliable memories. some were old friends. some were older friends. some i hadn't seen in years. some i had forgotten entirely until they appeared carrying a six-pack and reminding me of things i had done in my early twenties that should probably remain forgotten. a campfire crackled near the shore. somebody passed around a joint. somebody opened another beer. somebody was forever tending a barbecue despite nobody remembering who had actually started cooking. music drifted lazily through the trees. laughter wandered across the water. the entire evening possessed that effortless quality summer occasionally achieves when everything aligns just long enough to make you wonder why life isn't always like this.
i arrived with a woman i happened to be dating at the time. even now that sentence feels more romantic than reality deserves. there was no great love story unfolding beneath the stars. no invisible thread binding two souls together across lifetimes. no dramatic orchestral score swelling somewhere in the background. it was simply a relationship. one that had arrived quickly and settled into existence without much substance beneath it. there was no deep trust. no profound connection. no sense that we were building anything together. if i'm being completely honest...it felt less like love story and more like filling an empty chair. but i guess those too deserve time and space in everybody's life.
none of this seemed particularly important. the evening was warm. the company was good. old friends surrounded me on all sides. for a few hours it felt as though every version of my life had gathered around the same fire. at some point my sister, who has always approached alcohol with the confidence of a viking raiding party, apparently informed my girlfriend that she would quite like to kiss her. my girlfriend later reported this information back to me. i remember finding it odd but not especially concerning. just one of those details that arrives quietly and just sits in the corner and waits years for its significance to be revealed.
otherwise the evening continued exactly as summer evenings are supposed to continue. stories were told. songs were sung. beer disappeared. fresh logs were added to the fire. people drifted between conversations and returned again. the lake remained calm. the sky remained bright. the world felt impossibly gentle. i remember looking around and thinking that if there was a better place to spend a summer night i had yet to find it.
which... in retrospect... was probably the precise moment reality began sharpening its knives.
i had brought a small personal stash with me. nothing unusual. certainly nothing that felt remarkable at the time. by that point i considered myself experienced. seasoned. perhaps more importantly... i considered myself immune to surprises. i had spent years exploring those particular corners of consciousness and had developed the sort of confidence that only comes from repeated success. unfortunately confidence and wisdom are distant cousins at best.
at some point during the evening i decided the moment had arrived. the setting seemed almost comically perfect. a lake. a campfire. old friends. endless estonian twilight stretching across the horizon. somebody playing guitar. somebody else passing around a joint. laughter drifting lazily through the trees. if one were designing the ideal environment for a profound spiritual experience.... this would have been difficult to improve upon. i took one and waited.
nothing happened.
an hour passed. perhaps more. conversations continued. beer continued disappearing. the campfire continued consuming perfectly innocent pieces of wood. the universe... however remained stubbornly unchanged. so i took another.
still nothing.
at this point i should probably mention that patience has never been among my defining characteristics. with substances i mean.
another hour drifted by. still nothing. people continued telling stories. somebody sang. somebody produced food. somebody was forever opening another beer. i remember thinking that perhaps whatever i had brought with me had lost its potency. perhaps it had been stored incorrectly. perhaps it had simply given up and chosen retirement. or god forbid...was i myself becoming immune.
so i took more.
looking back...this was not one of my stronger decisions. but there was that ancient urge. the stage was set, so therefore i must.
midnight arrived. then shortly thereafter so did absolutely everything else.
i found myself sitting on a mattress beside a small shed overlooking the lake. i remember that mattress with extraordinary clarity. after all these years it remains one of the few details that has never faded. entire worlds would appear and disappear over the course of that night. reality itself would eventually be dismantled and rebuilt. yet somehow the mattress remained. my own private island of certainty floating in an increasingly uncertain universe.
people came and went around me. friends stopped by to check on me. somebody brought me food. somebody sat beside me for a while. somebody played harmonica. at one point i distinctly remember hearing a folk harp which sounds ridiculous enough that i still cannot determine whether it actually happened or whether my subconscious simply decided the evening required one. but as we were estonians... the pagan poetry most likely happened. the campfire burned lower. fresh logs were added. conversations dissolved and reformed. faces appeared and disappeared. meanwhile i remained exactly where i was... watching the world move around me like a river flowing around a stone.
time itself became difficult to measure. the hours no longer felt sequential. they stacked on top of one another. folded into one another. i felt ancient and newborn at the same time. the sky shifted slowly above the lake. darkness never fully arrived and dawn never fully began. everything existed in a strange state of suspension. even now...ten years later, i struggle to determine whether i sat there for six hours or six centuries.
it was somewhere within this peculiar eternity that i became aware of the woman beside me. not noticed. aware. those are different things. noticing is passive. awareness arrives carrying intent.
something felt wrong.
not wrong in the ordinary sense. not an argument. not jealousy. not distrust. something far older and stranger than that. a sensation that the person sitting beside me had become slightly detached from the reality everyone else appeared to be inhabiting. i looked at her and felt a wave of discomfort so immediate and so profound that it bypassed thought entirely. there was no explanation attached to it. only certainty.
for the first time that evening i became afraid.
i had no idea then that fear was merely the opening act.
for a while i tried to ignore it. strange feelings are hardly unusual when one has voluntarily launched themselves several postal codes beyond ordinary consciousness. i told myself i was imagining things. i told myself i was overthinking. i told myself all sorts of sensible things. unfortunately sensible things were becoming increasingly difficult to trust.
the discomfort grew slowly. it did not arrive dramatically. there was no thunderclap. no sinister music. no cinematic revelation. rather it was the peculiar feeling one gets when something familiar becomes unfamiliar without changing its appearance. i looked at the woman sitting beside me and felt profoundly disturbed by her presence. not because of anything she said or did. she could have been reciting soup recipes for all i knew. it was something deeper than behaviour. something about her very existence felt wrong.
the best way i can describe it is this. imagine looking at a photograph that has hung in your house for years. you pass it every day. then one morning you walk past and immediately know something is different. the photograph appears identical. the frame is identical. the wall is identical. yet some primitive part of your brain begins screaming that whatever hangs before you is not the same thing that hung there yesterday.
that was the feeling.
the world around me remained unchanged. people laughed around the campfire. somebody played music. somebody wandered past carrying food. the lake continued reflecting the endless northern twilight. yet over the top of all this another reality had begun unfolding. not replacing the first one but layering itself over it.
when i looked at her i no longer saw the woman i had arrived with. i saw a figure standing within an immense black void. beside her stood two silent sentinels draped in filthy rags. their clothes looked as though they had survived the collapse of several civilizations. animal masks concealed their faces. pig masks to be precise. weapons hung casually at their sides. they did not feel threatening. somehow that made them worse. they felt inevitable.
then she laughed.
even now i remember that laugh more clearly than i remember many real conversations from that year. it carried none of the warmth or awkwardness that usually accompanies human laughter. there was no joy in it. only certainty. the certainty of somebody who has already read the final chapter while you are still struggling through page one.
and then she began showing me my life...
chapter iii — the burning archive
and then she began showing me my life. not the embarrassing moments either. not the mistakes. not the things i regretted. those would have been easy. there is a certain comfort in seeing your failures dragged into the light. at least they belong to you. instead she chose the beautiful things. the dangerous things. the things worth protecting. i saw my grandmother's kitchen exactly as i remembered it. cinnamon buns cooling on the counter. winter pressing gently against the windows. the orange glow of a fireplace from the next room. snow drifting lazily beneath streetlights. i saw my mother. i saw birthdays. family dinners. school friends. childhood summers. countless moments which seemed entirely ordinary while they were happening and later became the architecture of memory itself. for a moment i felt relieved. perhaps this was nostalgia. perhaps this was some strange celebration of life. perhaps after all the dread and discomfort i had finally arrived at something beautiful.
then she set the first memory on fire.
it burned exactly like old film. the edges curled inward. colours distorted. the image blackened and disappeared. i remember feeling confused more than frightened. destruction was not what i had expected. then she laughed. loudly. dramatically. it sounded amused. ominous and eerie. the sort of laugh one might reserve for a child proudly explaining something they have completely misunderstood. you think this happened? she asked. another memory appeared. another flame followed. you think any of this was real? and suddenly i understood that destruction was not what was taking place at all. destruction implies that something once existed. this was worse. she was not destroying my memories. she was proving they had never happened in the first place.
that was the true horror.
somewhere deep inside me i believed her.
the certainty with which i had carried those memories my entire life began evaporating. i could still remember them. i could still see them. but they no longer possessed weight. they felt borrowed somehow. fabricated. no more substantial than dreams remembered upon waking. the more they burned the more absurd it seemed that i had ever believed them in the first place. my grandmother was not real. my mother was not real. my childhood was not real. school was not real. friendship was not real. love was not real. each conclusion arrived quietly and settled into place with terrifying ease. there was no argument. no resistance. only acceptance. i wanted to curl into a ball and die. but dying was not an option unfortunately.
around me the party continued. that remains one of the strangest parts of the entire experience. somewhere beyond the edges of my attention people were still laughing. somebody was still tending the fire. somebody was still opening another beer. somebody was probably telling a story they had already told three times that evening. the lake remained calm. the sky continued its endless northern dance between night and morning. existence carried on exactly as before. meanwhile my entire reality was being dismantled piece by piece.
i wanted to reach for somebody. a friend perhaps. anybody. some familiar voice capable of anchoring me to reality. then i realised there was nobody to reach for. friends were not real. family was not real. relationships were not real. even the woman beside me had become something else entirely. everything i had ever loved had transformed into fiction. i was not grieving people. i was grieving the possibility that people had ever existed at all. it felt as though existence itself had been retroactively cancelled.
i have spent ten years trying to explain that feeling and still fail every time. people understand loss. people understand heartbreak. people understand death. this was none of those things. it was the unbearable grief of discovering that there had never been anything to lose in the first place.
there was only me.
the mattress.
the lake.
and the terrible certainty that i was the sole witness to a universe that had never happened.
chapter iv — the last human
i do not know how long i remained in that state. one of the many inconveniences of having reality dismantled around you is that time tends to lose all professional standards. minutes masquerade as centuries. entire eternities pass between heartbeats. i sat there on that mattress unable to trust my memories, unable to trust the people around me and increasingly unable to trust existence itself. eventually even despair became exhausting. there are only so many hours one can spend mourning the nonexistence of everything they have ever loved before the mind begins looking for alternative forms of entertainment. that was when the scenery changed. not gradually. not symbolically. one moment i was sitting beside a lake in the estonian countryside and the next i found myself aboard what can only be described as a spaceship. i realize how absurd that sounds. trust me... i was there and i agree. everything was white. impossibly white. not hospital white. not sterile. something cleaner than that. the sort of white one imagines before colour is invented. people moved calmly through vast corridors wearing immaculate uniforms. nobody appeared concerned. nobody appeared rushed. they carried themselves with the confidence of beings who had solved problems i could not yet comprehend. eventually one of them approached me wearing the face of my sister. by this point trust had become impossible. my sister had already ceased being my sister several existential crises ago. if my mother had never existed, if my grandmother had never existed, if my childhood had never existed, then why should my sister be any different? i regarded her with the suspicion one might reserve for a particularly persuasive demon. she seemed unsurprised by this. she explained that she was not actually my sister. she and the others had merely adopted familiar forms because they believed it would make me more comfortable. i remember finding this deeply ironic given that i was currently less comfortable than at any previous point in my life.
she explained that humanity had destroyed itself. earth was gone. our species was gone. these beings had watched it happen. they had observed. they had studied. they had witnessed the entire collapse unfold and had been forbidden from intervening. by something i suppose even more superior. they could document the end of the world but not prevent it. i listened with the enthusiasm one might reserve for a tax audit. none of this mattered. earth was gone. my family was gone. my memories were gone. reality itself was hanging together by a thread. what exactly did they want from me? that question seemed to interest them greatly because apparently i was important. i remember rejecting this immediately. special people never believe they are special. frauds believe they are special. politicians believe they are special. every idiot with a microphone and an opinion believes they are special. meanwhile i was currently trying to remember whether my grandmother had ever existed. they insisted. i remained unconvinced. then something shifted. not in them. in me. it occurred to me that if everything they were saying was true... then they in fact needed me. not wanted. needed. according to their version of events i was the sole surviving representative of an extinct civilization. the final witness. the last human. they possessed technology beyond comprehension. knowledge beyond imagination. they could cross the stars while i was struggling to hold onto the concept of childhood. yet despite all of that they required something from me.
that was the moment fear disappeared. if they needed me, then i possessed something they did not. power changed hands instantly. they had knowledge but i had experience. they had studied humanity but i had been human. they had studied love but i had loved. they had studied grief but i had buried my mother. they had studied friendship but i had sat around campfires with old friends and laughed until my stomach hurt. they had studied snow but i had watched it fall. for the first time since the evening began i felt something resembling confidence. they could recreate cities. they could recreate planets. they could recreate stars. but they could not recreate the feeling of being alive. only i could do that. and so i agreed to help them. not because i believed them. not because i felt chosen. certainly not because i considered myself some cosmic saviour. i agreed because the universe had presented me with the strangest negotiation in history and i suddenly realized i held all the leverage. if humanity was truly gone then i alone carried the blueprint. if earth was truly lost then i alone remembered what it felt like. and if they wished to rebuild it, they would have to do it my way.
chapter v — genesis
the next thing i remember is finding myself back on the mattress. that mattress really had no business surviving everything it survived. civilization had collapsed. humanity had vanished. reality itself had been taken apart and examined from the inside. i had apparently negotiated with extraterrestrials and accepted responsibility for rebuilding existence. meanwhile the mattress remained exactly where it had always been... faithfully waiting beside a shed near a lake as though none of this was particularly unusual. the campfire had burned low. only glowing coals remained. somewhere nearby people were still talking. somebody laughed. somebody wandered past carrying food. the lake reflected the approaching dawn. everything appeared normal and yet nothing felt real. the best way i can describe it is this: imagine walking onto a film set after the actors have gone home. the houses look like houses. the streets look like streets. the trees look like trees. but some invisible quality is missing. everything appears convincing until you touch it. that was how the world felt. the grass looked like grass but wasn't really grass. the trees looked like trees but weren't really trees. the lake looked like a lake but felt more like an exceptionally well funded imitation of one. the entire world had become a prop. a reconstruction. a stage assembled by beings who understood the mechanics of reality but had never actually lived inside it.
then somebody handed me a strawberry. of all the profound moments that unfolded during that night i still find it amusing that a strawberry became the turning point. not an angel. not a revelation. not some cosmic secret whispered through dimensions. a strawberry. i took a bite and immediately knew something was wrong. not dramatically wrong. it wasn't rotten. it wasn't poisonous. it simply lacked life. it looked exactly like a strawberry should look. it smelled exactly like a strawberry should smell. yet the experience felt hollow. it was a strawberry assembled from instructions. technically correct but missing its soul. i remember staring at it and suddenly understanding what these beings were asking from me. they could recreate the object. they could recreate the shape. they could recreate the chemistry. what they could not recreate was the feeling. they could build a strawberry. they could not build summer. they could not build childhood. they could not build the experience of stealing one from a garden and eating it before anyone noticed. they could not build memory. so i fixed it. i made it sweeter. juicier. alive. and the moment i did, i felt something shift around me. not applause. not celebration. more like recognition. as though i had finally understood the assignment.
once i understood it, i began noticing everything that was missing. the dawn itself felt wrong. the light was there. the lake was there. the trees were there. yet everything felt unnaturally still. then it occurred to me that earth was never silent. not once in its entire history. silence exists mostly in poetry. the real world is endlessly noisy. leaves rustle. branches creak. birds gossip. insects conduct mysterious insect business. water moves. wind wanders through forests. even solitude has a soundtrack. so i created a breeze. i remember that moment vividly. one instant the trees stood motionless like decorations and the next they began to move. not dramatically. just enough. enough for leaves to whisper. enough for branches to sway. enough for the forest to remember it was alive. then came the birds. their songs emerged from somewhere beyond the shoreline. hesitant at first. then confident. then everywhere. suddenly the morning possessed distance again. depth again. character again. i looked down at the grass and realised it too was wrong. beautiful perhaps. green certainly. alive? not quite. nothing moved beneath it. there were no insects. no worms. no beetles conducting important beetle affairs. and for the first time i realized how much of earth's magic belongs to creatures nobody particularly likes. so i created them. worms beneath the soil. ants marching with purpose. beetles. spiders. all the tiny unseen workers responsible for turning dirt into a living ecosystem. the moment they appeared the world exhaled.
that is still the best way i can describe it. it exhaled. and for the first time since this impossible project began... i stopped feeling afraid and started having fun. i know how ridiculous that sounds given the circumstances. only a few hours earlier i had watched my entire reality burn to the ground. now i was sitting beside a lake in the estonian countryside enthusiastically reintroducing worms to existence. yet that is exactly what happened. i was remembering. not facts. not history. sensations. the coolness of morning air against skin. the smell of wet grass. the sound of birds greeting the sun. the endless complexity hidden inside ordinary things. i had spent hours watching reality unravel. now i was watching it return. piece by piece. breath by breath. birdsong by birdsong. and for the first time that night i understood why creation myths always sound slightly absurd. creating a world is easy. creating a world worth living in is the difficult part.
chapter vi — the impossible equation
for a while i remained entirely occupied with the pleasant parts. this is hardly surprising. given the opportunity to recreate existence from scratch, most people do not immediately begin with grief. they begin with strawberries. with birdsong. with summer mornings. with all the things that make life feel worth living. i was no different. once the breeze returned and the insects resumed whatever important negotiations insects have beneath the soil, the world became increasingly enjoyable. the sun climbed higher. warmth settled across the lake. the trees moved naturally now. the birds no longer sounded rehearsed. earth was beginning to feel like earth again. and i must confess there was something deeply satisfying about watching it happen. i had spent what felt like an eternity trapped inside absolute despair, convinced that nothing had ever existed. now i was sitting at the centre of creation itself, remembering things back into being. not facts nor objects. feelings. experiences. textures. the peculiar sensation of stepping outside on the first truly warm day after winter. the smell of rain striking hot pavement. the comfort of hearing laughter from another room. all those tiny moments which seem insignificant until they disappear.
then came the problem of people.
the strange thing is that i had already recreated much of what makes life beautiful before i arrived at humanity. there were forests and there were birds. there was wind moving through leaves. there were seasons waiting patiently. for a brief moment i considered leaving it there. after all... according to the story i had been told, people were responsible for destroying everything in the first place. the forests had done nothing wrong. the birds had done nothing wrong. perhaps the solution was obvious. keep the beauty. remove the problem. the idea survived approximately thirty seconds. because the more i thought about it, the more i realized that every beautiful memory she had burned in the beginning of the night involved people. my grandmother was people. my mother was people. friends sitting around a campfire were people. every moment worth grieving had originated from the very species i was now considering excluding. i wanted sunsets on beaches. unfortunately sunsets become significantly less interesting when nobody is there to watch them. i wanted laughter. friendship. first love. family dinners. graduation days. old friends telling increasingly inaccurate stories. children discovering snow for the first time. people falling hopelessly in love and pretending they know what they are doing. all of it required humanity. the same species capable of breaking the world was also responsible for everything that made the world worth missing.
so i created them. i created birth first. that felt appropriate. not individual
and then i arrived at death.
i remember stopping. even now... after everything else that happened that night, after the burning memories and the extraterrestrials and the reconstruction of existence itself... that remains one of the clearest moments. wind had been easy. birds had been easy. even love had been easy. death was personal. four years earlier i had buried my mother and grief was not some abstract concept floating around inside a philosophy textbook. it had weight. texture. smell. i knew what it felt like to stand in its shadow. for a while i resisted. perhaps this was the point where i could improve upon the original design. perhaps death was merely a flaw inherited from an older version of reality. perhaps i could leave it out entirely. after all, if i was rebuilding the human experience from memory, why would i willingly reintroduce the very thing that had caused so much pain? i sat with that question for what felt like hours. maybe it was hours. maybe it was minutes. time was still behaving more like a suggestion than a law. eventually i realised the problem was larger than death itself. the moment i removed death, everything else began coming apart with it. birth no longer meant anything because nothing had ever been absent. love no longer carried urgency because nobody could ever leave. seasons became decorative. sunsets became permanent. even joy itself started losing shape. i began understanding something i had never fully appreciated before. meaning does not emerge despite impermanence. meaning emerges because of it. the first snowflake matters because it melts. childhood matters because it ends. a conversation with an old friend matters because one day it will be the last conversation. the leaves turn yellow because they are preparing to fall. the tide retreats because it must eventually return. everything beautiful seemed connected to the fact that it could not remain exactly as it was.
i would spend many years thinking about that realisation afterwards. at the time it felt less like wisdom and more like surrender. i was not creating death because i admired it. i was creating it because i could no longer imagine a living world without it. once death returned, grief arrived naturally behind it. then loss. then longing. then all those emotions people spend their lives trying to avoid and poets spend their lives trying to describe. for a while i resisted those too. surely if i was rebuilding existence i could leave sorrow outside the gates. surely i could keep the beaches and the sunsets and the first kisses and the graduation days without inviting heartbreak to the party. yet every time i tried, the entire structure felt hollow. beauty alone became strangely lifeless. joy without contrast began feeling artificial. a world containing only pleasant experiences resembled one of those showroom houses where nobody actually lives. everything appeared perfect and nothing felt real. slowly... reluctantly, i accepted that the architecture of being human required more than happiness. it required contrast. movement. departure. return. i would not create war. i would not create hunger. i would not create cruelty for its own sake. those felt unnecessary. but illness belonged there. aging belonged there. grief belonged there. not as punishments and not as flaws. simply as part of the rhythm. the tide cannot remain high forever. summer cannot remain summer forever. people cannot remain forever. and somewhere beside a lake in the estonian countryside...while the rest of the party carried on entirely unaware, i found myself placing death back into the universe and hating every second of it while simultaneously understanding it was the only way any of the beautiful things could survive.
chapter viii — ten years later
the strange thing is that none of this felt particularly important when the sun came up. i did not emerge from the experience enlightened. i did not return carrying cosmic wisdom. i certainly did not spend the following weeks telling everyone i had uncovered the secrets of existence. quite the opposite. i remember sitting beside that same lake watching my friends wake up one by one. people searched for coffee. people searched for breakfast. people laughed at stories from the night before. somebody complained about their hangover. somebody wandered off into the trees. the world continued exactly as it always had. meanwhile i felt as though i had spent the night dismantling and rebuilding reality from the ground up. nobody noticed. which... in hindsight, was probably for the best. 'you are still sitting in the same spot?' they asked amused.
for years afterwards i rarely spoke about it. not because i was afraid people would think i was crazy. if anything...i was afraid they would think it was interesting. the truth was considerably less glamorous. i was not walking around feeling enlightened. i was walking around feeling haunted. something had shifted that night and i could never quite shift it back. the world no longer possessed the same solidity it once had. every situation carried the faint flavour of theatre. every argument. every celebration. every heartbreak. every success. everything felt strangely temporary and constructed. as though somewhere just beyond the edges of perception stood a crew waiting to dismantle the scenery the moment i looked away. i would sit in restaurants wondering what the point was. walk through shopping centres wondering what the point was. attend birthdays and parties and funerals and ask myself the same question over and over again. if none of this is real then why does any of it matter?
the problem was that i had already answered that question without realizing it. the answer had arrived beside a lake in the estonian countryside sometime around four in the morning while the rest of the party continued blissfully unaware that i was busy reconstructing existence. when i rebuilt the world i did not begin with governments or economies or religions. i began with strawberries. with birdsong. with wind moving through trees. with the first warm day after winter. with old friends laughing around campfires. with yellow leaves and first kisses and grief and love and all the strange little experiences that make up a life. i never recreated facts. i recreated feelings. and perhaps that was the lesson hidden inside the entire ordeal. perhaps the question was never whether reality is real. perhaps reality has never cared what we think about it. perhaps the only thing that matters is participation.
it took me years to arrive at that conclusion. years to stop standing outside the experience and judging it. years to stop treating life like a philosophical problem to be solved. eventually i understood that whether this world is a simulation, a dream, a cosmic accident or something stranger than any of those possibilities changes remarkably little. the birds still sing. people still fall in love. mothers still die. friends still gather around campfires. leaves still turn yellow every autumn before surrendering themselves to winter. the experience remains the experience regardless of what machinery happens to be operating beneath it.
so these days i no longer spend much time worrying about whether the game is real.
i am far more interested in playing it.
after all... i already rebuilt the bloody thing once.
looking back now... it feels less like a bad trip and more like a prologue. the first crack in the shell. years before twin flame came into reality.... years before awakenings, years before dark night of the soul. years before i would find myself standing in a prison corridor haunted by the scent of a childhood that may or may not have existed. it took me ten years to cook this story properly. ten years to find the language for it. now...at long last...you know why i'm so fucking unhinged.
