This is a short story I wrote on my perception of the world and based on scenes from 'Pink Floyd's: The Wall'.
Please don't steal.
The door opens.
The cold is slowly clawing and eating away at me as it the heat slowly struggles to free itself from the artificial confines of this room, slowly but surely clawing its way out. The heat, the essence of my body, seeks to follow after it, seeping out through every bare crevice and pore of the pale yet slightly rotted-looking skin covering the body in which my mind bases itself.
They see what has become of the room. So many items hanging in a fragile or precarious, uncaring way that had been able to hold their position for so long thanks to invisible yet extremely powerful force of caution locking their wrongful state of suspension or unkemptness in place. All of these had been broken from their place, some were stripped away from the lone position they had stood in for years simply to test that the reality of this room was not fading into suspension like the objects, and they had become frozen in time and space, just like the background of a painting. But they were not. They were, in fact, just objects, random accumulations of mass sitting but not entirely frozen in space, and I knew that while for all normal intents purposes they were touching the floor, every last one of them had an incomprehensible amount of molecules within them that were resisting and pushing against each other to avoid contact, every one within its own empty space… and yet at the same time all in unison. All the random clutter from around this place where I had so often put things down, promising to myself that I’d find some place for it, not just some place, but almost like a home. A place where, if it was put, could serve its purpose and function most efficiently… but that day never ended up coming. Instead just laying on top of the dresser, or in a small bowl, or lying in a hundred, even a thousand different pieces within a large container under the bed among many other things which had succumbed to the same fate. All that I could strip down from these places in those moments were what they saw as they looked around the room.
Uniformity. Every piece of the probably millions of objects, some even smaller than a grain of sand and some the size of a fist, or a piece of paper, because they were pieces of paper. All these broken or thrown objects had been tediously arranged. Through it all, I never became frustrated, I had let go of all feelings that extreme. Whenever I was cut by the tiny pieces of glass, or contorted into an extremely uncomfortable position to make sure the lines and curves of the glorious pattern looked their best to me, I thought of how it didn’t matter how good it was, it only mattered how good I thought it was. I wasn’t trying to do this for anyone’s standards, I was doing it because it was a beautiful way to manifest my mind and soul in physical representation. I was doing this as a gift to myself, and only I had to see it and like it. It didn’t even matter if any possible spirits watching me had thoughts. Forgive me grandpa, if you really can see and hear. I would have never even thought about doing this to the incredible antiques in your house. Or at least, that were in your house…
It was about there, as I suddenly jumped off this train of reminiscence into a river of painful memory, that I quickly dragged myself out, baking my skin and drying away every last drop of that river under the sun which was the star-filled sky. And I was free to get lost. No part of me tried to say (and no voice succeeded in saying) I shouldn’t get distracted, that I have a task and dedication. But what was the point of dedication if you can’t find some feelings of fulfillment? So I stared all around gazing at the grand art piece which was the sky. Usually, staring off into this inky void filled with tiny, scattered diamonds was a horrible idea, reminding me only of one thing, how small I was. But tonight, I simply chose to view it as a piece of art, one that every single person in the world had seen, even if there were those who didn’t admire it. I felt… proud, knowing that I, too, was creating something just as, if not more beautiful than this. And it was the most beautiful thing in the world, because it was me. I was molding my reality, my prison of routine, memory, and personal connection into a tribute to my own mind.
I breathed in, letting the tiny daggers of cold air rush up and then pierce the back of my navel cavity, further up one than the other. I worked my way over to the nearest trash, expelling the waste from deep within my skull, feeling not only cleansed, but reinvigorated. So I kept piling on, measuring, placing, arranging… and yet, through it all it didn’t feel like life. It didn’t feel like a purposeless, tedious task which I was trapping myself in. No, each little bit was a key to a different hall of thought, the power of my imagination making me the god of this universe which I had created. It wasn’t small, no. All I had to do was let those thoughts in, about how there was a nearly infinite number worlds upon worlds within each tiny fragment of something, every seemingly boring or unimportant shard had, if you looked close enough, a tiny crack or crevice that was, in a different world within this universe of a room that I alone oversaw, a massive canyon separating completely different landscapes. And this allowed me to keep on piling, all the many more, all through the night. No wonder I was surprised at how quickly I had finished, reminding me how my entire existence was, itself, unimaginably brief. Even with that in mind, I still knew that this was what I really wanted. So I let the next portion of my small, blink of an eye life in this world waste away, however long it was. Until they walked in.
So, someone would see. I truly do not and did not have any feelings about that, I didn’t care about anything anymore. As long as, even if for just a moment, my true self had been accumulated from the rubble of my restrained state of existence, no other eyes that would see or not see didn’t matter to me. But what they saw was this, Hexagons. The most perfect shape in all the universe, as many things in nature and even studies of objects in the universe at the atomic level had overwhelmingly proved to me. Hexagons, strength, arranged with the utmost delicacy across the entire floor of the room, very well described like a carpet pattern, weaving their way across the room in the ever-repeating pattern. They were all equal, all the same, even if made of millions, maybe billions of large and small shards. Tiny rubble and wreckage, ranging from 1 to 3 inches wide of countless different materials, colors, shapes… they were equal. They didn't change to go around, never. They either existed or did not. Just like a carpet pattern, whenever the rapidly flowing streamlined highways of things encountered something, like a wall, corner, or large piece of immovable furniture. To make precise corners and intersections around unique corners were of course, the cause of those periods of uncomfortability. Yet it was worth it to ensure the pattern, the shapes, did not change. They were simply… cut off. They couldn’t exist where they couldn’t exist, content to be incomplete, instead of trying to adjust. Why, oh why, couldn’t more living things be like this beautiful pattern? Rigid and never changing, and yet at the same time able to be fit within places it had to be.
With one exception. And that was what their focus was immediately drawn to, only jumping to what was biggest and most interesting-looking, not even asking ‘why’ to one other aspect of the current state of my universe which they had nervously entered. At the center of my universe, was my body. Though it wasn’t that important, compared to other things, it was undoubtedly significant in my current existence. Thus, I was generous to make an exception for my vessel. Around me, hugging unbelievably close to my silhouette, was another silhouette, identical but slightly larger, and merely a component of the lines, or were they all one big line, that spread across the floor in a hexagonal web. The silhouette was made with extreme care and caution through the early morning hours, more than any snow angel, placed down around all my edges in tedious precision, piece by piece. It was all worth it, it was more beautiful than I imagined, even if I had imagined it deep down inside of me for longer than anyone really knew, because it was real. And the only thing more real than this silhouette, a connection between my mental and physical being, was my actual vessel laying within, feeling something perhaps I’ve never truly felt before, perhaps barely and life in this universe ever has… content. Even if it only lasts shortly, when I fit my physical body in as the last piece of this puzzle which was my mind, I felt like I had achieved some kind of greater state of understanding of myself and my world. Then, I greeted my own self-assigned task of exploring the vast mysteries of thought and mind as I lay, in the same position as the christian savior on the cross… in perfect isolation.
Until, circling back to the ‘main events’, they found me. Lying there. Eyes and mouth closed, inhaling very slowly, and almost naked save for the black fabric covering the areas which I had my entire life despised. They reminded me the selfish evolutionary chain had only given me life in this body so that I could perpetuate whatever my species may be. This was, my entire life, as long as I could possibly remember, back to the earliest days of sitting on the couch, retaining more than anything else on tv the atrocities humans committed just by existing. Save for these places, I was only as I truly was. This vessel was practically useless to me. As long as it existed and kept my mind alive, why would there ever be any point in trying to make it look good?
As the light reflecting from my molecules entered their eyes, rapidly moving along different points, they stopped upon the area which reflected a low wavelength of light, what most minds called ‘red’. It encompassed the last foot or so of one of my upper extremities, with which I used to arrange the majority of my universe. Where lied a cooling and now hardening hot spring from which seeped out the thick, salty liquid which was key to my body’s survival, a gateway past the constantly dying skin which I knew, thanks to what were often called ‘horrific experiments’ conducted by Japanese scientists in the early 1940’s, contained mostly water as well as all the body’s interior workings.
They stepped towards me. Contrary to what I expected would likely occur, they did not instantly distort and destroy the peaceful unitary art which I had manifested, stepping over and around the shards, despite wearing foot coverings… almost as if they somehow knew this was important. Important to me, at least.
They looked me over once or twice, bending down, waving their hands around, shaking my body, calling my name, each time releasing larger sound waves through the air surrounding us. These waves traveled into one of the many components of my body designed and tinkered by evolution to be efficient at capturing them, the vibrations from the precise amount of force it created when impacting into tiny, rice-sized bones within my skull, which were then funneled through and picked up as specific patterns of electricity, which, through microscopic wires of tissue, were sent straight to me. However, at this exact time I did not have the capacity to create a whole new patterns of various signals and send them off to different parts of my body to respond, I was preoccupied, basking in every bit of this freedom which I could draw from ever-expanding planes of existence that were my thoughts and manifestations.
As the room moved more and more throughout time (and throughout space, but I don’t want to explain all that at this precise moment), more people entered the room, carrying objects which were just like how I wished the objects that were now smashed, shredded, and arranged about the floor could have been. They carried and took out things, many of which touched my body, that were always in a specific, identifiable, and easy to get to place, if not in use. Just like my thoughts. They moved my body through physical space and onto a platform of fabric above wheels, allowing them to move me while having to draw less energy from their bodies.
As I moved, I still felt a peace within me. I wasn’t being taken away from that place, because it was always inside me. The millions of worlds instants away from annihilation or modification, that was my mind. It only mattered now because it was real, even if not entirely anymore, it had been, for at least just a brief time, even more than a single moment. My body, an important piece of the puzzle, had been removed, but the puzzle was always complete inside of me.
As long as I knew, and felt, how the pieces should line up, nothing really matters. I don’t need to feel anything.
I feel… completed.
