A Thousand Ways to Go Blind.

They ­­sat, waiting, in my chest.

I woke up and turned to see a group of men huddled in the empty, lidless, wooden chest that stood next to my bed.

Their heads poked up above the rim. They did not seem to see me yet, as I lay in bed and looked at them.

Then, with a single movement, they rose from the chest and grabbed me. A foot there, a hand, a forearm " without word or pause they took their places. As a group they pulled and lifted and carried me away.

“Down, down, down” they said, accentuating each step. I looked and saw the home that was once so familiar, the neutral carpet and blank computer, from a distance. The dim light was a barrier to my clutching hands as I tried to take hold of what I knew.

They carried me through the hall.

They carried me down the stairs.

They carried me out of the house.

Through the forest, they carried me, where the trees twisted and lurched but did not lift their twigs to catch me as I fell through the world in the hands of these strange men.

As they carried me I looked into the faces but they shifted and swirled, each man becoming the next.

Shadows from the leaves fell on my face and hands.

Leaves of shadow fell on my head and closed my eyes as I moved without fear in my sleep.

I woke up to find I had been carried through the earth, and was surrounded by darkness.

Sitting up I hit my head on the shadows above me. The earth fell in little clods, filling the cracks between my fingers with moist darkness. My breath rebounded from the walls and misted back on my mouth.

The men were gone.

I put my hands over my mouth even though I was not crying, pulling back the corners of my lips as I held on. I felt the darkness swallow me, even as I drank it in shuddering mouthfuls. Heaving with the weight that pushed the dirt towards my head and my head towards the dirt I tried to sit up. There was not enough room, even for that. For hours, I struggled against the dirt and against my body. I wanted to fling it all aside and return to what I had known. As I grew weak, all I wanted was to sleep again. I wanted to forget. If I could not change anything I did not want to know anything.

I could not sleep in that hole, I could find no peace.

I lay and tossed as room allowed, squirming in a body suit of dirt. All I felt was limitless. Bounding frustration and discontent were actually propelling in the only possible direction " down. I did not know I was moving but like a worm I burrowed deeper. I cried in my shame and fear but I still moved onwards. I was ashamed because I felt that I was not strong enough to escape or give up, and I was afraid because the terror beneath me that I had always suspected had come up and found me at last.

And still I sank deeper into the darkness.

I did not wonder why I had been planted, like a moth inside the waxy sarcophagus.

When planted inside the earth and left the fear is enough.

And then after so much of the same dirt and moist and dark --

A change.

I felt cold air on my face and then a drop into slime. It was water, a liquid, but thick. I did not know how to change my movement to fit the medium I moved in. I sank into a world, a world I had never seen before but had dreamed of, had nightmared of in the soundless nights.

They were large, and dangerous, and angry; the animals in the slime. They swam through the darkness, more vast than any vastness I had ever known.  Blades of pale light cut up through the water and found my eyes but I only wished for the darkness again.

Whiskers,

Fish tails,

Reedy fins,

Pale and hooded and lamplike eyes,

Cruelty that was slime like the water.

The monsters cut at each other and churned but the lake of slime was depth itself and not even a tremor reached me, except through my heart. I watched them roll and fight, unsure if I witnessed the violence of rivalry or some ancient sacrificial impregnation. The bodies were large and at each turn I could only hold a part of the body in my mind, in my vision. One turned a vast eye towards me. In the face of something huge and incomparably important I did not feel fear.

A hand reached through the water and grabbed my shoulder. I was lifted onto a boat where I lay, surrounded by pale and dirty faces. Their eyes flickered back and forth. I turned and fell asleep.

When I woke up, I stood on the deck of a ship. It was wooden and hard, the wood petrified and smooth, and the water sliding over the vessel mineral, cool, and dark. The rowers and steerers and navigators did not look at me, each of them a pulse in the darkness and the silence. We were moving towards a town at the base of a mountain. A mountain on a lake in a cavern in the belly of the earth.

The town was dark and filled with echoes. The boat-people landed and started unloading their cargo: miniature slime monsters. Some tentacled, some still squirming in the air. These hands that bite us, also feed us.

In the town, the people moved without escaping the shadows. Just paleness in the darkness, eating and drinking the products of it.

It was the commune of death, the half lives of the buried.

Gone for a hundred years, beyond desire and needing. Filling the cycles of the world, like a watershed, they are living in the space beneath the walls of the world.

I could live here, in the fear.

 

There’s not much more to the story, no lyrical re-birth.

No Pheonix, no Prometheus. No journey up, only the journey “down, down, down”, as my captors had prophesied.

There, under the earth, they made me their king. A king for the empty people, a king for the empty throne; a king is an empty title.

And I’ll never know why; the key to this life is surrender. No control"

Just darkness, here, under the earth.