Cultural Looping Syndrome

0.02

250 polychrome statues adorned the floor of a temple near the Mount Emei Scenic Area (峨眉山). There, she types on a machine, her hands covered in leather.

"Ritual practice", she says in an endless loop.

The demigod reflects her desire back at us. I feel the hunger, the cold touch of painted memories. Leave me in the snow, tie me to the altar, and drown me in your lake of nonexistent faith. I'm island bound, a spiral turned to stone and this is my new prison.

"I may never see you again", I said.

She stopped. "These contrived wounds are only a distraction. I count my friends fewer than my lovers, and I need only two hands for both."

I am, in some fundamental way, empty. Nobody cares about you, when you become a fossil. Rooted and bruising on the concrete floor, a casual violation. Sometimes I feel the circular tidal metaphors, like imprints of the primordial cosmos dripping slowly into the arid land. An inexplicable pain on the threshold, wielding searing knives that skin the deer. I avoided breathing night air by going indoors and keeping windows and doors shut. On a parallel timeline, something black and stretchy pulled itself over scavenged wood.

There was an urgent trajectory. She wept scented tears, apparitions, falling on the lure of a crucial gaze. Only the flame is real. Everything had always lacked accuracy and depth. A wooden image of herself, of flesh and fur, a swift run of motionless hollow eyes. The western star fell like a scandalous random experience.

"I can only give you what will never be yours", she said helplessly.

And why it we like sad music? Why can't it all disappear from the horizon of history-just as silence. It was too hard to swallow the fact her quest was over. She would now offer her mind to a higher power.

"If you don't want it now, crawl back when you do".

This page from our saga, trapped in its decay, restless in the artificial womb. Does it exist at all? A real body in the external reality? I can barely pretend to be myself, let alone anyone else. An iridescent and restless bird, vital in absence, from zero to infinity.