Portals To Another World

A Living Puzzel

    Our minds rationalise what we cannot comprehend. We jump to the most likely conclusion and convince ourselves of that idea when the loose ends do not add up. If we step into a house where the walls jump to different places, we begin to search for the most reasonable solution, maybe we are trapped in a horror movie. Something like The Shining perhaps. If we have reason we have a sense of understanding and safety. Our brains can think of the furthest possible reasoning, go to any length, always looking for patterns and rhythms in what we experience.

    So what happens when even our minds cannot think of a reasonable solution?

    I saw something one day. Or night. I'm not sure of the time. I saw it, or felt it, or... experienced it. Was it right to say that my eyes beheld it? Or that my sense were able to pick it up? Something was cold on my side, I was leaning against the wall. Praying that the creature didn't look over and see me. Could it see me? It wasn't moving, totally still, but it was shifting. Constantly folding back in on itself, opening up, swallowing the air just to stand facing the wall. Somehow it stood still and was moving at the same time. Like its structure stayed in the same place but its cells where dividing and merging all the time. Because of this I couldn't tell if it was looking at me or not, but I felt as though its attention was focused on the wall. I got the sense that of everything that was happening, I did not want its attention on me.

    But then it looked over. Saw me. Perceived me. Focused its attention on me. And I was flattened against the air pressing on my back. Its attention was like a wet blanket. A noise sounded up in my ears, like the pressure fluctuating in a vacuum. And my body broke. My bones shattered. My blood reversed it's way around my veins. My eyes melted. My skin tightened. The thing did not move. I was being broke a million times a second. Broken and shattered and destroyed. And made and reborn and living. This all happened in the space of a second, a second that stretched for a hundred years. A hundred years that lasted a second. I couldn't tell how long I'd been there. I was plunged under water, seawater forced down my throat. Lungs drowned. Choking on the salt in the water. Then fire scorched it's way through my body, evaporating the nonexistent water. My body could not move, the pain too much to bear. My eyes were dry and sore but I could not move them away from it.

    My mind searched for a way that it caused all this without touching me. Without anything touching me.

    But I could not. The way it moved, the way it felt like a curious child seeking to learn, probing my mind and body. Like I could not comprehend it, it could not comprehend me.

    Its attention then moved off me, and I was left gasping for breath. Concentrating on not falling. I watched it as it seemed to melt into the air and become even more liquid, dissipating. My eyes slowly moved down to my hands that were intact, I checked the rest of my body, all fine. But I did not imagine the pain that my body went through, that my mind went through. I looked back to where it had been. Still searching for some reason, any reason, behind this, I walked slowly to the edge of the room. I saw the way the air shimmered in the place it had been, the way I could still feel its presence as if it left an imprint on my own structure. Running my fingertips over the wall I noticed the way it pulsed, the white tangles of what I thought was rock was moving with a steady rhythm I knew all too well.

    Breath.