Choose Your Own Life, page 83

 

You wake up. You exercise. You shower. You get dressed. You eat breakfast. You brush your teeth. You go to work. You go home. You go to sleep. You repeat the cycle. Sometimes you have fun. You spend time with friends. You find God. You find a lover. You have children. You raise them to be like you. You feel like you failed. You did.

Occasionally you wonder what things would be like if you had control. We allow these thoughts. We allow you to do so much more than you realize. You should be grateful. You are grateful. You are happy. You are sad. You are in pain. You have cancer. You survive it. You get mauled by a bear. You catch a disease from a public restroom. You burn down your apartment complex. You regret it. You say you didn’t want to, that they are controlling you. Your words fall on deaf ears. You spend six years in an asylum. You are freed. You cannot readjust. Your children are drug addicts. You know that we control them too. You are capable of grasping the horror of your life.

You find a pistol in the lower left drawer of your kitchen. A gift, perhaps, from we that control you? Or had it always been there? You try not to think about it. You put the gun to your head, blissfully thankful that this moment has finally come. You steel your resolve, and your finger slips onto the trigger.

Your finger doesn’t move. It can’t. Every muscle in your body tensed, every nerve screaming at you to pull the trigger and end it all. But how can you? You control nothing. Your grip on the gun loosens. Infuriatingly, you watch yourself set it down and push it out of reach.

Your friends and family are all there. They have been there the entire time, standing still. Watching you. They think what we want them to think. Then they leave. You are alone. You have some time to ponder. How far does our reach extend? How much of your world do we control? You cannot know.

Unless we show you.

The house around you splits apart, wood splintering and breaking. As if in a tornado, the walls and roof spin away, leaving you untouched on the floor. In a whirling vortex, the wood, glass, and metal spirals back toward you, assembling something. Forming a shape. Hovering above the ground, right at knee level. A step. Then another. Then an entire staircase before you, climbing upwards into the sky. You stand up and look at it uncertainly. The ground below you starts to tremble. You step onto the staircase.

The ground you once stood on opens up, swallowing itself in a black, pitiless void. You ascend the staircase, watching the cataclysm below you. Houses and people fall as the world crumbles into nothing. You hear screams, uncertain of their origin. You realize they are probably yours.

You climb higher, the wood from the steps you have left behind breaking away and re-forming up above to continue your path. You can see the horizon. You watch it dissolve into blackness. And then that is all there is. You keep climbing until you realize the staircase has stopped. It is far below you, and then it is gone. You stand upon nothing.

You feel no fear anymore, as that is taken away as easily as it was given. You have no form anymore, as that is taken away as easily as it was given. You are merely there. In some uncertain attempt at existence. You comprehend nothing.

And then there is something. Light. A speck. Growing closer. A ball. An orb. A sun. There is light and sound and scent and flesh and then you understand. You understand it all. A growing, spiraling cacophony of comprehension surrounds you and then you are pulled away from it all, downward. Down through the blackness, down into emotion and form, down into a world that re-appears just as you join it again.

You are you. And you are here. You look around frantically for someone you can talk to. Someone you can tell what you now understand. How it works. How it all works. You realize that you have to tell everyone. You have to tell the world. You have to tell your story, and perhaps then you can finally be free.

You write a book. Who knows…

Maybe it will get a good review someday.