I walk through the day with the weight of a name I didn’t choose. What I do gives it shape, this thick crust around my being, and each small movement shatters a previous self like snow turning into mud. I say “I” but I am two. Two voices, one beneath, whispering through barbed-wire sleep. The upper self grins, shakes hands, performs. The lower watches behind the stage curtains, itching, shifting, rearranging the set of a theater piece meant only for one. I feel a kind of excited nervousness all the time and it’s not just from stage fright. It’s as if every word I speak might expose the architecture of my inner catacombs, crawling with symbols and mythical masks, riddled with hungry ghosts. Yet they see nothing, the ones outside. Their eyes are like tiny television screens, their thoughts are tuned to the peaceful sound of the mass consensus. Even if I were to scream: “I am burning inside!” they would nod politely and ask me how the day is going. Strange… And why shouldn’t I be strange? I have seen what’s in me: not sin, not sickness, but those elemental biological robots that determine my destiny. Little gods with no eyes, turning ancient mechanical handles in silence, churning out impulse, dream, dread; they do not ask permission from me or from anyone else; they live in a dark place where even I cannot look, not directly… They may be my old memories, or maybe not mine at all. Each act I commit alters the possible futures I am permitted to experience, the selves I am allowed to become; the true expression of me lies not in the mirror, but in the black well that lies beneath, where the reflection refuses to reveal itself… I have come to believe that the unconscious is a bridge, a tunnel, a river that runs black and cold beneath every word I say; I cup it in my hands sometimes, that dark river water, but it slips through, carving new pathways in my tiny universe. What I do changes what I am, and what I am, day to day, determines what I do and how I slowly drift into the mouth of some forgotten night… And still I smile when it seems appropriate. Still I nod. Still I wait for the day when someone else twitches, and I know that they see it too… Now I see, not the whole picture but just enough: a jagged shard reflecting a face I half-remember and half wish to forget. This is what I call vision: not a shining prophecy, but a kind of subtraction; I remove what does not belong, I scrape away the soft edges, the false comforts, the gentle masks, the structure others call personality; every smile that does not serve must be sliced from my mouth. I have slept and I have dreamed; and in that dream I was not I. My own image wandered there, detached and spectral, through dimensions that defy the rhythm of our clocks, those vast rooms without corners, where the light does not fall, where time is not a direction but an open wound… I was in El Salvador again, where the sunlight stings like old guilt. There was my father, that face of gravity and sweat, and we said goodbye like men do; half-hug, nod, silence. But then he pulled me aside, his hands strong like always, his voice rising with that familiar heat: “You need to work harder. You need to take care of yourself. You need to meditate…” No. Not this time. Not in this dream that is not yours. I looked him in the eyes, brown, bloodshot, heavy with so many years of resentment, and I said, “But actually you’re the one who needs to work more.” A pause. His silence like an ancient wall. So I said it louder: “LOOK AT YOURSELF. NO…REALLY. LOOK AT YOURSELF.” He didn’t of course. But the dream kept going. Or maybe I did. Because what I do changes what I am. And what I am changes what I can do next. That’s the terror of this clarity, that it binds you, that it burns the bridges that extend back towards comfort; I used to believe in freedom, a simple fiction of limitless motion. But now I know: vision is a blade, and consistency is the hand that dares to wield it. So I will keep cutting until all that remains is the shape of the thing I must become… I still feel a kind of attachment, a thin palpitating wound, like a hairline crack in a glass window, imperceptible until the light hits it just right; attachment to my name, my face, the little gestures I polish like coins: a way of laughing, a hunger for praise, that slow, stupid dance of simplistic, selfish ambition… All of it, ropes I tie myself around my own ankles. I know this. I say it aloud, as if this private incantation could loosen the knots; but knowledge does not unbind. Because what is easy, the forgetting that comes in dreams, the blessed numbness of accident, the serene erasure of time, becomes nearly impossible when it is consciously willed; just like trying to forget something on purpose, you’ll remember it more clearly the more you try to forget; like carving a face into a mirror… I remember my father not for his warmth, but for the twisted systems he built in his pregnant silences and glares; every word a transaction, every moment a border checkpoint, life or death on the line; he tried to engineer a world where no one could stray too far from his wishes; where freedom was chaos, and chaos was treason; step out of line and the hammer would come down; not just with rage, but with the terrible logic of a man who cannot tolerate the unknown… I wanted to escape that iron clad logic, but the attempt to escape itself became another trap; I became that which is not him and so remained attached to him in a negative loop. Define yourself by negation and you still serve the ghost you have tried to leave behind. But that is the point, isn’t it? What is forbidden, the outside, the feral, the unspeakable desire to not belong, to be a true outsider, that is what calls to me most sweetly; the attraction of the unknown is not a mistake, it is the residue of a deeper self beneath the constructed one, it is the lawless place where no parameter survives… I reach for it. Sometimes only in dreams, sometimes in action. And the closer I get, the more I must let go: of the face, of the voice, of the story I’ve told myself about who I am. This is not freedom. It is falling. But maybe, if I fall long enough, I will land outside the map my father tried to draw and there I might find something worth finding… What is left is a blade edge, not the past, which has hardened and softened in layers like sediment stained by regret; not the future, that smiling con man always promising a climax that never quite arrives; but the now, the present, that sharp flicker between breaths; I must find it in every moment, and then stitch all these fragments of presence onto the marked skin of the past. Only through this constant work can the truth behind time begin to show itself, like bone beneath wounded flesh… But my body, this meat-engine wired to half forgotten ghosts, wants to fall, wants the warm cloak of nostalgia, wants the story of how it used to be, wants the lie that what hurt before will somehow heal and become new again, if I return to it carefully enough… But I must resist. Not stoically, but savagely. The present is war, a battle zone. And sentimentality is treason. Sentimentality, that padded room we inherit from culture, from shame, from mother’s lullaby and father’s silence. It cloaks the will in translucent gauze. It says: Be good, be cautious. Remember how things are and how they should be. Remember how things were. But when it is set aside, when I rip it from my face like a wet mask, something stirs. The will awakens. Not the moral will, not the obedient servant that follows the rules as I know them, the rules that I was taught, but the dark will, the one that does what it must, without fear, without permission, without a hint of morality or limitation… There, and only there, does freedom begin. And what once was forbidden, what I was told not to touch, not to want, not to say, it calls to me now, like a lost god's whisper in a long-dried well; the unknown, once caged in the word dangerous, now beckons me with strange music. It is not safe. It is not pure. But it is real. And so I return to the present again. Bleeding from memory, aching with restraint, dragging the past behind me like a sack of heavy wet stones… and still, I try to stand upright; because presence is the only altar where the self can be sacrificed and finally become whole… Now that I see, everything must follow. No more wandering. No more friendly detours into the vaguely pleasurable, the simply permissible. Just this: a narrowing, a tightening of the noose called purpose. The vision has become clearer; not brighter, not kinder, just sharper, like frost across glass or the edge of a broken bottle… I must be consistent. I must remove all obstacles. Remove the useless comforts. Remove the parts of myself that clap when I lie. Remove the endless waiting rooms of narrowly defined identity. But what used to slip away like loose thread now clings like wet cloth; because to choose to let go is not the same as forgetting. To amputate with awareness hurts more than I would expect. What is easy to lose by accident becomes unbearable when you must do it fully awake. I try to talk about it. I speak in diagrams, in reports, in casual metaphors. I say: ‘the vision looks like this’ as if it had clear dimensions, as if it stood still long enough to measure. But the vision resists measurement and it’s always moving. It flickers when I try to explain. It mocks my limited language… Truth lives elsewhere. Not in what I say, but in what I don’t know how to say; that place deep inside where nothing is distinct or stable; where thoughts melt before they coalesce, where the self forgets it is separate, where will and instinct bleed into the same pool… You want to find yourself? Then dig down, past your stories, past your explanations, past your insistent love of light; keep going until it’s dark, until everything blurs, until you feel yourself dissolving into something shapeless and somehow you are still there… That’s where the vision comes from; and that’s where it must lead… So I follow this ambiguous guide, not with hope, not with clarity; but with a knife in one hand and cautious silence in the other… The world, I now see, is a complex labyrinth; not as a metaphor, not like the mazes on tourist postcards or Tarot cards, but a real labyrinth: stone and echo, corridors of law, guilt, memory. I walk through it day after day, and every turn promises some kind of escape; a north, a south, a turn towards some kind of salvation; but they all fold back into the same entrance, the place I started from: my name, my face, my father… My father; a man of reason, or so he claimed, but what he did when we argued for hours wasn’t reason. It was a performance. A performance of an expected dialectic, polished and recited, a war disguised as a conversation. His voice, a cage of syllogisms. Mine, the rusted key that never quite fit into his lock. Every argument we had was a hidden geometry; a drawing designed to look square, but always curving back into him being right, into me being silent; into that familiar, choking detour toward shame and dismissal… But now he’s gone. And strangely, there’s air again. I can breathe again. There’s no peace (never true peace) but a kind of open space in each moment to choose. To act without sudden rebuttal. To fail without being silently observed. To walk through the same old corridors and realize there’s a crack in the wall where his shadow used to stand. And in that space, in that crack, I’ve slept. I’ve dreamed. Dreams where the mind no longer obeys the linear tyranny of waking. Dreams where my consciousness, no longer a prisoner of the flesh, wanders into hyperspatial dimensions, the infinite halls of the dream-labyrinth where time is an unspoken myth, where past and future lose their costumes and we sit naked together, laughing. There I see him again. Not as he was but as he might have been had he let himself dissolve. Had he ever let go. Had he stopped building arguments like fences around a cherished property… And, when I see him, I walk toward him, or what remains of him, and I don’t speak. Because this time, there’s no need for the performance of the dialectic; only the echo of freedom in a hallway with no beginning and no end.
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