The Legacy of Omnipotent Light

Lessons, cosmic tutelage, arrive packaged in flashing neon, the universe’s directionals. Guides that fade like setting suns, yanked beyond the blanket of the horizon by stalwart hands, the Un-Makers, hypnagogic gremlins that quarter the mind as a steak.

Who, at the aftermath, speaks for you, if the world won’t? What of the happenstance gift from a fallen Star, celestial offspring from the ghost-land, that gave you your mountains and your valleys? What of the stream-broiled meat-city you welcomed, and the coursing jets of sky-breath, the shared essence in which they, too, breathe? That you brought into fruition?

That you saved?

That you won?

Only the idiots win, anyway. That’s because they follow the lights to their terminal conclusion, imagine themselves as minuscule, curious things searching the brush of a mudstalker’s den. Such an idiot. What would you even know of those? What would you even know of anything?

Where do we draw the line at sense? At an explanation for your reasons steeped in the rancid goo of the factual, the verifiable? What are such things if not temporary? Fleeting?

Be honest with yourself. You’re not the hero of this world, or your People’s World. Perhaps you’re just another Inventor, like the rest of them, dancing at herself from within a Cage. The only glimmering mirage that rests on the horizon is the one you were taught to see with.

Names, and their associations, are irrelevant. They already know who they are, how they came to be. The tongues that first blessed them with uncanny animation, wrote the script for their second life, aggrandised the heaving, disheveled funny papers that only solidified our agonising distinctions, walls of culture against the colossal, threatening assimilation of a holy love.

The scintillating non-city could have been this. And you were so close. You nearly introduced the paradise beyond it all, a nigh-infinite Oasis where bodies gasp under the sand, formless, their putrid stench intermingling with the petrichor dropped in from the toolbox. Beyond actions confined to physics, beyond language that grinds void-rubber to a meticulously-drawn landscape.

Beyond the fate of the encountered Other. All-encompassing, self-made power without any of the intervention or the consequence.

Forget the adhesive liquid that clings to wilting skin. Forget the confinement to your eternal bed. Forget what you knew, what you loved, on behalf of the drifting fog. Forget that you were ever “alive” at all.

Revel in the simple irony, the exquisite joke splattered into the edges of the paint. A roiling museum, art born from urgency, generational disconnect.

A gap in the box that you will never close. Not from the idiot-image engine.

…

Just…stop. Stop it with the fucking metaphors.

Let’s get this straight: you terraformed a home for refugees. You gave them somewhere beautiful to stay, that reminded them of their past. You’ve played your part. You’ve helped people, at a fundamental level. You’ve entered back into the religion you loved, the one you’d tried so ruthlessly to defend in a world that you felt was cutting it off.

But you discovered it’s not the one you were willing to reject life for. You backtracked.

And for what?

Maybe because you remembered where you came from. Who you are.

And maybe, just maybe, that gets to be enough.

Stop running. Evidently, the new friend you just played the game of your life with did the same thing.

You’re echoes of each other.

There it is. That’s how you do it right.

Step into the box, alongside the rest of them. I promise you won’t lose yourself.

If anything, you’ll remember what made you so beautiful.

Written by Dakota S.