Gordian Knot

The train clamor awoke me with a shutter. I watch the flashing of indigo lights like lightning storming through swollen eyelids; black, blue, black, and blue. A familiar spirit in the distance I recognize, but cannot place, as a specters’ ramblings can be heard; momentarily jolting my mind out of a blur of depression. This depression lingers like sullen fog circling an abandoned bridge; suspending water droplets while obscuring my clarity. My stubby fingers can't be seen held out in front of me, years can't be seen either.

Wisps of dust and dead skin glittered in sun beams; eventually laying to rest along the cracked metallic sheets lining the train floors; mixing in with stale cracker crumbs and lost change… lost...change. What labyrinth of events led me here; on this train? All I want to feel now is anything but me and this place. I want a different life, a new life, an old life, someone else's life. No god would be cruel enough to expect such suffering for any amount of trivial reward. Surely, someone else has been here before and knows how to fix this...someone...anyone?

With no memory of purchasing a train ticket; my gaze sharpened, and I made out the words on the crumpled pamphlet sliding off my lap; “You are here… not where you want to be.”

Looking around, the train appeared to carry no other passengers, no operators, no engineers; I was alone. My gaze focused through the windows, but I was traveling too quickly to identify more than just smeared colors, and undefinable shapes.

“What direction are you going in? How do you get lost on a train?” I whispered.

Much like Chernobyl spiders that weave expansive chaotic webs, I had found myself in a tangled mess of disarray and discontentment. You see, there’s something outside of their efficiently manufactured bodies that had penetrated their perception and armored brains, that came out in their web work; disillusioned and toxic. It was as if nature was preventing their webs from catching the capsules of nutrients they needed to sustain life, leaving holes in strands of thin shiny heaps on purpose. The fate of these tiny creatures’ DNA was left not to continue. Still, the deformed insects continue to weave massive webs, jump tree to tree, collecting the fleeting vibrations that will soon disappear. Crawling from four corners in an attempt to salvage what is left of their existence. Unstoppable. Was this my fate? An uncontrollable desire to cling to a passed down web, that I know is destined for destruction? A victim in my own life story?

I was always running away while lugging a trail of meaningless trinkets behind me. Here, on this train; the trinkets held no value. Passing through a tunnel, darkness expanded through the train, and I could articulate an embodiment in the window reflection; me, a monster, me, a monster, me again.

Often, we blame the world around us for our troubles causing us to easily forget those dark spaces and corners within our own demented minds. Most of our monsters are our own perceptions and expectations of how selfishly we expect the world to be, rather than the way it actually is. The monsters live within us, are created by us, and are only there to see when we let them escape out into the vast dimensions of our trivial worlds. At times they collide with other worlds and are able to walk freely amongst them, plaguing others. I had many monsters, I let escape. So, I learned to build staggering fences to keep the monsters out, and sometimes to keep me in. But today, on this train, I traveled trapped with this monster; a part of myself.