My Secret Garden

There’s a tiny square in my brain that I have mapped out for my own self preservation. Right now it’s little more than a jail cell, but at least I can close the door and keep the rest of the universe out. In this tiny space I am completely sane. Completely weird, emotional, erratic, intense, manic, depressed, exhausted, spun-up, but sane.

In this tiny cell, I work desperately to keep my spark alive. Both magic and science work as a singular construct. There is no veil here. The universe makes sense.

Whenever I open the door to this cell to walk outside with the spark, however, the raging torrent of external insanity floods my innermost room, trying to extinguish the light.

I’m fairly certain at this point the reason this has happened is that my spark is that powerful; that dangerous. I can only surmise if the spark was allowed to cross the threshold, the entire universe’s order would be upended, because this is the only reasonable explanation at this point.

My singular view of the universe threatens most everyone else’s, and there is clearly some fundamental mechanism at play to prevent these “streams” from crossing.

Our shared reality requires an amount of group delusion to avoid disintegration. That said, the group delusion is running our reality at this point.

I know I’m not completely alone where I am, I tap out messages to the other inmates on a pipe beside my bunk, like morse code. Sometimes the other inmates tap a message back so that we know we’re not completely alone in this.

Today, I scratch one more notch on the wall and wait for the pressure to equalize outside so that maybe one day I might be able to open the door and carry my spark out of this hell.

And I swear to God, if one more prison guard tells me it’s me and not the world today, then I’m just going to lock myself in here for good.