Entering and Exiting

There are no exits. The doors are flat matte metal under my fingers. They are sealed from the outside. I have no recollection of how I got here. The doors were locked when I found them. When I first put my fingers out in the dark, all I could remember was cold. I felt it for the first time, again. The sensation of being out in the world. Like a birth, the expulsion from the womb’s warmth into the cold dark. Now I am blank, black, mapped out on the concrete floor, which is smooth and seamless. The doors have seams. One splitting them from each other, one reaming the edges. The edge seam feels like two but runs along the floor and must rejoin the opposite seam at the top somewhere to make a complete circuit. I put my eyes to the seam and strain for a sense of light. If the doors join, then they must allow some light in. But there is nothing, just the seam of the smooth metal under my naked eyeball. And then a sudden phototropic swirl of spots swimming in my eyes after I rub them, press them with my fingers. At this moment, the pressure I put on my eyes brings me to recall the moment of entry, a sharp pitching forward. The simple mechanics of my arms catching my body and doing so without my insistence. They reached out until they made contact, and settled the weight of my falling torso into them like useful pistons that have been worn too far. For, they did not stop me completely but let me down hard onto the floor. My cheekbone feels like the skin has split around it. I haven’t run my fingers up to check but the skin is swollen and tight and is making my left eye hard to close. I am lying on the floor. The space of the room is short and dark. I am swallowed in a finite space, bounded by walls. They are rough and blocky to my touch. I rub my limbs against the walls until they are slick with blood. It seems that the space around me is shrinking, drawing in. I no longer have to move to reach the walls. They are closing on me until there is no difference between my body and the wall. I am a function of the wall; I exist as a barrier to motion. I am pure and superior in my finite state, held in a granite density in eternal motionlessness.

The exits are many; they exist all around me. I am held in a space where the light is so bright that it has ceased to exists as a stimulus. I keep my eyes closed because opening them hurts too much. I am standing, but I am not standing. I see through a process of sensing the lack of obstruction, indicating and opening. There is no weight settling on my spine. I do not feel the ache in the ruptured disc in my lower back. I remember a vague statement once made about this condition, that it would be with me permanently. It appears that statement is incorrect. I do not feel the disc. There is no pressure being exerted on my vertebrae. I feel suspended, as though all directions are open to me and I could proceed at any moment through a flapping doorframe. I do so and feel the presence of the door only as a slight breath of air moving across my face. There are no moments of hesitation, no space between the want of a thing and its occurrence; there is only the present state of being. I am moving at will now through doors placed at every angle in the space of cubed walls. That is, there are no walls, only doors at sharp angles to each other. I proceed from cube to cube until a certain turn leads me to a room that is more than a cube. It has several more doors than the previous room. This room is a cube with an extra side, a fifth side, a fifth door. And then it seems that door is a remembered term, one with implications that are now lost—these are not doors but opportunities for motion. Room also seems a false construct. They are really moments in space. I move through the opportunities to more complex moments. These hold me in the bright vacuum of their light until I am accelerating, flipping through the moments in a scattered zag of sharp-cornered turns. The speed is incomprehensible until the moment I reach is so complex that it is simple in its complexity. I understand this all at once and my speed disappears. I am moving at such a high rate of speed that it seems that I am not moving at all. Every facet of the moment is held out to me in a glittering array. The opportunities are limitless. There is no choosing. I cannot enter even one of them. It is impossible to proceed further into infinity than infinity itself. As I begin to ponder this I understand everything, and all is present to me, there is no past, no future, nothing but the moment I am in, which is endless and eternally encompassing in its capacity.