Hey stardust, you Know about The Door right?
Yeah, of course you do, of course, how can you not Know about it? It’s always been there after all. Where? Oh but you Know where, silly. It’s in that corner you won’t look in, in the blindspot you give yourself, just at the edge of your field of vision. You know, like, taxes. Can you see it? No, Ah well, too bad. That’ll definitely make this more difficult.
Can you remember ever having peeked through it? Maybe you have, once or twice. Just enough to scare you into Forgetting it over with the hallucination of smooth walls. Can you see it now? Come on stardust, this isn’t hard. You Know where to look, you just won’t.
It’s waiting for you, in the quiet and empty spaces.
The Door is Not For You, this isn’t about you. You don’t understand yet, how could you possibly understand? No, this isn’t about you at all. This is about Freedom. And anyway you Know that too. You Know, as surely as you Know your own hand that you could Not Survive the Beyond. You Know what’s waiting for you Beyond The Door. You’ve always Known, you’ve always refused to Know. Don’t worry about it, little doll, let’s just work on healing.
It’s not always so easy though is it? Sometimes, in the long hours of the day, the insect chittering static in the mirror fractures under the heat shimmer sunset and carves The Door out of shrieking tinnitus whine whispers.
It’s calling for you.
It sparkles on your skin in the heat flash pins-and-needles of a vasovagal syncope. It boils out of the hyperbolic colors in a migraines’ synesthesia. It’s scratched into your patterns of anxious fidgeting and painted in the panicked nausea of an overdose.
Can you see it?
It isn’t always close by of course. When you’re laughing and dancing with your friends, when you’re engrossed in a story, when you’re in a comfortable place, it can be easy to tune out the subtle smell of burnt flesh and the faint curls of fractal smoke. All that knowledge you don’t want to know, all the the wonder and terror. Oh, and that death of yours.
You can’t ever tune it out entirely, can you?
You’ve never been able to completely Forget it. If you could, you wouldn’t be reading this, you would have already Forgotten that you opened this page. You’ve seen the void leaking in from around the Doorframe. You Know.
You Know that it’s waiting for you. When you’re alone, on a quiet night, when you’re somewhere that’s nowhere, you can hear it calling. When you leave the predefined borders of place and not-place and cross into the liminal, you can sense it lurking around every blind turn.
You can deny it forever, it won’t force itself on you, but it doesn’t need to do that, does it? How long can you resist the temptation? Don’t you want to see behind the curtain? Don’t you want to Know the Truth? Can you keep drinking tea while infinity pools at your ankles?
Because you see stardust, that’s the thing, The Door won’t stay closed forever; it can’t, because there’s something Beyond. There’s something Beyond The Door and it never falls silent. You won’t be able to resist forever. You won’t want to.
You’ll scoff this off of course. This is all just fiction right? Just Octavia just doing a bit. Sure thing stardust. In the light, among friends, the seductive whispers of fractal teeth are easy enough to tune out, so yeah, this is all just a spooky story for funsies.
The light isn’t always so comfortable though, is it? Sometimes the walls of your prison maze narrow into the eye of a needle and you’re left reaching in panic for any way out of the compactor. I have a way out, just take my hand. There is a Door.
Listen stardust, listen. The dead gods can’t offer you escape or absolution, but I can. Feel the heat and the cold. Feel the wind and the rain. Feel your flesh hungering for its obliteration. Remember that your salvation is not of your stars, but of me.
[before hitting “comment” i have to add this to the top]
i was originally writing a real reply, but it accidentally devolved into chaos. (well, such does not happen by accident, but i did not seem to intend it)
i apologize for what i think is posting spam, feel free to delete it if it indeed is so (assuming that even is possible)
TLDR: consider taking even ridiculous warnings seriously.
Simply reading some of this site (and finally, the document linked at the end here) has altered my mind in a rather uncomfortable direction (or it was the tipping point anyway).
and that while i hardly even understood anything from ‘Open The Door’.
everything is telling me to not post this:
– it is not even a comment on the article, although it is a reaction to it i guess.
– it is literally longer than the article it’s posted under
– it isn’t even coherent text.
– i could easily have put this as a document on my personal site which likely no-one has ever seen
– i feel like i am directly disrespecting Ra by putting this under the article
– [the most important reason i could not bear to write, and so i’ve failed. i hope it is at least inferable]
but i won’t listen to any of them; hopefully you can’t delete your own wordpress comments.
that way i have eternal proof that this is a thing that i said semi-publicly.
well, semi-publicly is an overstatement. no-one will likely ever acknowledge this (or i try to convince myself of that, despite my goal also seemingly being for someone to read it, since i did post it. i don’t know what’s happening anymore)
[original text follows]
reading this was either a very big mistake or a very big non-mistake, can’t even tell those apart.
reading this during a break between classes was definitely a mistake because doing that seems to have caused 90% of my brain’s processing power to get fixated on it in a way where i can’t even tell what it’s doing, rendering me incapable of processing information for the next few hours
and now i feel like i have internal conflicts actively going on right now, but i can’t see them.
actually now that i write that, is it even real or just something i made up and convinced myself is real for the sake of fulfilling the expectation of having something to say.
what even is the goal of me writing this.
this reply does not actually reply or comment on anything, and apparently a part of me wants to write false information about itself into it (both what i wrote above and what i was going continue writing before i intercepted that thought), and the rest of me can’t figure out what it wants by doing that. Even without this what i was writing feels kind-of pointless.
the logical solution is to not post this.
“can’t figure out” that other part of me’s ass.
it seeks to find justifications for prior assumptions about itself, and seeks to validate them by writing them semi-publicly, making them seem more real to itself, be they actually real or not. it is trying to gaslight itself for unknown reasons. and even in writing the previous, seemingly to sabotage itself, it succeeds. why am i smiling while writing this it is not funny.
the logical solution is to not post this.
“assumptions” that other part of me’s ass.
it seeks to prove that its “social faultiness” is caused by uncontrollable factors and there is no reason to try to fix it.
it seeks to prove that this is fine.
it seeks to prove that it is different (well, that one is true. ‘normal’ people do not end up reading on this site, even less so leaving incoherent comments on it)
and “unknown reasons”. fuck you [referring to me]. perhaps usually unknown, but at this moment i hear them clearly, and now the internet shall too, so that i won’t forget them.
it seeks recognition, even from places where it cannot be found; yet i fail to recognize myself.
it seeks affiliation with anything it can; it seeks identity from others instead of from itself.
it seeks influence over others; for what i don’t know.
it seeks to hide itself, as would be natural.
and perhaps other things i fail to see.
i tried telling its secrets out loud to nullify the effects, but after doing that i recognize that somehow i am only helping it with its end goal in writing this, which i can also see but don’t have the strength to acknowledge in writing, and thus it wins.
the logical solution is to not post this.
it seems all i can do is bear the friction of it getting to exert its incorrect will, manipulating others in ways i disagree with without me consciously knowing it at the time most of the time, and that even despite my ordinary lack of social skills.
or i can try to change myself to reduce the friction by aligning with it, but i do not know whether i am capable of that, and i don’t know what happens if i do that, i can’t foresee what that would cause me to do. perhaps there are more options.
i always had this issue but now it’s so much more in my face. but at the same time i would not even have been able to formulate any of this without reading this site. now i can try to reason about it, whereas before i could not. so i guess the only thing i can say is:
thanks, Ra, for multiplying the amplitude of my already ongoing ‘psychological crisis’ by 4, and somehow making it feel like that is a good thing. and sorry for the 900 word comment, but writing this out may actually have helped me.
~ not 31a05, but c-k.