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.
