There is a man in white. He brings questions and green flowing liquid. From the walls a kind of buzzing sound, inumerable positions is taken by unnamable energetic particles. Sanitary sanity is cleaned away. The floorboards heave and almost touches the ceiling. A blinding flash and its all over. Yet again darkness all around. Somebody is lying down but just now getting up. Somebody is looking around, only ashes below and black sky above, in the distance fires burn. Soon trees covered in burned skin is visible as this somebody treks across the dry ash. The somebody enters one of those trees. Its evident that they contain some kind of wisdom, but yet that wisdom is not contained in the trees, its only accesible through them. In those trees godlike power flows in an ever steady stream. I think that somebody might be me. I turn that gaze inward, that gaze that sees somebody and it looks like me. Yet i exist beyond and above myself. I feel the need to run and the flesh is stripped from my bones as i run, the friction of the air bulls apart every muscle and every tendon. I catch fire, but i dont stop. Now im simply the bones within my flesh. At this pace i must crash, i cant even stop myself as i travel ten miles in one second. When finally i come to a stop, even my bones has turned into ash, only that blinding fire is left. All of my body, consumed in that flame and added to the ash on the ground.
My body is regenerated. Hard things grow in my eyesockets and soon i can see dimly. I move my arm and see tendons and muscle tissue being regenerated to cover that thinn skeleton arm. I rise and see a low stone wall. Beyond it a lush green kingdom. Old forgotten buildings of stone, clearly not made by any civilsation i know. Huge blocks of stone, perfectly cut. Though some are withered, many are yet perfect. I walk slowly across a bridge. Seven metres down i see a wild current and dense green folliage on the sides. I sit down in a clearing. I see no animals, yet i know they are there, i just cant tell what kind. Maybe they are not to be called animals since that refer to earth, and right now i have no idea where i am. I am quite sure this place have little to do with the earth, my home planet. Or now im talking about the person i used to be, i used to call earth home. Now im not even sure im the same person any more, and it feels like it doesnt matter. I see someone coming closer. Its a squid man in a black robe. His head looks like a squid but the body sort of looks like a human. He is not afraid of me, and i have no reason to fear him. He comes closer. Really close. He stops inches from my face as i rise from my meditation. He is not breathing. He examines my face and then he walks off, not in a hurry, but not slowly.
Where am i? Why did i come here? Those questions fall away quickly. I know. This time i have the answers, like so many other times. I came here because i just wouldnt give up the search. Not the search for enlightenment that i already found. But the search for a place, some place. Some place like this? No. Maybe i was looking for my home, maybe i was looking for my people. Im not saying that squid guy is part of that people. Hes probably just some unrelated guy, maybe he has a great purpose, maybe not. Maybe he just walks around here and have done so for a couple of billion years. And yet, maybe i was not looking for my home, maybe i was just looking for places and found this place. Its time to move. I have been here for days i think, i ate some fruit and drank from that water. I climbed down that steep slope. Im strong, and smart so i made up my plan for how to climb it carefully, just like how i always survived, i saw the way in advance. What do i know? Should i enter some of those buildings to have a look inside? Maybe i find something fun like a drum, or maybe i find one more piece of my evergrowing puzzle. Or maybe i get killed by a falling rock or something else while i search, but so what i cant just stay here im getting bored. So i move to the right.
I walk for a while down a street. There are cobbletones but it looks like the ground changed, there are sort of waves in the street where stones have heaved and others sank. The difference is about a foot or so in height. The street is between two and four metres wide. I come to some sort of cellar that looks interesting. On the other side of the street there is a manor house with a garden. The plants inside have even grown above the high wall encirling the manor. I can enter either of these places and easily find them both because of the size of the manor. I walk the steps down to the cellar door. Its a heavy wooden door. I try to identify the kind of wood. Its very strange the rings in the wood have a wide spacing, yet its very hard. There is a large handle, a rusty iron ring. Doesnt seem to be any lock on the door so i try opening it outwards, dont work so i push inwards and it opens.
Suddenly i see myself standing in the opening of that door, as if i see from someoneelses point of wiev, somebody that is inside that cellar, looking at me. And then my vision flips back again and i see through the eyes i have become to sort of call "mine" even though its really not. I need light to see inside. There is probably somebody inside. Maybe that one want to sing a song or talk about how they prefer to live their life. I sort of want to hold my hand out and let it glow, so i do that. Its a small rectangular room. I need to bend my back to get my six feet of body inside. In there i find some kind of backpack, as if somebody placed it there for me to find. Either way i pick it up and heave it unto my back. Its light, only a couple of pounds. There is a small door, only three feet high on the opposite wall. Thats not for me. Or maybe. No i want to go to the manor. I close the door and go across the street to the gate of the manor. There is a big chain around it. I try tareing it apart and i try just melting it with my hand. It doesnt work so i climb the wall at a place where there arent too much plants in the way. As i land on the other side, this place sort of looks like a world of its own. Fist sized insects gather nectar and a hedgehog walks slowly across the lawn. I see someone in one of the windows in the house, a woman. She is wearing white and has black hair. She pulls down the curtain as she sees me. She didnt seem afraid or anything, she just didnt want to look at me or what? Maybe i can talk to the hedgehog. I try. It lights a cigarette and starts talking about how he smuggled booze in the thirties. I tell him its sort of odd that a hedgehog can speak. He counters and says its sort of unusual to get people like me here. He tells me im a shifter. I want to know more about myself, but he just sighs and walks off, slowly. I dont want to bug him too much so just forget about him.
Next to me is a big beautiful tree. It has big, bright green leafes just like in May. I pick one of those leaves off and it dries in my hand. I roll it and stuf it with tobacco from my backpack. I also notice a bottle of wine and a huge knife in my backpack. I pick that bottle of wine out and as i look at it, it shifts colors, from white whine to red whine and then back again. I put it back as i sit down on the lawn and smoke my cigarette. The hedgehog returns and gets down beside me. He brought a book. Its old, worn and leatherbound. He flips to a page with me painted on the upper third of the page. Below is a description of me, at least if the hedghog is telling me the truth, since its an a very strange language. The script keeps flowing, changing. Even the symbols the selves seem contingent. I ask him to tell me about myself. He puts on a pair of glasses and starts reading:
Actually says here you where born in the wrong place and the wrong time. I mean you are not dysfunctional or anything, you are the way you are ment to be, only you ended up on earth in 1980 and thats not right. Or well thats how i intepret this, the hedgehog points to the open page with me on it and then he continues. Well another interpretation, one thats a bit more shall we say "challenging" in many ways, is that you are born in the right time and place. According to this interpretation your suffering and the absolute impossibility for you to fit in, is ment that way. Even the fact that you just cant keep doing the boring things people normally do, even that was ment. In this interpretation you are like a piece of another puzzle that havent even been made yet. I raise an eyebrow at the hedgehog, he looks at me but continues. Yes of course, the future is in flux and probabilities maybe is not the truth, meaning there is a theoretical chance of you actually fitting in. I dont even know what kind of place that is, it probably doesnt exist at all what do i know im just a hedgehog.
I shift my weight from one side to the other and put out my cigarette. Then i make a serious face and look at the hedgehog. What then, what sort of place would that place be like? The hedgehog scratched his head and got a thoughtful expression on his face before he started talking: Well see, i cant say what the colors will be like, or what kind of buildings there will be, or what kind of technology there will be. However, i can tell you something about the overall feeling of the place. The kind of place where yo fit in is the kind of place where you wake up. Its the kind of place where everything thats hidden within you can flow freely. Its the kind of place where you get up in the morning or when it is otherwise appropriate and you decide from there what to do until night or when you get tired or something like that. Its the kind of place where things are in flux, but not in a dangerous way. I looked at the hedgehog with a perplexed look on my face and i asked him: Is there such a place? The hedgehog shrugged but still he answered: That depends on how much of yourself you will come to understand. The map to find that place is within you.
I look around and i see the tree that was closeby has died and toppled. Now there is only a rottening treetrunk covered in moss left. Instead of grass there is mostly moss and, and a fog that makes is impossible to see far. The ground is not as flat, there are water filled pits and big ferns growing around them. The hedgehog looks at me with a serious look. Hey, somebody is ageing this place, we better get out of here. It could be a hired hitman or... The hedgehog is interrupted by a rain of bullets. I am struck in the back and fall over while the hedgehog jumps behind the treetrunk. The bullets hurt but they dont kill me. I stand and jump over over the treetrunk while i am struck by more bullets. As i land on the other side of the trunk the hedgehog picks up a rock, looks at me and then the rock catches fire in his hand and he peeks above the treetrunk and throws the rock. There is an explosion and the hedgehog looks at me. None of the bullets went through me and i feel them embedded shallowly in my back. The hedgehog gets up and takes another peek. Lets go. We start running through the swamp, while the bullets fall out and i feel the wounds closing. As we run i can see an old stairway made of stone and we dash towards it. But my legs are very tired so i stumble as i reach it. The hedgehog helps me to stand while we climb it running more bullets strikes us from the side. And now i get a look at our attacker, its a women wearing a trenchcoat and a thirties hat. The thing raining bullets is a 45. caliber Thompson automatic that she is using.
At the end of the stairs there is rottening wooden door. Tackle it! The hedghog shouts, i tackle it as bullets strikes me in the side and i crash into a moldy cellar. The hedghog starts dragging a heavy green stone towards the door. I get up and help him. We get the stone in place and the hedghog shouts again: Reinforce it! I dont know how, i answer! You can do it. I look at the door and then i close my eyes and imagine it as a bomb shelter steel door. There is a sudden pressure and im blown to the ground and everything fades to black.
