766. before the envelope

ed note: Von sits apart, envelope in hand. Not so much a journal entry as a recording of his thoughts:

I walk an edge between madness and bliss and I'm beginning to think the two are not so far apart, that what we refer to as sanity, is the illusion our minds create to protect us from forces beyond the hynerian form. So this is it. Madness or Bliss. And upon this tightrope, I feel a step away from one or the other.


What is it I want to know, need to know? What part of me is missing with the memory? What part of my heart did they take that makes me less than I was such my very footsteps call forth the hollow echo of emptiness? And too, of not knowing, from not remembering. This envelope feels as a knife to my throat, holding what pleasure, what pain, for surely it must hold both. So again I say, to what profit do I walk this road of re-creation, as if some minor god playing in the river of long ago? How many regrets do I unlock, which can never be locked again nor fixed nor corrected, unleashed to haunt me to my dying day? Yet, still, the longing to know of a hug between father and son, of the look now forgotten, of love known only to the parent, and too, I suppose the child. For this, if but the one memory of him and I, together beyond language, for this, I would risk it all.


I am under a magical spell, of a power greater than any strength I have to resist, if resisting were sought. I am upon the raft drifting to the waterfall. My eyes are open. I am not dreaming. I know where I am going. And I am powerless to stop it.