This place is a pocket. Warm. And soft. 

Slim breezes echo against the outside walls. 

They die at the edge of our hearing. 

Serenity. 

It rips open her eyelids.

Solitude. 

It forces itself into her eyes, her face, her mind. 

A solitude so deep it grips all slivers of of soul. 

The floor is black. No, not so; perhaps it has color no sight can perceive. It feels full. Its heft is palpable, permeating the place where lack of thought breeds shreds of space.

The wall is black. The number is none. But this wall of nothing still covers the sun. It extends all around so that it, the wall which is one, is itself and not itself. There is nothing for it to hold up or press down, no shape that the room which does not exist needs, no roof- for no sky has no why to invade.

There is silence, that is of course. The course, of course, is not so if you know; rather, it is a dark silence that permits no evil, for it has far too large a task at hand keeping out good. 

This silence is piercing, penetrating, precarious. It follows no thing and no body or one. 

All the same, it is nothing and nobody; precisely because of this, the route to this place is littered with bodies and things. 

You must relinquish everything attached to the things you will glow. For if not, you will find yourself cutting off the flesh of your children in order to fit them through the hole. The hole leads nowhere nice to your mind, but knowing that your mind is a failure in keeping out the bad, you assume that the place it can not go must be good. 

And perhaps this is so. 

But perhaps the darkness is right, and there can be no light. Not for reasons of morality or justice or love; perhaps what the darkness knows that you do not is that it must hide from the light so the light becomes bright. 
Still, it is still, here. 

The orbs are glowing.

Isn’t that what orbs do? 

We wonder about this plot point. Could it be that this is something done so many times, over and over, through the history of this story, not because it is TRUE but because it be cause? 

We ponder.

As we do, we gaze at the glow. Soft cherry hues that melt into a wafting flake of autumn; some grey grade of orange and hostile honey. Seeds of blue, so small you might miss them, miss our eyes indeed, self-validating this entire questionably worded sentence. 

The silence continues. There is nothing to detect that might make us suspect that the colors are going to replace the soundlessness soon, yet for some reason this might be a truth that we feel or might feel. 

There is solace in this silence. The solitude is strong and warm. 

But what about loneliness? 

We think about this. 

Deeply. 
Like the unflinching metal of a dagger gone wayward, we feel it penetrating an inch too far from the heart to correctly resuscitate a demise. Wise. Unwise? Why? 

We bristle. 

We listen. 

What if loneliness is found not alone but in packs? Of course, we know this must be true. 
Just as we cannot drown without water, we cannot suffocate without noise. Stillness is the in-breath, the Prima Materia and the Axis Mundi. 

True isolation cannot exist without others. 

When there is nobody around to misunderstand you, you cannot be misunderstood. 

And do not misunderstand me; you will always be misunderstood. 

And if, like some, you seek solace in others and find still moments unbearable, you sort of affirm that you lack the ability to go within, without the external trimmings and lights and noise. 

Now this, you think, might be the case; and not just that, but it might be that this is the case for the world within which we now find ourselves. So, you ask, what’s so wrong with wanting to be with others? 

And at this, I wonder. Wonder, then imagine.

I try and succeed, see a new world of need. A world full of people lacking a self. A world devoid of self-understanding. Maybe it works. Maybe it might. Maybe the bricks of our buildings must become hollow. Lighter, empty. In order to take us higher. In order to save us from depth.

But none of this is the problem. 

The girl sighs.

One orb rolls off to the side. 

So does another. 

So does the third.

We wonder about these things, now. Before, the narrative flew by far too quickly for us to gather enough understanding. Now we see nothing but questions. 

Were those always there, or can they only grow in darkness? If it’s too bright, might light be the cause of the “because” nature of cause and effect? 

But enough.

Back to the story.

The first orb does not roll so much as it rumbles. Its movements are small, erratic and spaced. Yet there is a certainty in each of them, as if to communicate to us that perhaps this orb’s relationship to its own energetic causality is akin to the relationship between myself and the author, or perhaps between you and me. But we shrug this off. Don’t read too much into the text, as the boy would say. 

So the ball-like thing sits solemnly and with utter dignity, certain of its place and immutable in certain- if not all- senses. 

But the orb sits and moves not at all.

The second orb to roll is quite dim and selective. It betrays its own softness from afar; fringes and fibers plague its smooth surface. There must have been a time when this thing was not so; not fearful of its own demise through the energy born in its core. This former clump of color, cut and crimped to a pocket-sized ball, exudes its frayed and delicate nature. Patches of color crawl across its surface. It reacts swiftly and wildly to all changes in its surrounding environment, but the changes do little to save it from suffering. It lacks the ability to see its own capacity to act. It ensconces itself in safety from imaginary dangers by closing its eyes. But it is blind to the fact that only its own fall can ever be the cause of cracks. Still, its smoothness gives it some measure of solace. 

Though we find ourselves wondering…

What sort of solace isolates the sole lace that connects?

The third orb we look at is cloudy and cracked. Softness seeps out of these slits. There is a small rip there, and we think it leads to somewhere else. We do not know why we think this. We are most likely mistaken. It glows, we think; not as bright as the first, though quite more than the second. 

Within it, billowing plumes spur and revolve, stir and dissolve. 

Hypnotic.

It triggers a fragment that knows deep down we know this form intimately. 

The orb is sweetly silent, too. Its stillness penetrates the black from all angles, projecting the cracks in the glass onto the darkness that surrounds us. From these wispy cuts in dark, soft gray glimmers through from the fringes of the other side. Whatever that may look like spatially. 

We want to pick up the cracked orb. We want to know its heft is gripping; not between but as much as both the heavy and color. It glows without brightness and releases tufts of white smoke. The scent is dry and sharp. Not pungent, not pleasant. We wish to hold it so we may watch our hand through it.

Where are we in the story?

We return.

She places the orbs, one by one, on the floor. Gently, as if made from the finest of glass. Which one of them actually seems to be.

In this initial shape, the dim glow they emit seems to trigger no thoughts.

She stares. 

But could it be that this shows she is scared?

No, no.

She has been through far too much to let some fear stop her now. 

She wants to leave, still, but she accepts that perhaps this will not happen the exact moment she wants it. 

This feels like a turning point, I must say. Since the moment we met her, the girl has failed to display anything other than an inordinate amount of irresponsibility. 

Well I mean of course, I don’t have to tell YOU that. You were there!

Weren’t you? 

This is getting out of hand. 

The click returns. 

A pattern emerges. 

Above the girl, a pyramid appears; a small, glistening triangle smaller than any of the orbs. 

The girl sits on the floor and crosses her legs. 

With a rebellious sigh, she closes her eyes, placing the back of her hands atop her knees. 

Presumably, she begins to meditate. 

Here we could hypothesize about the inner workings of her mind; this might prove to be a humorous exercise, given our current theory of the girl being something along the lines of a Jungian Anima and therefore herself being within a mind of sorts. The laughter we might unleash dies prematurely however, when we realize that if this is the case, the implications for you and I quickly collapse into the unthinkable. 

Or evolve, depending on your vantage point. 

We leave it alone.

The girl sits, then, silently absorbing the silence and stillness. This, of course, is what needs to happen. 

Nothing happens to the orbs. The pyramid, however, twitches a bit. 

The first side to grow does so slowly, at first. Then, as if pulling, it takes the others along for the ride. This entire process takes a very long time.

At some point we are in it. 

She is with us, then. 

We watch. We wait.

And she finds herself falling…