Water falls but also cuts. Sharp, like knives. She shivers.
Cries. From within the waterfall we can do nothing but fail to escape its massive proportions. Swallowing each and every direction to churn out relentless and violent rejection, it goes and grows the longer we do nothing. In the form of pain, so clean and plain, this vicious water burns our waiting heroine. Relentlessly, it lives on.
The girl moves forward as translucent strips of vibrant color pulsate dimly from beneath her tight grip.
We watch vicious slats of liquid pull and peel at her frayed body; the blood hijacked by blackening torrents like the teeth of dead dogs, forming sleek slits in her flesh.
She feels it shedding ribbons and shreds and slivers of skin. But this feeling, like so many before it, is false.
What is being removed is the layers of caked-on optionality, the infinite possibility that has kept her heart warm for so long. The chill she feels is that of existence, its neutrality bristling against the surface of reality.
This really is far too much. She falls to her knees. The colors betray their hidden bleakness, swallowing her and tumbling her into a collapsing whirl of thought.
Falling, falling, down, down…
We find her heart, it beats, is beat. Down but not out, and one must, after all, acquaint oneself intimately with both downs and outs if one wishes to rise. For the path to the highest point remains the tallest funnel downward.
And the beats of her heart skip and slip, keep skipping and slipping. Skipping from energetic to slightly frenetic. And then again, from sympathetic to unapologetic.We think we might remember something about input, something about the two ways it can go when the context is the result of shutting out stimuli. But which of the two do we get now? And what the heck does that even mean?
When eyes close the volume blossoms. Now the sounds are harsher. They have sacrificed their sharpness for a subtle gain in grain. Ever finer, ever finer…
Like the mash of opinions in small spaces, the clutter of chatter dissolves into an incoherent blob of failed meaning and perfected incessancy. Bits of words escape at irregular intervals, too few to make meaning but enough to distract.
It must be during one of these moments that something clicks.
At first, she feels it within the upper region of her brain. The smallest of clicks, followed and accented by the most stunning of silences. It is the kind of silence that exists only within strong pockets of noise; the only sort of quiet where the true secrets are kept.
As this sudden silence erodes, a sheet of anxiety drapes over her being.
She is close.