I fell into my bag. The bag was vast - a la Mary Poppins. It was cavernous and dark and lighted only by the sheen of conscience. I kept falling before the bottom reared up and caught me in its canvas bosom. I spent an age in its depths trying not to think of the one thing that would raise me up again. I had a penchant for self-deception you see. Or I’d like to hear the echo of a voice trying to unhear itself. I had nowhere to go and it was the purest of feelings. For a time. I even danced, albeit with phantoms who’s ethereal sweat still marks my palm. Sometimes the echoes would bounce back and I’d ick at the sound of it. My voice had changed; grown cynical; blurred by the stains of alcohol and colloquialisms. Too many American films. Too much blending in.
I’d fallen into this space to find X but had dragged too much of myself down with me. Or perhaps X was me and the stuff I dragged down was the absence of me I wished unstuffed? Clearly, I was Churchill conceiving an attack on Gallipoli and then getting flustered when, going tits up, the plan unwittingly initiates the ultimate test on the Australian spirit, where, through a sea of scatter-gunned numbing brutality, our spirit proves its ability to stand amidst catastrophe and carnage. Alas, like Churchill, I wanted the operation to succeed but the criteria for success played funny-buggers and left us in the lurch.
I forget that that war was "won". The Romans would create a wasteland and call it peace. Perhaps one must destroy to find their peace. Perhaps the inverse of creation is itself creation. But I repeat myself. One must either destroy or create to be content. The path of light and the no-path of dark. I tripped into the dark to destroy myself; to find a valley of death where the eye of my stagnant soul is blind, allowing me the freedom the learn whether X, or its merest hint, exist. I am at peace conceiving myself at the bottom of a bottomless bag because it is bottomless and I have reached its bottom. A paradox of impossibility that yields creation. X.
My senses fire and long for open air; for sun and joy. My body forms anew and starts its rise, passing forgiven objects once reviled and stowed away. I crest the lip and spill onto the floor, exhausted but elated - perhaps even redeemed. I'll beam until the light becomes, again, too much to bear.