The lines don’t cross. They never cross. Like connecting the dots, he pulls one string to the next. This is the only way he knows how to make sense of a senseless world. It is geometric. He points at the points placed by the power of his imagination. Then he twirls them in every possible angle. “There is a deeper truth in this,” he swears.
For fifteen hours he has stared at the puzzle. Cursing, and circling, every corner he could conceive of, seeking ultimate truth. His blues eyes blink with the powerful pulse of unrelenting fatigue. Soon he will succumb to slumber. This obsession may wane for the night. Although, he fears that in the morning he will lose the patience to pursue this line of reasoning.
Loose leaf papers filled with colored equations lay scattered across the room. He mumbles, “Sleep would be good.” Instead of going to bed he clears the clutter from the frigid floor. Pushing his papers to the side. Then watches as they lift off the ground and float gently to the left and right. Dust particulates dance in the air, swirling and glittering in the morning glow.
The white t-shirt he was wearing comes off then his tight blue jeans go as well. “This will allow the free flow of blood to pass unconstricted throughout my entire body” he thinks.
“The answer is somewhere here,” he stutters. Slowly he seats himself on the floor, shivering as his naked flesh settles on the cold concrete. His legs curl and cross each other. Closing his now reddening eyes, he begins to breathe slowly. In and out and back again repeating and repeating the same breathing patterns, he focuses. Letting his consciousness float inches away from sleep, uncertain on which side of slumber he is sitting on.
Smooth round stones of various colors and sizes fill and form a shore in his mind. Then a pool of glimmering water appears from nothing. No scent exists here. Aluminum foil wrapped potatoes are scattered all around him coinciding with an itch forming on his left foreman, diverting his attention for a minute. The landscape begins to dissolve, and he struggles to regain control. Bit by bit he regains control breathing in and out and back again.
His skin vibrates, or twitches, he is uncertain. The rhythm remains consistent. Thin lines of blood cross his entire inner body. In and out and back again. The shape from his room reappears with a white glowing sphere circling it. In and out and back again.
Inside the sphere a speck forms then disappears then forms again. In and out and back again. He wonders were this is going. Where does all the meaning in the universe come from? In and out and back again.
Is flesh the meaning or is it spirit. In and out and back again. Is life death and death life. In and out and back again. Is time a true measure of my existence? In and out and back again. Dam, what does the shape mean?
A small hand pushes his shoulder jerking him to the left. The world shifts colors. They pool and rock phasing into a grey scale then return to their original color, then shift back and forth for a few minutes until they settle into the original color scale. “That was like adjusting the color in a tv,” he muses.
Suddenly, a thin white light explodes piercing his retina, causing him to shudder in pain. In and out and back again. Why? What? Why? How? In and out and back again. The pain of uncertainty gnaws at is being. Fear begins to tighten its grip but he is too deep to withdraw.
Every book he has ever read appears fluttering freakishly fast opening and closing like a strange mousetrap. In and out and back again. Every experience he has ever had replays and is reintegrated into his being as he struggle to return to true consciousness. In and out and back again.
For a second the breaths stop. He can hear the words “in and out and back again.” A finger of light pushes its way into his mind pulling out strings of lights. He forgets all that he is and was. The strings explode and spread like a million lasers. Each lasers latches on to a book and pulls every words into him. Then he becomes himself again. Another round of lasers explode from his brain. This time these strings of his being reach out. Each one exploring the world around him. Just as he begins to feels like there is nothing of his being left the lights fling back like an overstretched rubber band and smack his brain with even more information.
After what feels like hours of this exploding and reforming he opens his eyes. The shape no longer cloud his thoughts. He jots down a few notes. After a couple days of intense study he adds to and passes the notes on to a friend. The friend reads them then passes them to, and again and again. Someone adds something new reshaping the ideas, then passes them on as well.
Years later the ideas comes back to their beginning. The young man reads a new book. He smiles as he absorbs the new ideas that linger in the mix with his old ideas. He sits down to breathe in and out and back again assimilating and integrating these new things into his being. In and out and back again.