The weight that weighs us down (short story)

[sash]

Short story

"The void" within started out as a search to replace something missing, to find something more, and to eliminate the feeling Of 'misplacement'. However, it led back to solving something contrived with solutions that were themselves contrived. Each person begins, somewhere along the road, staring into an isolated valley, into a crystal clear lake among trees. They look in to it. They see themselves, they moved their arm, and observe it moving in the reflection of the water.

Their consciousness is separate, they name it 'I'. Others begin the same road, they encounter each other, follow-through friendships of endless reflections of themselves, reflections of their 'I' - the consciousness they found, and defined as an absolute component crucial to their existence. Threats that seem like they are going to take that away or to marginalise it are defended against hastily.

It becomes a matter of life and death. They fight and kill to preserve it, to slip through the fingers of death again and again, all the while dreaming up superstitions claiming that the hand that takes life is a different one from the hand that gives it.

It began with fear and ended without it. In the beginning there was no fear, but as soon as they saw themselves in that lake they were mesmerised by the image - by the frozen snapshot in a moment in time. From that moment on they refused to let go of what they had, trading the universe for one photograph of truth.

Then death became a certainty, and out of all the fear, the darkness ahead, and a universe of uncertainty, came an unexpected reaction. Now faced with no option but to die holding on to that one image, or to risk letting it go. It was not in dying clutching that frozen memory that they found eternity, but in the mere letting go of the hypnotic grip they rediscovered what it was to live. Now the next valley and lake they came across was met not with confusion, but laughter.