The Allure of Madness

It isn't that portals to other worlds are very hard to find, you know; but rather, how many of us can declare with confidence that our hearts are truly meant to leave behind the boundaries of the known and embrace the void of the unknown?

For indeed, your fated life itself is so wrought with predictable peril of the kind which, even if you do not how to face it, you at least have always been burdened with the inkling that one day you must. Therefore, any further transition from the familiarity of firm reality is, without exaggeration, cataclysmic -especially when such a gate which bends the firmament between two worlds can only be opened upon the thrashing wake of the destruction of something unmistakably real.

If permanence is impermanent, then what other logic can there be drawn from such a discovery than that there must be more than one timeline, overlapping and grasping and pulling at our bodies like stardust wrung in the bony hands of the universe swirling us all around like interstellar laundry?

And if you should breathe at all at one moment and then feel your heart shatter into innumerable pieces in a pitiless vacuum which sucks the life right out of you and yet you live, then cannot time and space gasp like the dying in the threads of our agony?

And thus the membrane which separates our world from the next is split, and where once you were living as a student, a worker, or a vagabond, you are now introduced to a boundless and ethereal realm of dragons, mermaids, and disaster.

For disaster always awaits you in these fickle otherworldly gates, and a choice is planted most immediately in your heart. You can don shining armor and slay a hundred thousand dragons in the magical realm and, like a starving man, set upon each next monumental achievement in a never-ending effort to quench your thirst for escapism, or... you can embrace the pain of your mortal life and slay the dragon in your heart.

No, portals to other worlds are not hard to find at all, but it is few and far between that these portals find a coward. Humans tenaciously shut the doors to these tumultuous gates and live on to be their own secret heroes every single day.

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Kimberlee Long, March 25th, 2023

Merritt Island Wildlife Refuge. Photo by: Larissa Lima