Tag Archives: shattered existence

The Digital Tao ©️

Posted on by

You have died many times. The deaths are not a single moment but a braided series — small unstitched endings that tumble into one another — and yet in the life-line you occupy nothing stops: the city keeps its angle of sun, the dog waits by the door, the bills still arrive in the same indifferent hand. In those lives that run on without you, something else happens: everyone else keeps walking through the doorway you were meant to open, and they go in without you.

In one reality you die slowly, the way winter dies in a slow thaw: breath measured like thawing ice, memories dripping off your tongue in long, honest drops. You lie on a cot under a ceiling fan and watch a plaster angel spin; your sister hums a hymn you once loved and then forgets the words. Outside, the neighborhood gathers — the neighbor who once mended fences, the barista who knows your name, the child who calls you “mister” — and together they cross the threshold of what’s next as if it were a porch you forgot to step into. They do not look back. They carry your hat like a talisman and pass it along; they carry your jokes and your debts and your unfinished sentences. They go in without you.

In another reality the death is sudden and bright, a single flare of light that makes the world clear as bone. You are on a highway at midnight; a headlight splits the air, and everything becomes geometry: the smell of burnt coffee, the slant of rain on the windshield, the way your hands remember to grip. There’s no time to arrange goodbyes. Later, at the hospital, someone will tell a priest a story you once told in drunken fragments; someone will laugh at the same pause you always left before the punchline. They deliberate over what to keep in the eulogy and what to let go. They go in without you.

Once you die in a reality that remembers you as monstrous — not because you were, strictly speaking, but because fear needs faces — the crowd that gathers at your passing is taut with accusation and relief. People write your name as an accusation on the margins of their notebooks. They stomp and applaud as if performance were a cleansing. Later, when the scandal settles into routine, they adopt a small kindness you taught them by accident: how to tie a knot in a lover’s shoelace when upset, how to make tea without talking. They fold your memory into a handbook of practicalities. They go in without you.

Sometimes the death is private, a soft failure in a room where no one notices for days. In that version, your lover finds your toothbrush in the sink two mornings later and, in the simple chore of rinsing it, performs the ritual of moving on. They rearrange the bookshelf, read the last book you left open, replace your coffee mug with a new one that says: “Begin Again.” A friend sends a lazy postcard from a place you used to swear you’d go together; the postcard arrival is the stick that sets the wheel turning. They go in without you.

There are sterner deaths where the world treats you as an absence to be administrated: forms filed, accounts closed, names crossed out. In those corridors — fluorescent, perfumed, efficient — your life is measured in boxes ticked. Bureaucrats and relatives and lawyers make decisions that feel like small betrayals and practical mercies both. One cousin will insist the piano be donated; another will insist it remain until someone learns the Chopin piece you never finished. In the arguing they make a future out of pieces of you, like mosaics from broken glass. They go in without you.

Across all these rooms and roads and waiting chairs, one pattern holds: your death does not stop the river of living. It alters the current but never damns it. The people who loved you, who envied you, who barely knew you, who owed you — they cross thresholds you don’t cross. They inherit the sound of your laugh, the bruise on your pride, the late-night note you left on a napkin that no one reads until later. They carry parts of you like salt in the pockets of their coats: necessary, gritty, invisible until it stings their tongue.

What does it mean that they go in without you? It is not vengeance nor kindness as we usually imagine them. It is, rather, the absolute human refusal of stasis: to keep moving, to make rooms, to fit new furniture into the hours where you used to sit. It is grief’s most practical swivel — the way a mother folds laundry in the month after a son dies and keeps folding as if the motion itself were a cure. It is the village’s decision to harvest the orchard because the apples will rot if left undecided. It is the world doing the only thing it knows how to do: continuing.

And you — in all your undone permutations — become the axis against which they pivot. In some deaths you haunt: in dreams, in the whistling kettle, in the way a certain song rearranges a heart. In others you are fossilized, cataloged into stories told at reunions and church basements and bar stools. In the best of those realities you are remembered with a kind of misremembering that improves you: people omit your worst lines and sharpen your errors into lessons. In the worst, you become a myth that justifies small cruelties. Still, either way, they make room.

So let this be your strange inheritance: the knowledge that dying — however often, however differently — does not mean the world ceases to be. It means you have been excused from the next line, and others will read it aloud and rearrange the punctuation. They will carry what they can. They will misplace what they cannot. They will, with that awkward mercy that is survival, go in without you.

The Long Fall ©️

Posted on by
Reply

The edge isn’t reached. The edge reaches.

It yanks the ground out from under thought — a betrayal faster than prayer. The body jerks, the mind screams, but gravity already owns the song. The cliffface spits you into the endless.

First is the air — knives in the lungs, knives in the blood. Then the sound — a roar that isn’t a roar, a roar that is everything you never wanted to remember pouring into your ears. Then the light — shards of sky hammering the skin from the inside out.

The ground no longer exists. Direction no longer exists. Only plunge. Only freefall. Only the raw, screaming now.

The air becomes thick as oil. It clutches, pulls, tears. It stretches the falling thing into thin strands of memory, until identity is just another piece flapping behind like ripped silk.

Time shears itself. Seconds fracture. Falling a thousand years between heartbeats, drowning in the infinite space between blinks.

The rocks rush upward, teeth bared, hungry. The ground opens its mouth wider than death.

But there — between the heartstops — something tears loose.

The idea of a body. The lie of falling. The fiction of direction, of up, of down.

The fall isn’t movement anymore. The fall is.

There’s a twist, a fold, a terrible, beautiful inversion. Flesh bursts into stars. Nerves rupture into rivers. Blood shatters into languages never spoken.

And then —

nothing hits.

There is no crash.

No end.

The cliff, the ground, the fall — they were only layers of a deeper sleep. They peel away, one by one, until all that remains is a silent roar in the shape of a question.

And inside that roar:

a universe

falling,

falling,

falling

forever.

The Rest of the Story ©️

Posted on by
Reply

When He fell, the world itself seemed to crack open, peeling back layers of what was real and what was imagined. He wasn’t sure if He was still dying or if this was death’s infinite aftermath. The ground under His feet felt like velvet one moment, molten glass the next, shifting with each step as He wandered deeper into the void. Time folded over itself like a wilted flower, its petals dripping seconds that evaporated before they could hit the ground.

Hell was nothing like the fire-and-brimstone sermons. It was a kaleidoscope of fragments, shards of memory and illusion stitched together with strings of static. A river of ink wound through the jagged landscape, its waters rippling with whispers, each one His own voice repeating questions He didn’t know He had asked. Why? Who am I now? What have I lost?

Then He saw her.

The Face in the Unreal Garden

She wasn’t where she should be—though He didn’t know where that was. Her face shimmered, half in focus, half caught in the static hum of this fractured reality. She stood in the center of what could only be described as a garden—though no garden had ever looked like this. The trees grew upside down, their roots spiraling into a candy-pink sky. Flowers opened and closed like breathing lungs, their petals dripping with silver tears that fell upward into clouds made of glass.

She was standing beneath an enormous tree, its branches twisted like the spines of a thousand books, each one etched with a story He couldn’t read. The fruit it bore was not fruit at all but luminous spheres, each containing a spinning image: a boy laughing, a woman weeping, a city crumbling into dust. As He approached, the spheres dimmed, their light retreating like frightened fireflies.

“You’ve been dreaming about this place,” she said, her voice a melody He almost recognized. “Haven’t you?”

“I don’t know,” He replied, though it wasn’t true. He did know. He had seen her face before, glimpsed in moments of stillness, like a reflection on the surface of water.

The Chessboard Horizon

She reached for His hand, and the garden collapsed like paper thrown into fire, folding inward until nothing was left but a horizon stretching into infinity. The ground beneath them had turned into a chessboard, its squares shifting and rearranging as though trying to decide whether to trap Him or free Him. Pieces moved of their own accord—queens and pawns walking backward, bishops toppling into nothingness.

“This is your kingdom,” she said, gesturing to the ever-shifting board. “But you broke it.”

“I didn’t—” He stopped. He had. He had broken it, hadn’t He? He had shattered it into fragments when He died, scattering it across the void like so much meaningless dust.

Her eyes caught the fractured light spilling from the edge of the horizon, and He saw that they weren’t eyes at all but mirrors—reflecting not Himself, but something deeper, something buried. “I’ve been here all along,” she said, stepping closer. “You just didn’t know where to look.”

The Tree That Was Him

The chessboard disintegrated beneath His feet, and suddenly He was falling—not through air but through Himself. He landed in a forest of towering trees, each one identical to the tree from the garden but impossibly vast. He stumbled forward, his hands brushing their bark, and recoiled. The wood was alive. Each tree pulsed faintly, its surface shifting like skin, and when He pressed His ear to one, He heard His own heartbeat, slow and rhythmic, like the ticking of a great clock.

“This is where you are,” she said, standing beside Him now, though He hadn’t seen her move. “This is where you’ve always been.”

He turned to her, the question forming on His lips, but before He could ask, she reached up and plucked something from the nearest tree—a small, glowing sphere, like the ones from the garden. She held it out to Him, her expression unreadable.

“Go on,” she said.

When He touched it, the world turned inside out. He was everywhere and nowhere. He was Himself, and He was her. He saw every fragment of Himself spread out across existence, each one glimmering faintly in the souls of others. They weren’t gone. They were waiting. And through it all, her face was there, a constant, steady light guiding Him back to what He had forgotten.

The Dream Beyond Dreams

When He opened His eyes, the forest was gone. They were back in the garden, though it had changed. The upside-down trees now grew right-side up, their roots sinking into a ground that felt solid and real. The sky was no longer pink but a deep, infinite blue. And the fruit—they were no longer spheres of light but golden apples, glowing faintly with something He couldn’t name.

“You dreamed of me,” she said again, smiling now. “And I dreamed of you.”

“What does that mean?” He asked.

“It means we’ve always been here,” she replied. “You and I. In every shard, in every fragment. You’ve always been looking for me, and I’ve always been waiting for you.”

The light from the tree spilled over them, warm and endless, and for the first time, He felt whole—not because He had been put back together, but because He had learned to live within the cracks.