It’s late at night when your mind starts wandering.
Our minds aren’t large enough to contain everything which passes through them. Everything we observe, and some things we don’t, all pass through our minds. The sights, the smells, the sounds. The smell of fresh food in a paper bag. The feeling of ocean winds against your face. The crunching of dry leaves against the sidewalk. The subtle signs which you don’t really notice, but which are enough to give you that feeling that you’re being followed.
That something’s watching you.
“We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are as quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar.”
Have you ever wondered what happens to those things which aren’t retained? Remember the exact thing you were thinking about two days and thirty-four minutes ago? No, you probably don’t. It’s not in your mind any more. Not in your conscious mind, that is.
“Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force; gesture without motion,”
You see, there’s two parts two the human mind. The first part is the one we’re familiar and comfortable with, and the second part is neither. The first one is the conscious one. Where we actively choose what we think and how we think and so on. The second part is the subconscious one. Once something comes into your mind through your senses, it stays there. Permanently. There’s no way out, after all. So once you can no longer recall it, where does it go? The subconscious.
Thrown out of the window of your conscious mind into the bleak beyond of the subconscious.
It must be one giant rubbish heap out there.
A colossal rubbish heap of a size sufficient to put the galaxy to shame – that’s a whole lot of thoughts we’re thinking about, both thought and un-thought.
We all know that life exists everywhere it can. Even rubbish heaps become havens for crows and rats and insects and vermin.
But it’s not just the vermin we need to worry about.
You see, it’s not just the vermin which rubbish heaps attract. Some creatures are opportunists and will grab whatever they can find. Creatures like raccoons, which come from the wilderness in search of easier, maybe tastier, scraps. And once again it’s not just the raccoons. Bears, too, come and sift through the rubbish in search of things to devour.
Remember that this colossal rubbish heap exists in the dark abyss which spawns multiple personality disorders, schizophrenia, and psychosis, amongst others.
Remember that whether you know it or not, the darkness – or at least something within it – is alive.
“The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms.”
That there is life amidst the softly falling snow and the dark, dead trees. Amidst the frozen lakes and midnight skies. That the howling outside isn’t simply the wind through the abyssal valleys. That when something goes bump in the night and you jerk awake, and you shine your torch out your window with trembling hands whilst clutching your blanket tightly to yourself, that those two glints in the near distance aren’t stars on the horizon.
“Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death’s dream kingdom
These do not appear…
And voices are
In the wind’s singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.”
It’s alive and is slinking and sifting through the discarded and the unwanted, devouring slowly and quietly. It gets hungrier and hungrier with every bite, with every taste of emotion or rationality, rusty and discarded from within the warm wooden hut – temptation. It’s circling and it’s stalking.
And waiting.
And waiting.
And watching.
“Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow.”
Remember that the next time you want so desperately to forget something. Remember that you’re simply throwing more food out the window for what’s waiting there.
“Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow.”
Remember that the walls won’t hold forever. That the thing out there will come closer and closer, attracted by the scents and the sights and the smells, and that one day it will go straight for the source.
That a thin pane of glass won’t protect you once it decides that it has its eyes set on you.
“Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow.”
Remember that the next time you’re walking down a dark alley and you suddenly feel like something’s watching you.
Remember that the next time you’re alone in your house and suddenly you hear the sound of the window-glass shattering.
“This is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends.
Not with a bang…”
Remember.
“…but a whimper.”
