This world, the “real” one, is just a curtain, an illusion created by other people in order to stop you from reaching your full potential. Pull back that curtain and you’ll see that the libraries are all filled with runaways writing novels, the highways are humming with escapees and sympathizers, and all the receptionists and sensible mothers are straining at the leash for a chance to show how alive they still are. . . all that talk of practicality and responsibility is just bluffing to limit your mind so that you can’t discover the world that lies beyond.
You can taste it in the in the blood in your mouth that instant after an accident, when you realize you’re still alive, or in the shock of a first, unexpected kiss. You hear and feel it in the magic of your favorite songs, you’ve seen evidence of it scratched into bathroom walls in a code without a key, or you’ve been able to make out a pale reflection of it in the movies that you saw.
It’s hiding between your own words, when you speak of your desires and aspirations; it’s lurking somewhere beneath the limitations that this society is creating.
When poets and radicals stay up until sunrise trying to discover the perfect sequence of words or deeds to fill hearts with fire, they’re trying to find a hidden entrance to that other world.
When late at night, children escape out the window to go wandering, they’re trying to sneak into it— they know better than us where its doors are hidden.
When teenagers vandalize a billboard to provoke all-night chases with the police, they’re trying to storm its gates and get in there by force.
No, it’s not a safer place than this world — on the contrary, it is the sensation of danger there that has the power to bring you back to life: the feeling that for once, there is something incredibly real at stake, and all else is eclipsed by that feeling.
Maybe you stumbled into it by accident and you were amazed at what you found. The old world you knew as real was splintered behind and inside you, and no one could ever put it back together again. Everything before became irrelevant, ridiculous as the environment suddenly changed around you and undreamt-of new paths opened to you. And perhaps you swore that you would never leave that place, that you would live out the rest of your life electrified by that urgency, by that thrill of discovery and transformation — but you came back…
Common sense dictates that this world can only be experienced temporarily, that it is just the shock of transition and nothing more than that.
But there are some myths. Myths that tell another story: stories of women and men who stayed there for years, who lived and died there as heroes.
You’re not the only one trying to find it’s entrance. I’m out there searching too… by this time, maybe I’m already there, waiting for you. And you should know that anything you’ve ever done or considered doing to get there is not crazy, but beautiful, noble and necessary.
Enter that secret world and never come back; or better, burn away this one, to reveal the one beneath in all it’s splendor.
Once you’re in the world beneath, burn the bridges that took you there, so that you could stay there for ever and live the life you wish to live, a life without artificial boundaries and limiting restrictions.
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Photo: Vera Bing
