Dark reflections
Prompt 2 (26/11/2023) - tarot cards 'The devil', 'The moon' and 'Judgment'
Over and over I looked at my notepads from that time. The time when things had made sense. The time when the future had been so certain. Careless doodles made in the margins took on the significance of ancient runes, a holy text written by my past self to my present, offering obscure answers to questions that I knew not how to ask. The truth lay there somewhere, but it was hard to see, hidden beneath the morasse of quotidian banality.
The size and shape of foundations that a structure would need, the calculations and formulae that were the focus of these pages, these receded into the background, as scribbled faces pushed themselves to the fore. One in particular stood out - a man with glasses, smiling and holding a pen, writing something. It stood out because I knew I had not drawn it. Someone else, someone sitting next to me in a lecture, perhaps afterwards in the cafeteria, had drawn it, but why? Had she drawn it? I remember the style in which she doodled, similar to my own, and this didn't seem to fit. Endlessly I pored over its portent, listening in silence as the ghosts of my pasts bustled past, laughing and joking while they told me where to look now.
The Devil had been there too, and I had to be careful not to listen to him now as I must have done then. So hard to remain forever attentive, when he dwelt in my attention now as much as always. You needed him too, the Devil, the one that everyone smiles at and desires though they pretend not to, but let him in too much and all is lost. Like a suspension bridge, swinging gently, imperceptibly, as it is designed to, but having a breaking point nonetheless. The trick is to know how much swinging is too much. The notes had the answer, yet somehow weren't enough.
As my relationship with the Devil progressed, as the swinging became greater and greater and his glistening eyes became ever more alluring and ever more difficult to look away from, I began to lose sight of the meaning of those pages. I couldn't tell the notes apart from the doodles.
Even with friends, I was always expecting some bolt of truth to come to me on that cursed device, the thing we all have in our pockets at all times thinking it offers companionship while it robs us of that very thing. As the things in our pockets got smarter and smarter and the devil got closer and closer, the things gave us more and more insight into what others thought of us, or what they might think of us, and I became overcome with doubt.
As my doubt grew, my carapace hardened and I was harder to know. I can't know now whether I was at fault, and it doesn't matter, but so began the night time of my life. By the light of the moon I lived, always seeing the present in its eerie reflection, and I shrank from the sun. The doubt that clung to me was not dried out and killed by sunlight, instead it grew like mold, and I became the golem, living underground and never moving.
People and things moved around and past me as I kept my stony vigil. Like the Easter Island faces, I could show no emotion, and most of me remained hidden by the accruing silt of centuries, washing at my sides. Days became weeks, and months became years, and counting became living.
Now I stay here, always about to leave my cellar, my voluntary cell, always looking at the steps that lead up to light, able to see its reflection on the goings and the risers, knowing the names for those things but being unable to step there, as if the light might not take my weight.
I circle around and around with the cursed glass, scratching incantations that I half-learnt from those notepads from so long ago, but none of them bring forth life, none of them bear fruit. Without space for roots, I can hardly grow beyond a sapling, a few leaves appearing but turning yellow and brown and falling off just as soon.
The light is what keeps me alive, but I fear it too. It's there, but just out of reach. If I could bring my notes to the light then the light might judge them worthy, or they might crumple and be cast aside and forgotten, along with the rest of the great human river that I watch, obsessed, down here in this hidden culvert, hypnotised by its ever changing black reflection.
Alone there is no judgment. There is no right or wrong without others to call it such, there is only the impersonal, uncaring movement of the universe, making decisions for me, showing me what must be done but unable to tell me why. I keep writing, and thinking, and casting my spells into the black water of the river, but they wash away with the rest.