The problem with wonderful philosophies and religions and theories is that they all fall flat if you begin dismantling them with the right, rotten attitude.

What I mean is, causality creates a timeline every time, even if there is no time.

I hate to be this way, but I'll try to be linear about this, and tell it how it is. No excuses, and hopefully not much self-deprecation, since it's just me and me reading this.

So I began reading this novel because a friend lent it to me a while ago and I never returned the book - given that I completely forgot about having it on my shelf, with all the moving and the light year-long reading list. 

Don't get me wrong, it's a great book, but we all know how it's set up. Age-old triad with the loved, the loving, and the observer-narrator, who loves the loving. There's travelling and a problem and a resolution.

The flesh on the trope skeletons though, they came alive with my blood, either because the author happened to pluck on the exact right heart string to make mine quiver with the echo, or you know, I just became so predictable that poplit en-masse suddenly appeals to me on a personal basis.

Since it's just us here, let's assume it's not the latter. 

So, the writer, she's this dissociating, saved, stupid, failing little thing, never understanding humanity's need for sexuality or a regular sleeping cycle. She falls in love with a woman, and then vanishes to the other side.

The temptress, a refined wonder who grew her present self from the half that was left, being a born foreigner and traumatised out of her sexuality.

And the teacher, completing the triangle by yearning for the loving, and attracting the loved. He values the valuable and analyses whenever it's not destructive.

And while I was wrapped up in their lives, I found a note. A note from when the estranged mother called to say her mother is nearing her last page. 

And then, the colours, that cognitive test, by Schneider, again, either cracking a joke about my becoming an everyday Joe, or snap bang calling me out on my nesting cowardice.

This temptress, she cannot remember what happened to her then. Her mind kept a shard from the third perspective, and just a shard, and the knowledge that she is broken by it. What she tells, is a disjointed dream of a story, unlikely, and easy to disregard. If you heard it, that is.

And remember Lecter saying abandonment requires expectation? And Jung, with his bloody visions of the world war, how he said loneliness isn't the lack of people close to the skin, but a lack of meaningful contact, and the lack of the one to tell. Whatever you have to tell. Whatever is ripping your mind apart with a red-blind flurry.

The writer, the girl, she is slow because she only thinks when she writes. She always writes. She doesn't think without reaching the conclusion. Again, that's just added time. Time taken away from learning idiocies like societal norms and class and manipulation. She's clean in a way I remember me from back when I scribbled away to keep sane. And because I didn't know anything else.

They all stare at the moon, all three of them, and really, all four of us, probably all the ones locked in solitude for a time, or forever. I'd like to think some smart, failed Buddhist natural developed to a level where they could tap into the collective, numb pain emanating from the moon, the pale mother, fed into her by all of us staring at her with everything dried on our face in the black of night - ashes, tears, lies, smiles, masks. I'd like to think he came to control the moon, and turned her into a channel, to create a hive mind for all us lonely, stumbling, ethereal blobs of matter.

No, really. Suspend your opinionated frustration for a second and imagine this. You look up at the moon, and as her white beam of light envelops you, boom, you're in the channel, in the hive mind, you feel all the lonely souls, see glimpses of them standing here and there on mountaintops and windowsills. You wash into them in that ray of mute light, and for a moment, you know, however alone you are, you are not alone. Not in being alone.

And I yearn like the narrator too, for no words, for half a face, framed by a pillow and that moonlight, sleeping. For a calm pair of eyes. For simple listening. For the ability to exchange a glance. For understanding, without the mindless chatter about trivialities of the dull days.

But I'm not supposed to get derailed, this is not my point right now.

Pity is always so alluring.

Something happened, I'm sure. Something that locked me in a day of forever repeat. That only overrides the saved data, and leaves the memory echo-y empty, like some abandoned warehouse. Something that was so painful that it hasn't merely buried itself under millions of layers of overridden memories, but it also grabs everything that resembles it, however mildly, and steals it away to the grave of all recollections.

The terror of not knowing is almost as chilling as breaking through to find those old bones. I fear if I saw that something again, there would be nowhere to run anymore. I would be incinerated and burned to ash by it, my mind would shatter into such shards that eons of rebirths would shudder its horrific shadow. 

See, there. Cowardice. Like the narrator, unlike the writer. Like me, unlike I made myself to be.

Even poking it gently like this, I rip open recent hurts, banal, dull pains. Nobody to tell this to. Nobody to love. Recoil from warmth, because it hides the blades and the red, wet pain. And the child, locked in there with those horrors somewhere deep inside, buried, balls himself up and cries.

I wish I could too, because as stupid and despicable a way out it is, the chemicals generated by the same brain during a good hour of sobbing would alleviate the weight, maybe even slap the timer of a breakdown further, too.

Such a pathetic place.

But I do want to remember. I've been robbed by my memories, all the hurt. I can't recall how my heart got broken for the first time anymore. I don't remember the heated arguments, the battles that kept the few remaining people near me. I don't remember being a child. I don't remember the punches, the ridicule, the hatred, the death, the loss, the blood. All that would make me strong, erased. All the training for a ruthless existence, tempering mind and soul to an unyielding, slender piece of dangerous weaponry. Lost.

One of the few painless things I remember from that locked away child is that he always admired the mad. He though being insane is the ultimate freedom, the visionaries' enlightenment, when the mind breaks loose and roams the universe in a shrill, victorious scream. 

And here I'm standing, on the precipice of change, on the cliff, blinking into Abyss and the well of Mimir, almost seeing. Treading water, because I'm too much of a chicken to let the truth sear me clean, or sear me clean of my sanity.

Those times, I told you about them before, when the storm is nowhere to be seen, but you feel them in your every cell. And when you stare at that moon. That slow movement just beneath your skin, almost tickling. That feeling of foreboding, that something is close. As if there was a fate coming, the shadow Damocles' redeemer. I think it is the sound of causality, of the big Effect, coming to reach out from the deep Cause, and without hatred or love, shaping your world into whatever you deserve and binding you tight in it.

It is coming, and I hope I will have the courage to calmly look into the eyes of my demons. I hope I will have the strength not to run or beg for mercy in the dirt. 

I hope I will accept the justice with the dignity it deserves. Be it death, be it madness, be it the death of everything I ever knew and loved. 

And the insubstantial narrator just says, devoid of all emotion, see him talk big and shiver like a leaf.