An End Other Than Death (Part 2)
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I had dared once again to think of the white-clad city, and persisted even when my body shook with tremors of abject fear, with the hatred only doable when one faces an obstacle they truly despise and yet must overcome or fail–or worse, die. But death had no meaning to me, and so I pondered the vision.
Only when I seized and the damp earth calmed me again did I awaken to a woman. Her hair was black and disappeared far behind her in the earth at her pale feet. She was nude, but the entirety of her was wrapped in a pure-white serpent with no discernible head or tail. It slithered and writhed about her constantly, threatening at any moment to clamp and suffocate the life from her. She opened her eyes and they were those of vipers, brilliant yellow and evil.
She told me she was unimportant, and I found myself agreeing. What was, here in this place? She told me that I was elsewhere from my true body, and that a true life waited for me outside. How could that be, though? My feet touched damp loam every day, and the black sky lit by stars seemed very real.
She told me that she, too, had grown tired of the game she was subject to. She told me that she was searching for a way to return to her reality, but I did not follow. This was reality, after all. Transient, beautiful.
“But our true selves are concrete. Visceral.”
I am scared of the snake woman. Even worse, I am afraid she speaks the truth, and I simply am too small to understand it.
The woman made me afraid of this place. She made me want to die.
