Waves and tempest winds of a god lost to the modern world shake the very earth beneath. Flooding the cast iron caldron, the surrealist contained within, the water rises and engulfs. The bliss promised by the looming threat of this…this slice of our world’s oceans, is but a guise, the guise of a false serenity. Lose all sense of danger though it is not gone, and pretend we have contained mother nature to be manipulated at our leisure. This is a cruel joke…for the skies above blow ice cold shards of nothing into our bare skin, inspiring us to relinquish to the seas, to give in to the beautiful promise of warmth, but at what cost? Would we drown and bloat before braving the cold to see another day?

And what of the isolation…to brave these seas alone? Is it forgotten, ignored…craved? By the most courageous leaders of men and the lost, departed souls alike, is this what we desire? Do we long to lie to ourselves, make ourselves believe we must tame the raging goddess in the hopes that we may be renewed in the end? This will not revive us. It will not cleanse our rotten souls, nor will it save the dirty and damned.

Nevertheless, we must face this hellish curse. Our humanity demands it. It is in our nature. We do not see this in other creatures, for they are one with nature while we fool ourselves, deceiving to believe we might be closer to the gods than they could ever be. Thus, we defy nature. We spit in the face of our creator, so ungrateful, unworthy of all the gifts bestowed, as to prove we are among them. This daily ritual, once reserved for the rich and bored, is but an exercise in egocentrism…yet to face ourselves, we must face this. We must undergo the journey to understand its effect.

And we know that we enter the quest as one and exit as another. We are thought worthy of blessings and opportunity and affection and all of the greatest gifts of life only after we have survived the torrent. The crippling weight of our counterparts and passerby’s thrusts us unjustly into our caldrons, rather our coffins…and we, too, are guilty, for we would not embrace another who had not gone through our struggles, and it is not because we have no love for them. Rather it is for fear of what the authority of the masses might do. They may cast us aside with the lowers and disregard the sacrifices we made in longing for their approval, to no avail.

I know what is to be done. I know that it is not a sacrifice that is required to be worthy. It is not something which we must give at our expense. Rather, it is something to be shed, to be disposed of to our great delight.

We stroll about the world we see, and we weep from the source of our visions, for we are shown nothing more than the falsehood of despair. We are tricked into believing that there is only suffering in this world. We block out the noise of the screams and the cries and the lies, for we only hear the deceptions of the authority. We wish to be deaf, though we could not bear to think of such peaceful silence.

The solution…so simple…sat just beyond my corrupted mind for too long. This…dreamlike “reality” hid the key to salvation from me, and I allowed it to. Now, I have found it, and I will act swiftly before I am to be enslaved again to this nightmare. Thus, I find myself in this, my caldron, not in spite of nature, rather in an attempt to bridge the gap between humanity and the natural world.

First, I take hold of a small blade, and with it I relinquish my vision, in the hopes that I might see clearly. I then take hold of the sharpened rod of an ice pick, and with it I deafen the noise of the dream so that I might wake. I then take hold of a razor, and with it I allow the blood within me to flow, to return to its rightful place.

…

I feel myself begin to wake. The pain is leaving. I can no longer feel the confines which surround me. None of it was ever real to begin with. I knew it was only a deterrent. There is only me, now, but I feel myself evolving. My mind is no longer polluted, and I am free to wonder without distraction. I am both everywhere and nowhere. The notion of space is an illusion. I know that now. My breath becomes unsteady, and I release a tearful, joyous, laughter before I finally…