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A person alone—hell. No matter how deeply reflective, no matter how self sufficient—eternal solitude—hell. Two people—as good as hell. Three people, a triangulated complexity, strife and forgiveness, alliance and conflict, a polyphonic piece of music sometimes dreadful in its dissonance, sometimes uplifting in its harmony—heaven.
Whoever these people were, whatever they had passed through to get here, they evidently didn’t appreciate the resources given to them. To live in a room so expansive, and huddle on the floor taking up as little space as possible, to have absolute freedom of movement and not move, made no sense to me. Something was wrong with them.
The rules of the divine game resulted in a certain isolation of the soul.
For the death of me, I couldn’t tell whether the place was intended to be heaven or hell. To the extent that heaven above is isolation, it seems to be hell. To the extent that hell below is a crowd, it apparently is heaven. Maybe we are condemned to an endless nagging sense of discomfort balanced against comfort, satisfaction against the itch to escape. But having escaped as far as I had, I didn’t know where else to go.
Now I am the strange mad creature of the ceiling. Obsessed and content with that obsession. To have a purpose is in itself an arrival.
