The Room

We wake up in a room, four solid walls without a door or any other opening, from which there is no escape. We exist for a little while in this prison, all that time seeking out new means of diversion to take our mind away from our wretched condition and away from the ever approaching death. And then we die. And then we are born again, in the same room, with the bones of our past selves scattered across the floor, ever rising. Every one of our deaths takes our soul with it, takes our memory, so that every time we awaken anew in this prison we have to relearn and relive it again as if the past did not exist for us, and when we finally grasp the terrible nature of our condition, we are taken by an unbearable urge to project our soul beyond its mortal confines, to immortalize a part of ourselves, to break through this cruel and pointless cycle of death. So we transfer our thoughts onto the canvas before us, we paint the walls with our blood, carving unto it our thoughts and our feelings, our fears and hopes, our ideas and dreams. And when death takes us, we awake again in this eternal jail, the floor covered in bones, the walls in souls.

But, behold, the cycle is finally broken. At some point in time, one of our past selves has stumbled upon an invention. He gathered some bones from the floor and ground them into a fine powder and turned that powder into a paste, which he used as paint for writing on the walls. This was easier than painting with blood, speeding up the process of communication. And then he died, and a new soul took his place in the room, and, as it always happened, fear and confusion overtook this soul. Being confined within those unbreakable walls, within that tapestry of souls, intimidated and frightened him. On the floor, amidst the bones, he found the white paste. In his distressed condition he smeared the paste over the walls, covering the relics of the past, silencing forever the whispers of the dead with a coat of thick white paste. And everything became calmer. The silent screams stopped, the blood disappeared. All that remained were four clean, plain white walls. And when he died, and another awoke, there was nothing to teach the new soul of what came before him. He was in a place with no past and no future, plunged into a mindless white abyss.

May 2016