God, why? The downhill spiral. Blind, and on the edge of a pit without knowing. The ground suddenly gives way, and I don’t know . . . anything. Everything I thought I knew turns upside down, and gets spattered, if not slathered, with mud. I too am covered in it, and fear I shall never be clean again. And though that may seem the least of my troubles, it is actually the grease which makes my desperate grasp and foothold at the edge of the abandoned well so tenuous and difficult. And it is that mud which will leave me feeling tainted and vulnerable, even after I muster all of my strength to pull myself out.
I shouldn’t look, but I do. I shouldn’t think about it, but my brain cells gather around it like iron filings before a magnet. If you looked closely, you could observe and diagram the lines of the field in those tracings—the lines of force. Much as I try to break the pattern—to manage the alchemy of conversion from iron to lead, the going is slow, and often tedious. I grow curious about the other side of the fence, and peek over again, only to see the same repetition of cold hard facts I saw before. Except I don’t always recognize them as such: Perhaps this time it will be different--perhaps there is something there I didn’t notice before, that would color all differently. But then memory beckons, and the icy whisper of reason takes hold of my ear. “There is nothing for you here,” the old crone hisses, in her cracked tones. “Can’t you see, fool? There never was. You only imagined.”
I would only be kidding myself, were I to look over the next fence with hope. It is more than likely there is nothing there for me either.
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