Whimsy
2002-11-14 � 5:22 p.m.

Fractured.

That's what the surface looks like, when you're deep below, peering up through the thick, freezing liquid to the enclosing shell up on top, a light making the spider-web cracks glow a silver-gold.

And you think that it must be nice up there, out of the cold, in the warmth of the sun or happiness, or whatever it is that's making it brighter there than it is down here in the dark.

And the fractures give you hope, because it looks like maybe you could break through that shell and emerge, a brand-new you, into that light, if only you could reach the shell and put the appropriate pressures on it.

But you never can, and the few times you float high enough to run your fingers over the shell, it is smooth and hard and unbroken, the cracks and fractures of hope no longer visible from your closer vantage. And no matter how you push or scratch or beat against it, all of your efforts only serve to push you deeper into the darkness again, and the only way to stay close to the top, hard against the shell, is to be passive and motionless. There, with your face pressed against the shell, you can almost feel the heat from the light that filters through. Up above you on the surface world you've never visited, you can see vague shapes moving around -- people, living their lives in the brightness, sometimes treading unheeding over the place where your distorted visage regards them from beneath.

Soon you'll drift back down with the currents, and if you struggle to stay close to the surface you'll only sink faster and further, and so eventually you learn to just float, and not fight it -- because eventually you'll float back to the top for a time, and meanwhile there's always the fractured, delicate lines of light and hope, and you can pretend.

You'll get very good at pretending, because that's all you have.

-t

Currently Aurally Inducing: The Mars Volta, Cut That City
Selection of the Lyrical Vocabulary: cedric screaming incoherently

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