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Description
It’s happening again. I feel it, somewhere between the base of my neck and my eyeballs, pushing and prodding at my synapses. My throat is dry. My fingers itch, flexing uncontrollably, aching to close and tighten and meld with my instrument.
Instrument may be an unconventional term for my particular tool; it implies something musical, a blend of chords and harmonies and dissonances, all put together to form a complete whole. The end product is always, in the end, indeed an end. A musical piece finishes when the musician’s bar runs it’s course and the notes come to an end, a crescendo of dips and climbs reaching it’s inevitable conclusion.
I sometimes envy the musician for what comes of his toil; it must be a wonderful kind of satisfaction, to know that you have played your best and finished the piece. I myself do not experience such comfort when I play my hateful instrument.
Imagine, if you can, a titan’s chessboard, stretching out and off over all horizons. When it reaches that border, instead of dipping beneath it as is the natural and right way of things, the opposing checkers climb up into the heavens and curve back, high, high over your head until your entire world is consumed with possible movements, and such a multitude of conclusions that you know you will go mad even trying to comprehend a fraction of them. The black and white blur together, leaving only shade after shade of grotesque gray.
And you know that you have created this. Simply by playing the first line of this lightless, joyless, cursed brand of music, you have opened it, unlocked the door to this world of horrific light and shadow. And yet, you must (yes, you must, for if you do not, you will lose yourself in the world of your own creation) find it’s end. An end that does not exist! You must focus the impossible grays into a line, and then a point, so infinitesimal and so impossible that the half-conceived image lacerates the mind’s eye, leaving it bloody and raw and unusable. And all the while, eye bleeding, you must pray that you have chosen the right speck of space to force this world of all-consuming specter into. For if you have not, the immensity of your failure may plunge you into another world, this time not of your own creation but that of the Other, the fabled light-bringer’s realm of pain and torture.
And, fearing this, you must press on. For if you do not, your mind will turn in upon itself just as the chessboard does, and collapse under the strain greater than the weight on Atlas’s shoulders. For indeed, every time ink meets paper and a beginning is penned, a world opens. The fate of that world rests on we, I, us, them, the writers, the authors, the scribes, for without an end to enclose the beginning, that world will expand and expand, growing like cancer among us until it consumes us all whole and raw.
We create WORLDS! We create UNIVERSES! The immensity, the diversity, the responsibility! Entire realities, to be built and then torn asunder by the mere stroke of a pen. It cannot be comprehended unless one has experienced it. Crying in the rain, the words pour forth, boiling until the madness can no longer be restrained and you must either erupt or die! Hold up your hands and scream to the heavens, for sanity is worthless coin. There is only a door that grows and grows in your mind, that fearful door that you know you must step through!
I must open the door. I must open the door. If I do not open the door, the door will become all that I see, all that I feel, all that I breathe. I will breathe it’s wood and it’s iron and it’s heaviness and the splinters and fragments will break my body and exit through my skin, through my eyes and most heavily through my tongue.
So I scream! So must we all scream! Scream, scream, until there is no scream!

There is no scream.

What is behind the door?

Description
It’s happening again. I feel it, somewhere between the base of my neck and my eyeballs, pushing and prodding at my synapses. My throat is dry. My fingers itch, flexing uncontrollably, aching to close and tighten and meld with my instrument.
Instrument may be an unconventional term for my particular tool; it implies something musical, a blend of chords and harmonies and dissonances, all put together to form a complete whole. The end product is always, in the end, indeed an end. A musical piece finishes when the musician’s bar runs it’s course and the notes come to an end, a crescendo of dips and climbs reaching it’s inevitable conclusion.
I sometimes envy the musician for what comes of his toil; it must be a wonderful kind of satisfaction, to know that you have played your best and finished the piece. I myself do not experience such comfort when I play my hateful instrument.
Imagine, if you can, a titan’s chessboard, stretching out and off over all horizons. When it reaches that border, instead of dipping beneath it as is the natural and right way of things, the opposing checkers climb up into the heavens and curve back, high, high over your head until your entire world is consumed with possible movements, and such a multitude of conclusions that you know you will go mad even trying to comprehend a fraction of them. The black and white blur together, leaving only shade after shade of grotesque gray.
And you know that you have created this. Simply by playing the first line of this lightless, joyless, cursed brand of music, you have opened it, unlocked the door to this world of horrific light and shadow. And yet, you must (yes, you must, for if you do not, you will lose yourself in the world of your own creation) find it’s end. An end that does not exist! You must focus the impossible grays into a line, and then a point, so infinitesimal and so impossible that the half-conceived image lacerates the mind’s eye, leaving it bloody and raw and unusable. And all the while, eye bleeding, you must pray that you have chosen the right speck of space to force this world of all-consuming specter into. For if you have not, the immensity of your failure may plunge you into another world, this time not of your own creation but that of the Other, the fabled light-bringer’s realm of pain and torture.
And, fearing this, you must press on. For if you do not, your mind will turn in upon itself just as the chessboard does, and collapse under the strain greater than the weight on Atlas’s shoulders. For indeed, every time ink meets paper and a beginning is penned, a world opens. The fate of that world rests on we, I, us, them, the writers, the authors, the scribes, for without an end to enclose the beginning, that world will expand and expand, growing like cancer among us until it consumes us all whole and raw.
We create WORLDS! We create UNIVERSES! The immensity, the diversity, the responsibility! Entire realities, to be built and then torn asunder by the mere stroke of a pen. It cannot be comprehended unless one has experienced it. Crying in the rain, the words pour forth, boiling until the madness can no longer be restrained and you must either erupt or die! Hold up your hands and scream to the heavens, for sanity is worthless coin. There is only a door that grows and grows in your mind, that fearful door that you know you must step through!
I must open the door. I must open the door. If I do not open the door, the door will become all that I see, all that I feel, all that I breathe. I will breathe it’s wood and it’s iron and it’s heaviness and the splinters and fragments will break my body and exit through my skin, through my eyes and most heavily through my tongue.
So I scream! So must we all scream! Scream, scream, until there is no scream!

There is no scream.

What is behind the door?