Beyond The Aether Curtain: Chapter 1
Existence. Existence is, was, and will be falling; I have, had, and will have no say in such matters. I can move, blink, and nod to change my perspective-my reality-yet I can't even stop falling. The light feeling of gravity taking control from the ground and your body is so soothing...but there is a threshold. Despite my limbs flailing about, I don't stop-it's as if I'm missing the earth and catapulting further into a state of acceleration. Nine and eighty-one hundredths meters per second per second, and there is no force to hold me in one spot. I can't stop. Six and sixty-seven thousand four hundred twenty-eight hundred thousandths times ten to the negative eleventh power meters cubed times inverse kilograms times seconds to the negative second power-every atom, molecule, particle and thought pulls on one another with force: I am a star. Furthermore, if I stop falling, then I start again: falling cycles when falling realizes it can't stop, it is always there. Like time, in a way, or-oh...never mind...here I go...again...falling feet first.
I feel so cold, but I feel no wind. I'd chatter my teeth, but I can't-the warmth and sunshine beating upon my cheeks burns my skin and chars the grass around me: sapping both of our cells of hydration and leaving behind a dry, brittle mess. My arms and legs prickle with loss of feeling-am I growing numb to leaving?-and knock together unceremoniously, as if to say “Hey! Are you feeling this?”. God it hurts, but after a while, I'll grow numb. Growing numb, what a beautiful feeling. But I have noticed that my cheeks are rosy now and peeling, I reach up to my face and instantly recoil. From white to red to purple to black, my face reveals all. No wayside breeze brings relief to my skin, and my skin begins to slide off-slowly but surely, my brittle bones knock out of their joints; they too, fall.
Looking out into the horizon, I see a red sun dawning a new day. I turn to the right, and see my body. Wincing at every collision, I watch as my once rigid body is reduced to gelatinous weapons: my nails, once before manicured and rounded, are organic and jagged mountain ranges that slice my flailing flesh; my fingers-what's left of them-swell and have the consistency of office stress toys; my arms are cratered from the violent strikes of my elbows, beating against me faster and faster until they too are nothing but craters; my legs, feet, and toes become two bloated masses of diced muscle and minced bone. How am I still conscious? I don't know. I just am, and the pain is so great that I can do all but bite through my bottom lip and distract myself from the indescribable agony. From just a few precious moments of falling, I have learned the life lesson of appreciating numbness. The crimson sunrise reflects upon my ultraviolet face and briny tears: the prism from each droplet is devoid of the colors that comfort and heal. Bitterly, I thank the sun. Thank you for taking away the bite, and replacing it with the sting, the compression, and the flaking. My entire body, red. And purple. Almost maroon, if you will-on second thought...no...I think I'm color blind...I'll stop dwelling on it. Another stream of tears comes down and I turn away to the sun again. You rise, Sol, while I fall.
I fall, I fall, I fall...slowly at first. Falling slowly, pushing through time like the molasses it is. Permeable while hot and young, I'd dive head first into the temporal sludge; only then do I realize that I can swim into the sea of existence with goggles strapped round my eyes-they too, are falling. Each blood vessel dilates as I fall-the pressure within each circulatory branch burst my capillaries a reddens my eyes, soon there are no vessels to speak of. Like the regal horned lizard, I blink only to have crimson fluid ejaculate from my eyelids and land upon the green-sea before me. And it falls, falls, falls upon the leaves of grass-the matted mass of turf, like the uncombed hair of youth, accepts the tainted water from me, and nurtures its own wounds from my misery. I take a moment to contemplate on the path it takes: the rules of projectile motion contort it into the Cartesian parabola that I hated so much in my studies. Invariance is all but absent from the traditional path-how I'd love to redirect each spurt in a new direction, creating an exploding fountain that rains upon the life around me to satisfy all but myself. But it fell, fell, fell onto the parched strands, strands, strands of biotic needles that seem to fall, fall, fall motionlessly drinking my life away.
And my momentum shoots upward-higher and higher yet I fall lower and lower. Momentum equals the mass of a specified object times the velocity of the object. I bust through clouds of interstellar dust that convalesce into interstellar dust clods, and as my bloated and pummeled body creates the new existence it falls faster. But from the outside, one sees my momentum remaining constant-I grow smaller and smaller yet I fall faster and faster. Faster and faster, smaller and smaller-hotter and hotter my face burns. My face, purpled and blackening, aches more and more. More and more, faster and faster, smaller and smaller, lower and lower, hotter and hotter-I cannot cry out! I am crusting over! Rome is burning! Rome is bleeding! I am burning! I am bleeding! I am peeling! I am falling! I am!
I have got to get the hell out of here.