After the fact, my mind is overjoyed with relief, and it blooms in thought. Nonetheless, it is still a constant that I was stripped of my confidence. The uncertainty that defeat brings is a pellet, a rotten one, that I get force-fed after a loss.
But is this, in essence, a loss?
Is receiving a bitter spoonful of truth less righteous than surrendering to a kettle of vultures that besieged my comfort?
I often worried for my sense of self. Hoping it would not get depleted after such a destructive streak of stillness.
Yet I stand today, confused.
Because somehow, I still feel.
I feel that, perhaps, I stayed for so long because I subconsciously knew that I was frightened.
To be alone,
Stranded in a sea of change,
Lost in liminality.
Be it as it may, this uncertainty is no longer a concern of mine. Systematically, disquiet remained wherever my will was challenged by external actors that meant harm to my ways or lifestyle. I was very frightened by this, and it often shaped my actions. Every movement I made was calculated to avoid disquiet, as I did not understand its origin or purpose. My fears, however, were drowned long ago, ever since I learned that my intuition is a woman, and she is rarely wrong. Despite the obstacles that might spawn in this new path I burned myself into, this time something tells me I will not succumb to the overwhelming weight of speculation.
This is because even after my life took a natural detour, my intuition screamed in apparition, as she feared that I may have been coerced out of some relevant facts that regarded the hardships I currently endure. And so, I started to question every single step. It was then when I felt the familiar tug of intuition. Vespera, silently, reminded me that some truths need only be noticed, and nothing else.
I believe the reason she and I have become such good friends is because we both tend to sit and wonder, often together. And upon the discovery of this whole new face of deceit, we have been able to efficiently conclude that this impact will not prove fatal to me. Although, we both are surprised at the fact that it even nicked me in the first place. And it is in that particular seedling of pain where I have stumbled upon my greatest personal revelation to date.
Subsequent to both success and calamity, I orderly experience incisive transitions that regard my sense of self. This behavior, which I have analyzed deeply in other studies, surged and has persisted ever since I first found Vespera by the fountain. Her nails were so long that she could not fetch water to quench her thirst, having no option but to long for a few drops to graze her lips. I stumbled upon her by accident and helped. I remember her skin glowing with such paleness, almost translucence, that one could almost perceive the path that the fresh water from the fountain made down her throat. The astonishment endowed by the delight from said scene was not the only reward I got from this sudden act of charity. After enjoying the relief of having her need met for a second, Vespera spoke. Impetuously, she vowed to help me and explained this phenomenon I am haunted by. The one that erodes the ego and the mirage of the self, leading sailors to their shipwreck and inevitable doom when the realizations rip the purpose away from their missions, making their journeys pointless.
She said that it is the reason that makes my past versions meet when docked near a lighthouse of memories. It is also what makes them estranged from one another and sometimes even antagonized, mostly to me. I understood then that pain was the catalyst for this transformation. She described it as the process itself, in which a memory of myself becomes a stranger, or even my enemy in some cases. It is those painful moments that squeeze the consciousness from the subject into another plane of reality, the sea of Cabanon. There, the mind is a ship. One that needs no captain. And it is driven only by the currents of regret and torment, being brought ultimately to the lighthouse, where the current version of the self rests ashore, but also where ships can never dock. Her words held no mystery to my logic. And I, being as much of a hedonist as a utilitarian, received this foretelling with a feeling of promise and renovation.
This matters little now, however. The pattern has changed.
Finally.
Vespera now worries about trust broken in intimacy and other external matters. Matters that threaten me in the outside world, where people lie. Now more than ever. Especially now, and to me. On the contrary, I have not been able to help but get lost in this new order. This new state of mind brings me to a whole new level of understanding. Since my mind remains blurry, I do not know if I should celebrate this new subconscious environment. Even though I have longed for such a change for longer than I care to remember, the thought still invades my head that perhaps I should drop to my knees and mourn the lighthouse.
Odd as it may sound. It currently feels as if the roles were inverted. Vespera loses herself in mundane affairs while I stay lost from within myself. It is indeed ironic, but it takes no weight away from the importance of this situation. In it, my dismay has rendered me a motionless smear in the canvas that illustrates the grand scheme of things. Belittled by the stampede of events, I was left with no option but to embrace stillness and admire with neonatal-like innocence the new reality that takes over me.
And so, the great discovery presents itself to my shock.
I have not transformed.
My memories have stayed the same, and my identity is unfazed. For a reason that remains undisclosed to me, the pain has not banished my selfhood to the Cabanon. Perhaps there was too little of it to strip me of my agency, but even so, it was a standard amount of pain for said event. Unforeseen, yet augured. After a long winter of inactivity and sedentarism, it feels like the promises are coming back to me. My soul is once again arriving at a brighter beach of white sand and clear skies. A sea where it does belong. The new prose takes the form of warm, salty breezes as I kneel at the shore and let my pen flow as waves do.
But this changes the theory around liminality and memories. This private revelation is the living embodiment of a broader dynamic. It is now clear to me that disquiet negotiates identity in the memory by alternating estrangement and recognition. In somewhat of a Pavlovian nightmare, pain here functions as an institutional mechanism of cognitive reconfiguration. After the discovery, it is unfeasible for it to be catharsis alone. Instead, it is more of a reallocation of attentional economy toward previously occluded truths. If in this equation the self is a vessel, the currents of regret push and pull insight to reorient it, as opposed to my previous hypothesis, which would be to sink it. Thus, the persistence of disquiet is not an anomaly. In lieu, it becomes the pistons in its engine, conditions through which selves rearticulate purpose.
Until this very instant, I blindly believed that the lighthouse where all the versions of my past selves docked and gathered around was the verdict. The final say in the directions that my life took. Notwithstanding, I realize now that it is nothing more than a marker. Pain brightens the shoals where my past selves laid their illusions, their discontents, and their disappointments, which they ultimately took out on me. Vespera’s counsel taught me to read the tides, to accept that change will bruise but not unmake me. I once thought that I was doomed to endure the scorching torment of my memories. That is no longer my reality
Perhaps there is no final shore to claim, and this new beach I have arrived at will neither be my paradise nor my prison. Perhaps these are merely seasons in which ships forget the anchorage and then, quietly, remember. The things that remain now bring me comfort: Vespera still sits by the fountain, and I still kneel at the white sand.
It would be foolish to say that I have been remade. The only fact is that I remain. Disquiet tested the seams of my narrative, tugged at old loyalties to versions of myself that lived only in memory, and showed me where the hull had been weakened. It did not sink me. That is an empirical conclusion drawn from repeated occurrences. Pain reorganizes the system. The meaning is redistributed due to changes in appraisal and attention. The subject, I, perseveres and, most importantly, gains knowledge.
Freed from the tyranny of past iterations, I am no longer a hostage to their unfinished scripts. I now respond with scrutiny instead of recoiling at the reverberation of old doubts. I learned from Vespera to view dishonesty as a force to be resisted rather than a destiny to be endured. It transforms vulnerability into strength and transforms my pen into a tool of punishment rather than solace.
I am no longer the sum of what hurt me, and that makes me a threat to those who would mislead or deform my course. It is only a matter of time before they try to silence me.
So beware, because I live,
And remember,
Sticks and stones may break bones, but my pen will kill you quicker.
The Liberator.
War FairyTales 