How Anderson learned not to look at mirrors in Blavatsky

[Ari Rahikkala]

Anderson floated in empty space, without knowledge of where or when he was. Within the unbearably bright whiteness surrounding him hovered something fuzzy: Two spheres, shedding their skin in large pink strips which would disintegrate in the air. Next to the spheres, he could make out a yellow rectangle that somehow seemed to be the source of the light. Wait, was he remembering his birth? And what was the word that had brought this to his mind again?

He tasted purple ink, the kind that drains out of the lips of cold flowers.

A vague voice spoke in his ear: "Evelyn could love deeper than any human being, and in a way, feel deeper pain, too - but somehow, she had been made right, and she was better at dealing with it. Arf!"

Anderson died and found himself in blue. A breathless abyssal ocean, with only the vaguest sense of light in one direction and of darkness in the opposite. He tried swimming, but while there was resistance against his hands and feet, he felt no motion on his face. He realised that this was one possible afterlife, the death of the ocean being: An eternity in substanceless water, neither cold not warm, and with no hope of ever coming to the surface.

The teenager retorted: "Hey, I spent a lot of time not existing and it didn't seem that bad to me. Bet you twenty pon you can't find the difference between it and going to sleep."

Now the taste in his mouth was clearness. A whiteness. Not sparkling, not bursting, but merely a sensation like the end of the journey from filthy to clean water, travelled a thousand times over.

And now, yet another taste - a repugnant one this time, one of a substance that he believed to be brown although he'd never seen it: The inner lining of the uterus, just before birth. It almost made him gag, it was like eating one's snot, but somehow even more puerile. And what, the uterus again? What was it with this whole birth theme again?

Inside his head, a lecturer's dry reproduction rang out: "I am Salemadus. I did die thousands of years ago, and now I am alive again, through this vessel that took into itself my memories. And if it wasn't for my host's knowledge and understanding, I wouldn't be able to tell to you how happy I am to be back."

Anderson existed outside of time. He saw the structures that made up - something. A mathematical concept? The whole of existence? He was something that rode the edges of a graph, he was a function transforming one immutable value into another, he was all things, but above all, he was timeless. Some kind of a feeling at the back of his head reminded him he should be concerned about something, but he couldn't quite catch what it was.

Anderson faced God. He had been an atheist since fourteen, still was, but that wasn't a problem. That was God in front of him, the one and only, he felt quite convinced of it, not to mention appropriately tiny and in awe. His mind was a machine, an imperfect mediator of internal models with external reality, always coming up with new theories, most of which it rightly expected to be wrong, but had to entertain anyway to see if they could work. Believing two inconsistent theories about the fundamental nature of existence was one of the easiest hacks you could pull off on a system like that.

And the fourth ghost spoke: "Hey, it's the simplest explanation, man. Why do you think we've got a zillion things named after mathematicians that no history book mentions?"

He felt the emotion of being a child. He really didn't know how that one worked. It was probably some kind of message his body was trying to send him that was supposed to have a real use, or at least once had in his evolutionary history, but that he'd managed to associate with the completely wrong thing. As it was, he couldn't really describe it as anything but that: The feeling of being a child. Of course, when he felt it it was usually also compounded with a flood of nostalgic memories and sensations - and sometimes it did seem as if he'd been feeling that same thing throughout his childhood.

Somewhere in the distance, he heard an angel intone: "Actually the solution's pretty simple. Just go through all your memories and reencode them in the new representation. It still works pretty well at the age of three, though if you want to keep a lot of intrauterine memories you'll have to learn language early and start the process at two and a half, two if you can pull it off..."

Anderson was in Straylight. He was turning inward, inward, into a world where he could only see himself. There was a sound not quite like any other, that of space closing in upon itself, of reality turning into the inside of a silver sphere. The universe was the folds of his brain, the dreamhouse he lived in so many nights not quite an illusion anymore. He was alone, all alone, trapped inside a poisoned mind.

[Ari Rahikkala]

In case you're wondering: The quotes are just random. The prose paragraphs, on the other hand, are my attempts to get as close as possible to describing various emotions, states of mind, weird associations, and minor obsessions I've had over my life. Feel free to ask about any of them, a lot were triggered by or just have some connection with some kinda weird stuff (and with "weird" I mean stuff that's normal but should not usually lead to this kind of thoughts).

Also, the reason why you shouldn't look at a mirror in Blavatsky is usually simply that sometimes the mirror looks back. But sometimes this other stuff happens too.

[Austi_Scot]

ok, since you said it's ok to ask questions.

Do you often associate taste with color?