The Tower

Take the Stairs

The Tower

 

I wake up from an endless night. I can’t remember anything. It is if I’ve been reborn, only in a pit. I look up and down. I’m in a hole deep, deep in the ground. I claw my fingers on the edges of the hole, trying to climb my way out, still pondering and questioning my reason of being here. I keep looking up, trying to see anything through the top of the hole. As it appears, I am about sixty feet underground, with streams of water rising to my knees and then down again.

Years pass, and I haven’t even died from starvation yet, but the worms help. I think of myself not having one moment of me without a wet face, as I beg my poisoned mind to just make me think happy thoughts about food, water, or a way out. A way out! Out! I scream the word over and over. I screech. Blood drips from my fingers. I claw, pull, scream- claw, pull, scream! I- I feel something. It feels nice.

      It was the first, “good” thing that I’ve ever experienced in the past 72 hours. It was the breeze. The breeze. I… am in heaven. Compared to all the things I have done which is nothing more than bleeding, crying, clawing and screaming- I am in heaven.

“How?” I ask myself. “How can a feel wind. I am sixty feet underground with nothing but quick echoes of my own screams, and a scarce amount of air that I am able to breath. How?” I rub my eyes. I try to get the poison of fear and corruption out of my mind. My eyes can see properly. My ears can hear accurately. My throat is now clear.

I am on the surface.

I’ve climbed to the top of the hole. I love myself and hug myself. My muscles and bones still feel weak and sick, though, so I start running. I run and run and run, feeling more of the fine wind brushing against my rotting skin (which now seems to be getting smoother and more fine). Then, I closed my eyes, and enjoyed the wind.

I keep running, until finally I fade into the experience of being cozy, or warm, or protected. I look back. I squint my eyes to a light. A big light. The sun.

“All this time” I say. “I have spent ‘my life’ in a ditch. I’ve been missing out on all of this?! I’ve practically been dead, or at least born in hell for about three days straight. But now, I’m alive.” I say it as if this it is the biggest relief in all of eternity. I hear the hills around me thump and stomp. I feel the wind paint the sky blue with its own mistakes of outlining clouds. I see the top. The top of everything. I’m on the top of The Tower.

I realize that if this is the very top, the only way forward, is down. I take a leap of faith straight down to nowhere, with pebbles hitting my sobbing face. My face is wetting up as fast as the wind is pushing the tears off. There’s one point, now…… one target:

It’s the hole of my birth and growth.

I fall, and fall… and when I reach the ‘end,’ I sink. I just think. My sight, once again, clears and I observe the journey of humanity and what made it so great. I see tall building and high mountains. “So this is the end,” I say to myself. But when I observe the creations of both nature and structure, I get a feeling that it’s only the beginning.

And once again, I have to get to the top.