# From the Rift — Story (4/4) · chapters 18–21

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> Before: From the Rift — Story 3/4 (chapters 13–17) — https://spindle-of-reality.org/volltext/geschichte-3.md · After: Gallery — https://spindle-of-reality.org/volltext/galerie.md
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> Structured source (typed blocks): https://spindle-of-reality.org/content/chapters/chapter-18.yaml · https://spindle-of-reality.org/content/chapters/chapter-19.yaml · https://spindle-of-reality.org/content/chapters/chapter-20.yaml · https://spindle-of-reality.org/content/chapters/chapter-21.yaml

## XVIII. Tremendous Attention

**Female Voice:** I see you have already accepted, or why does nothing stir in your window to the soul? Can you smell that? You have been left to yourself long enough.

**I:** Could you please leave me to the numbers?

**Female Voice:** You want me to leave you to chance?! He dwells in numbers. Where is the value in that?

**I:** A number has no value. A mere form, utterly empty. Its apparent fullness comes from invisible threads that hold the number in its shape. From one number to the next, they multiply, become many, infinitely many. And yet they all sink into the circling zero, and when added together they unite into a Whole upon the sea of Emptiness.

**Female Voice:** You want to go into infinity?

**I:** I am, therefore such a wish would be absurd. But do you not feel the waves, the eternal tide returns. I make my heart a rock and let them break upon my love.

**Female Voice:** It is true, the waves can be felt. The flood is coming. When you speak from the depths of your heart, yet your love no longer answers, then who speaks...?

**I:** You are remarkably attentive. You are already speaking from that place.

**Female Voice:** Oh, you are saying I can only love what truly is?

**I:** Love can only be found in experience, not in your heart. Another spirit dwells there, one that wants to see and feel nothing. You must behold her golden tail, give her a home in your world only to send her back into hers, then experience will mirror a Golden in her name, to be felt forever.

**Female Voice:** I will dream of it.

**I:** Do not live your dreams. Too many continue living in a sea of broken dreams. They need only let themselves fall and sink. Yet they fear that intuitive truth will overwrite their rational logic. And attention is not written, it is given, to the flowing context of reality as to the empty yet pulsing space of dreams. We are melting pots of being, standing on a bridge between ice and swirling blossom. We carry Nothing upward to experience Everything, charged with chaos, toward fulfilling bloom, so one becomes Nothing and is Everything: an eternal time-folder, if you understand.

**Female Voice:** How do I find a path like yours?! I want to learn to fold time as well.

**I:** I follow a young path. It has the potential to become a riverbed. I have given birth to it and sent it forth from my fire. I stood in flames and my spirit crumbled to ash. Finally alone in black Nothing. Gazing attentively into Emptiness, simply nothing. Here, at the very bottom, no one wants your gift, yet you see all the way to the top. Your heart contracts until it nearly breaks. So offer the last drop of love to your Self and stare attentively into the void, until the Self is You.

**Female Voice:** I know the black Nothing. I believe I have encountered it in my dreams these past weeks. There I become I?!

**I:** What do you mean you know it?! Do you have any idea of the depth of the human plane? You must have experienced something. Those who come to me are the ones who cannot imagine walking, so they fly. Those who fill mystical books at night because family violence made them grow up far too soon. Those who allowed black souls to bind them in white chains. Those who stand in empty rooms and dare not look beneath the carpet. Those who from birth could only stumble along, rejecting every help because beautiful images and stories sprout from dirty ground. Those who had already left their dying bodies only to awaken once more in white sheets with new courage to live. Those who end the war in the family for themselves and step into the Now with a seed for peaceful childhood. Tell me, what have you experienced?

**Female Voice:** A holy war rages within me. And it is not about peace. It is a storm of violence.

**I:** In time you will learn to love it. In it I grew old.

**Female Voice:** But here there is neither defeat nor victory.

**I:** Yes, the process is a thankless act. So take care to remain in your center and, in your attention, keep the equilibrium... how shall I put it... don't fuck it up.

**Female Voice:** I will give my best and accept my worst. Is a war raging in you as well?

**I:** What do you think? That my family, at the core of the vortex, did not nearly drown? That all that blood, shot and spilled, did not open dead springs that flow through my being today? Do you think that? Do you really think that?! The third is for eternity, and I have been waging it since I first had images in my head. Everything mirrors itself, and it sends me between poles.

**Female Voice:** I no longer think much. I have respect for what is coming.

**I:** Find your dead companions and follow the streaks. I send my companions from ungraspable planes into a subconscious battle. The line is shifted in the heart, not on the battlefield. And if we wish to live upon it, it must be brought into equilibrium. The desire, no, the drive for a fulfilled life kills good and evil alike...

I could speak no further. An image pierced through me: myself strapped to a kind of dentist's chair, eyelids clamped wide open, staring directly into blinding white light.

> *I tried with all my strength to see more, but all that appeared was the faint outline of a small, slender figure that enclosed the emptiness on both left and right and pressed me back into my own Nothing.*

**Female Voice:** The drive for a fulfilled life kills good and evil alike... and what remains is the human. You surely wanted to add that. We are finished with the operation. I have injected you with something that is clearly already taking effect. The wound needs time to heal. I will give you the necessary rest. Thank you for the conversation. You will recognize my gift when you see it.

## XIX. Angels Without Wings

And so I lay there. Where exactly, I did not know. I must have spent an eternity in deep anesthesia, for only slowly did I begin to see a gray veil again, and slowly came the sensation of returning to my body.

I could feel my heart beating dully, blood swirling in smooth eddies through my chambers and flowing down into my fingers and toes, though little of it yet reached the upper heights: my head.

> *And that was what I needed now. For the more my vision returned, the more I wanted to close my eyes again.*

I had not yet begun to grasp the full extent of what lay before me, let alone truly see it. I still felt suspended between a deep psychedelic haze, likely from the fading anesthetics, and complete shock paralysis.

> *The horror of my world had taken shape. She sat in the cage.*

And so I sat, half-minded and newly sensed, in an old, battered treatment chair. I looked down and saw many small bloodstains decorating the gray floor in mottled patterns.

It was no ordinary cage. It was a swarm of flies, buzzing in continuous orbits, forming the bars. Ah, if only it had been a wonder of nature.

But the figure inside the cage was an emaciated, utterly shredded crow. It had scarcely any feathers left on its body; one could see mostly its skeleton, and the wounds looked glassy. As though the flesh had dried up when the blood stopped flowing and healing had never begun.

> *The wings consisted of only four feathers each, symmetrically arranged, and through the vast gaps between them it seemed physically impossible for the crow to fly. Yet it did.*

It gave the impression that it had to fly; its food, the swarm of flies, appeared to hold complete control over the half-dead bird's freedom of movement.

So I stared through a wide gap in the cage, where the bars moved with a humming buzz, and looked into the crow's half-face. One eye pitch-black; on the other side, a deep blackness too, but no eye was visible in that hollow.

In its glistening gray-black beak it held a small silver chain from which a golden miner's lamp dangled back and forth.

*[Image: Crow]*

The crow, seemingly imprisoned, or at least under the cage's control, hovered in the center of the black bars, beating its hollow wings, half-crashing. The cage followed her and guided her at once, the way water follows a riverbed and carves new valleys into it.

And so, from the intuition of my confused state, I began to speak to her:

**I:** Are you imprisoned, or are you being protected? You seem to be crashing into nothingness, yet you hover here before me!

I waited for an answer, but none came. Only the buzzing of the flies in my ears, while my gaze followed the small miner's lamp and it worked upon me like hypnosis.

And on its next swing to the left, I looked a little higher, and saw how the flies had created a kind of black-and-white moving film. They moved skillfully beneath the light falling from above, forming a simple street where five-story facades rose into the night sky on both sides of the sidewalk.

In the distance, a young couple, the girl clearly smaller than the boy, moved haltingly down the left sidewalk, apparently locked in intense conversation. They came steadily closer to me.

And to my left, a plain house entrance had formed out of countless thousands of flies. Even the nine nameplates on the right wall were rendered with names. There must have been millions upon millions.

Everything I saw, the opposite side of the street, the parked cars, the dark-yellow streetlamp light that reflected so beautifully along the hundred meters of slightly damp asphalt, the entire space must have been transformed into this scene outside my attention. Now I stood in the middle of this "fly-film production."

And while my attention was still drawn by the gentle glow of the softly dancing yellow light, the couple turned into the entrance. She pressed a round shape into his hand in agitation, perhaps a cake, and pointed down the street from which they had come.

He only shrugged, turned toward the door, and set the cake tin directly beneath the nine bells. When he looked up again, she sat with her face buried in her hands on the steps, and the moving image-play of the flies froze.

I looked around: the street was empty, no movement, only the continuous buzzing pierced my being. I looked back into the entrance: the girl slumped on the stairs, the boy's hand only centimeters from forgiveness at the threshold of the altar, her shoulders, frozen.

And as these words tore through my stream of thought, my gaze was drawn upward again to the bells, first to the plaque above the buttons that read:

Höllenstraße -
No mountains in sight here
and the Main will carry you away.

I was no longer sure what she had said to me in the yellow sea, four blocks or four floors. I felt as though I were on the opposite side of the world.

I looked at the names beside the buttons and saw that no one lived on the fourth floor. At least no names were written in the small designated slots.

I glanced toward the entrance door and saw on the right side five rows of two mailbox slots each. Here too the fourth row was unlabeled, and from the left slot protruded the small white corner of a letter, which I instinctively grasped.

With one motion the slightly thicker paper of the letter unfolded, and my two round gates drew the lines into forgetful depth.

We are those no one believes in anymore,
and so we are eternally grateful to you.

We died for life,
crumbled to dust,
and now dance in new wind.

We live between every line
people write, speak,
sing into passing breezes.

You are the king of the skies.
No one can harm you up there -
at least that is what you believe -
and perhaps you want to be right -
but do you not sometimes wish
to be the wind itself?

We do not sit in heaven;
we stood in white robes on the peaks
and flowed with you into the valleys,
where in the shadows we gave wings.

We realize what you imagine for us,
that is how they learn through the pain of life.
If only they knew, if only they could see.

In your life you will accept only gifts
that are meant to be lived,
for that is how they fill your spiritual emptiness
with material rubbish.

We loved and revered them so,
but we lost them in the dark greed for more
upon the sea.

By walking through hell
you defended the possible heaven,
and so the rift opened.

We march on until we fly again.

As I released my attention from the unfolded letter, a thought drifted past me:

You run far deeper through my inner being
than my imagination allows me to see -
and I am glad of it.

You told me
that some things will be heavier than necessary,
so that later we will be stronger than ever before.

At last I can say it:
She turns, and I no longer do.

I pressed the unmarked buttons for the fourth floor, glanced once more over my right shoulder, and as I did I saw the crow land on a streetlamp across the street. She spread her four-feathered wings, and I heard the buzzing.

I pushed the door open and stood in a familiar alley.

> *I looked over my shoulder again: the teapot hung directly above me.*

## XX. Taut Surface

I turned around one last time and gazed deep into the alley from which I now sauntered casually, smooth-stepped across gray asphalt where the drops falling from the sky mirrored lost light in glittering reflections, before seeping calmly through a few cracks at the edges into the abyss.

I raised my head - the clouds above me were not merely moving - they were streaming across the firmament. A slightly light-gray shimmering pattern in the center of the cloud cover caught my attention.

> *I tightened the cord. It took only a moment and from the streaming movements of the canopy a vortex emerged in the light-gray shimmer of my twilit night. The vortex seemed softly flowing in its glow, yet still at the core. The flowing cloud cover slowly tore further open - from east to west - and between the tears it turned calmly, enclosed by hovering water droplets, like a fish standing still in the counter-eddy of a tearing current.*

A long gaze, a smooth motion of the hand across my forehead, beneath my chest, drawn back to my mouth, and it pulled me out of the alley back onto the bustling street.

The same street as coming, now walking back - guided by the remembered scent of the soup house - already falling onto the stool in the front corner.

I was just slurping the last of the beef broth, its fat eyes mirroring, from the cream-colored bowl when my phone vibrated.

> *It could only mean that an important message had arrived. I let the final warmth of the exquisite bowl of Lanzhou ramen wash gently through my body, wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and pulled the phone from my pocket.*

**Message:** I hope you enjoyed the meal. Take the five for three, then exit two, east seventy steps right. Look down - all ground is just taut surface. Nice to see you dance. The river is holy.

It took me four minutes to the nearest metro station, six minutes waiting for line five, the three stops lasted an eternal-seeming eight minutes, exit two was contrary to my expectation next to exit five, but after I crossed the street outside and turned left it was exactly seventy steps to the right turn into a relatively wide pedestrian zone, beautifully paved with white and orange bricks in mosaic-like patterns, yet run-down. It seemed as though commerce in the shops here had wilted not too long ago. Slowly I strolled across the patterns of the bricks, looking left and right up and down the facades. Everything appeared locked up tight or abandoned and I was alone in the open.

Until I paused briefly to examine an old price list at one of the shops - a kilogram of long-devoured leg of lamb for a no longer legible price - when I noticed a rhythmic vibration transferring from the ground into my body.

> *As though the heart of a blue whale were setting the underground into oscillation. I touched the wall beside the sign with my left hand and my body received the bass reverberating upward even stronger.*

I glanced around briefly before flicking my wrist three times smoothly, in time with the beat, knocking with the back of my middle finger on the white door to the right of the sign. The door opened a good crack and a head with curly black hair and round glasses emerged and looked first up the street, then down, before gazing skeptically into my face and asking without greeting:

**Doorkeeper:** What do we stand on?

**I:** Taut surface

> *What kind of question is that, he was not asking further, he was testing. And the unreflected intuitive answer would have been the ground..*

Even as I spoke the second word his head moved slightly downward and with my last syllable rose again. I was in.

**Doorkeeper:** Around the corner to the right is the cloakroom.

I left the cloakroom behind and turned directly into a wide corridor with black sofas and a multitude of stools, chairs and small tables standing around in disorder on both sides. On most of the tables stood several plastic bottles, between them lay, conspicuously often, empty little plastic baggies; here and there jackets were draped over chairs or stools and the occasional backpack and dozens of handbags were placed on sofas or beneath chairs and tables.

Hardly a soul had settled in the sparse artificial light of the corridor, next to me someone lay motionless on the couch and at the staircase still some distance from me someone sat on a stool nodding gently with his head while his eyes were closed. Two friends stood close beside him and seemed to be trying to get him to stand up. I closed my eyes briefly, breathed in and at the transition to its opposite, walked on and let my gaze wander freely.

Nothing truly caught my attention, my eyes briefly snagged on a yellow package from which some biscuits had been torn - an old name in curved script, a breath of monads - only as I curved toward the staircase did I hear one of the guys say:

**DJ Friend:** We can leave him sitting here, he'll sleep another hour, then he'll freshen up and we'll really get it going again.

The sentence still echoed in my thoughts as I descended the stairs and noticed how the air changed. It seemed to vibrate in the truest sense of the word, I shook everything off, turned slightly to the right and took the last three steps before I plunged into the sea of sound.

> *And then something played out before my inner eye that I can only describe in hindsight as a kind of opening sequence. Barely possible to capture in words.*

* * *

So cuts an invisible cord
Wound in attention
It divides and unites
So flowing reality falls into the riverbed of your being
Leaving a fissure in the heart

They think in a world like yours one knows no death
Yet it lies as medicine in every drawer
And it pulls at the dark void of their self
What do you know of people who have everything
But still want to take it all from themselves
Because they can find nothing within
Yet the white devil is just a message and twenty minutes away
All feelings grow cold
Thoughts so confused and dim
Grandma becomes her own executioner

Good souls plunge from the river of life
Down the stairs or bridge
And never rise again

Others lie on white sheets and are already floating away
But are not allowed to
Pulled back by unknown force

But at four in the night on the balcony
High again
No spirit is chained to tracks anymore

Young eyes watch their own sources extinguish each other
And then She stands there

Lonely

On her island in the in-between

* * *

And yes, then she stood there. I here, on the floor of the dancefloor, in the vibration of massive techno beats.

> *And what a magnificent room it was. The special thing? An interwoven net that divided the room in two. It was no simple net, but an entire network with a thickness of at least one and a half meters, woven with thousands of beautifully curved knots of black and white nylon cord. A vast macrame pattern with incredible visual depth-vibration in the trembling strobe light that flashed through the fog clouds.*

From well-hidden fog machines at the edges of the room and the corners of the ceiling, light gray mist was blown into the space and it formed an overarching cloud cover that reunited the divided room, at least in the upper reaches.

I gave her dress my full attention. It billowed softly in the vibrations that flooded the room from the speakers. She still seemed small in the vast space. Like a peanut - two together and yet divided in one shell. She had a tremendous radiance, like a dancing solar storm. Radiation in the face of flowing beauty, striking deep in the heart and carrying the bloom of life outward.

> *My self was in that moment a pure form, empty inside, but this form was all I had.*

Emptiness?
I am empty, emptier than empty
So much emptiness that everything fits inside
Without filling me
For my form of self needs its space
I myself am nothing
Only mirrored balance
My being a river in its bed
At the bottom there is nothing to understand
Look too deep into my eyes
You sink
Until you drown or swim in the charged stream of rising emptiness

* * *

All at once a hard shove. I had to take a light lunge forward before I could turn, already slightly on the balls of my feet - ready for whatever may come. Three dark figures were making their way through the crowd toward the DJ's mixing desk and had already vanished behind the next dancing group.

Suddenly a peculiar tension lay in the air. The kind of tension you feel without being able to rationally comprehend even a fraction of it, but you are dead certain everything will derail if no one throws a stone into the river. Someone had just re-stretched reality and folded their forms with great dissonance into the pattern of the landscape.

My focus remained on the three figures and their movement through the crowd. They were just crossing the macrame when a thought pressed itself into my field of attention:

> *Every war crosses borders, otherwise it would not be war - war is holy - one only enters it when words fail.*

In spiritual accord with the rhythm, not only my body moved but also my inner world:

> *I searched for words until I saw only images, lost in valleys drenched in red, fled through white mist over gray peaks, for a long time nothing but pain and this breath of lived balance. I am grateful to her, she always searches for the beautiful in all the gray - this SEEDWORLD. Flowed thousands of kilometers across the landscape, really to see clearly, but here I am understanding - I resonate in motion. My words are clear and cold, like glacial water. Everyone admires them from outside, but no one dares to bathe in them. Questions need no answer, in their depth every answer becomes a decision.*

And in my eye a black grain catches and cuts sharply, like the starlit sky of the Thar in their souls.

> *The desert a space for the time between states. And so I entered this desert - the dunes wove themselves through the landscape beyond the horizon - in gray-golden gleam of their countless grains. I did not move. The gentle but cold wind pierced every one of my bones and drew me ever deeper into the wave-like patterns within.*

And then I stood there, all alone, it was neither large nor imposing, it was beautiful but nothing special, it was gray surrounded by gold-shimmering grains of sand. I stepped one pace closer and in deep black script with a fine golden border, inscribed upon the stone backrest:

Rex Nullius
In solio meo sedeo in limine

*[Image: Throne]*

I turned slowly and was about to let my body fall onto the stone slab when I suddenly perceived the bass of the music again and the macrame wove itself back into my attention.

> *I was back and had lost sight of the three figures.*

## XXI. All Comes

> *I feel most alive when death whispers into my conscience and so warns me of the abyss.*

> *And it arrived in me, clear and distinct: "Set yourself in motion and bring the stones back into the river."*

> *It is each time first a burden, before from movement itself the desire is born.*

And so I set myself in motion, on the way to cross through the macrame. Driven by the feel of the bass I found my rhythm in my step - hidden in the dark space between the dancing figures.

> *So it carried me through the swelling room, and when I met the macrame with outstretched hands, it felt as though I were gliding through the gaps without dividing myself.*

Neither black magic nor holy light.
Who would remain must become.

On the other side everything felt softer, but also duller. The sound left a trickling echo in my ears here. I moved slowly and in rhythm with the music through the crowd - most wore chic black and bared a lot of skin while letting themselves fall, dancing or sitting at the edges.

> *I roamed the room and kept watch.*

For whoever seeks, finds.
Not what he wants - what he needs.

* * *

I looked into his eyes, let the impression briefly settle, and spoke.

**I:** Do we have a problem?

**Black Brother:** No, why should we?

**I:** There seems to be a palpable tension between us. Or am I sensing something here that doesn't exist?

**Black Brother:** Tension between us? In which direction is it pulling you, then?

**I:** I go my way, sometimes with the greater current, more often against it.

**Black Brother:** Keep walking toward death, my friend, my enemies wait for you there. For your return and their turning. Will you tell me where you come from?

**I:** I live between East and West, like the jungle between the two poles of this world. And where did you grow up? Surely not without drama, if one trusts your eyes.

**Black Brother:** Back where I'm from, you see them again and again, bright souls, dark hearts. Everyone who grew up with me knew at some point he'd never go under - sometimes proud, sometimes because they wished it for me, desperately. By now it's all the same to me what drama drips into my life-river, I enjoy the rain and water my seed in the black soil with it.

His friend to his right, casually dressed in black joggers, a black T-shirt and an open white training jacket worn over it, paired with black hair slicked back beneath a backwards cap - smiled at me, half mischievously, half warmly.

> *I gave the whole thing an accepting glance and picked up the conversation again.*

**I:** You must have known a fair share of suffering.

**Black Brother:** Mhh, what is suffering once you're used to the pain. Suffering is something that carries you, that's why it's so heavy when it lies upon you.

**I:** What can I say.. brother. When I hear them speak about the suffering of others, I ask myself, should I walk seven hours through a few valleys, over sharp ridges to high peaks, to bathe in the humility of creation - or should I, with art, first take the balance below, only to up there, with a grin on my face, let an elbow slide onto the temple.

**Black Brother:** Lucky for me you can't strike me - I play without cards or pieces. At least we're bound on this plane. They believe they could be good, and so first the bad, then the evil settles in.

He looked past me for a brief while, someone or something had caught his attention.

**Black Brother:** But now tell me - where are you from?

**I:** Where did I grow up? I walk the way back and ask myself where the waves of life have carried me..
Was it worth it?
Was enemy to everyone for so long, now I've got him as a photo on the wall. I see no light, yet want to count stars.
So often it's three in the morning again and I play my music and in my thoughts build no castle out of sand,
just a Tschibit with, not on, Hindu Kush, don't tell me I should run faster.
I dive through the riverbed of memory to coming visions.
Brother, welcome to no-man's-land.

**Black Brother:** You are where we are headed. And who would remain must become. Born King in the realm of men.

**I:** Grown out of a dark past in humility - become human.

**Black Brother:** A dark past?

**I:** My dearest spirit learned to dance in the yard, only to stand seven days at the end of the valley with the lads against four hundred iron machines and twenty-seven thousand souls.

**Wanderer:** Draw from your emptiness and all will become, not all will be good, but all will be. Just believe and all will be real.

**I:** From what depth do you suddenly speak. But you are more than right. All comes.

A softly swelling silence spread through the circle.

* * *

From the left a rather bright, yet scratchy, female voice suddenly sounded.

There were three women, without shyness, who had stepped up to us. Far right had beautifully drawn eyeliner that came especially well into its own on her pale face.

Far left was taller than me, had long legs, anything but thin, but not thick either - it was natural balance, and thanks to the black fishnet stockings paired with a black bodysuit they were lifted into full splendor.

In the middle, gray-green eyes stared at me trembling, her attention jumping between the men of the circle. She wore a kind of loose black corset with a woven mini skirt.

> *On the left side was a white orchid-stitch pattern. I followed the stem of the orchid from bottom to top, it was a flowing encounter, she moved her body slightly trembling with the rhythm of the freshly struck beat. My gaze slid further upward, always along the pattern, up to the beautifully embroidered bust, above which much of her own bloom came into view, and above that the flickering gray-green crystals.*

**She (middle):** Wanderer you got anything else for us? We only got two out, how's that supposed to last us the night?

**Wanderer:** You love the stuff far too much. I'll come to you in a moment.

**Friend on the right:** Everything I love starts with K.

**Friend on the left:** If you help us, we'll love you tonight.

**Wanderer:** Not necessary, better love yourselves. Give us two minutes.

The women turned and walked a few meters to the side, settling on the stacked pallets at the edge.

**Black Brother:** Better love yourselves? You did not really say that.

**Wanderer:** I can die alone, but not lonely.

**I:** As real as imagination itself. What helps against loneliness.. except being alone.

**Wanderer:** Dear God, please bargain my balance with the devil.

**Black Brother:** What more does God have to do for you?

**I:** God can do nothing against the devil. Beyond crossed borders we let our guiding principles fall and dive back into old patterns...

**Wanderer:** ..patterns of violence.

**Black Brother:** How do you know your words are true?

**I:** I do not know, I give them faith, until.. the echo of experience gives me the knowing.

**Wanderer:** All else nasip.

The Wanderer was finishing his business - I let myself drift a little, dancing to the bass.

**Black Brother:** Watching you, listening to you, one doesn't know whether you'll go up in flames or a great flood will pour out. And what truly happens I do not know.

**Wanderer:** And still you get this feeling of standing on black soil with new roots beneath. You have fire in your eyes, but you move like water. Despite our strength, you are rooted in fruitful time.

Who will hand me the water?
I am the water itself.
Who will ignite me?
I carry fire in my eyes.
Who will bring the bloom in winter?
I am black earth where green meadow grows, beneath a white icy skin.
Who will carry me?
I am free of suffering.

**I:** Yet all I want is to be free, like the wind that brings the rain.

**Wanderer:** You are like a gift that one opens only so it may wrap itself anew.

**I:** We will have to let go in order to hold our being in the current.

The two of them nodded silently. We looked into each other's eyes briefly, seeking trust, found it, and left the location through a back exit.

> *Climbed into a small five-door with a long snout and drove off.*

Are woven between worlds
Like Song Jiang the opportune rain
Between Liangshan Marsh
And the high image of every soul
A simple being with serpents and birds

They opened their hearts entirely
In their flight
First you feel the pain
Then hate should come
Yet all that streams out
Is clear but not visible.

We stopped at a corner, the two of them got out, I saw in the rearview mirror how they disappeared into an entrance.

I looked up the stories of the gray facade beside me. On the third hung flower boxes without flowers; on the sixth a man in a white undershirt leaned over the railing, on the phone. Two above him, delicate hands were hanging laundry, then my gaze was drawn further up to the edge, where in that moment a black creature glided in soft hovering flight onto the roof.

They follow me, heed me not.
They do not come when I call.
They are there when I need them.
They are the messengers of death,
and in silent flight they sow life.

When I go,
I am pecked apart by thousands
who sow my last golden remnant
into black earth.
A depth you can do nothing against.

*[Image: Crow]*

The crow swung itself in hovering flight onto the next roof. I let my gaze follow..

And out of nothing, the driver's door opened.

**Black Brother:** Now there's one who arrived.

> *It is not about arriving - simply being there.*

My considered answer formed slowly, while the Wanderer slid smoothly onto the back seat.

**I:** I am simply here.

> *I skipped to the next song - Green Meadows - and we rolled toward the nearest subway station.*

> *A brief handover, last words exchanged and an embrace given - I adjusted my cap and disappeared underground after a short glance at the sky.*

> *Changed twice and the landscape pulled past me as a gentle rain set in.*

> *The last steps up, door open, building one from the outside inward, and putting on a Wuyi rock tea - the one with the woody vanilla note.*

> *Then onto the balcony to carry the inner into outer thoughts. As I stepped over the threshold I glanced outward at the sweepingly written card that leaned against a plant on the windowsill.*

It read:

So what will come for us, boy?
What will be, when all this comes to an end?
Who will be able to begin?
Who will even wake from this evil dream?
Who will help us rise?

So at last I stood again on my balcony and let my gaze sweep across the greened landscape.

> *I have seen it, yet I no longer have it in thoughts. I have now understood it and that is good for him and for me. I pull the devil close. And I let it, for it will birth something new. Down at the smallest level I tried to overcome the heaviest illnesses - until they sickened me. Neither white mycelium in my hands nor gray smoke on white peaks saved me - only held me.*

**To Myself:** Eyes toward the abyss - letting my whole being go and simply sinking. Thank you for this second time: full of needles - full of pain - full of heart. For me? For the whole family. Even those who never returned from the war. For the parts of our souls lost on storm days. We were sawn off, repressed, resisted or followed - and yet sailed into new vastness in icy stillness.

Built it all back up and yet crumbled within. And no one saw, until now, what we left on the outside.

Then my phone vibrated.

**Message from Iain:** The time of leading is over. We send you back to the stars, where you will mirror, for us, the Whole back into Emptiness.

I looked at the street below me.

> *At last it is going uphill again.*

> *I wrote to Iain:*

**I to Iain:** We'll do that. The rain will keep falling on the earth.

* * *