Fixation

It’s fixed. It must be.

Surely, this time, after everything I’ve done, I’ve gotten it right. Really right.

The clock glares back from the corner affirming what I’ve come to fear. We’ve come back around.

There was a time before all this; a time that is hard to imagine now looking over this mangled landscape. But there was a time when I could have stopped and let all of this go. I can sense it gazing back out at me.

What if?

Such a deceptively simple and dangerous phrase, ‘what if.’

What would this place be like if I had never come here, never taken on this impossible task? What would be here if I didn’t fill it with my own hopes and fears? What if I simply let it end? What if I just stopped and walked away?

Perhaps I can turn back the clock to the beginning.

First there was a hero and a villain.

Or at least it seemed that way. Subjective experience and pathos will draw us in every time, won’t it? We see two figures diametrically opposed and draw our conclusions. “This one over here that looks like me, sounds like me, feels as I feel; they must be the hero. Deep down I might be a hero too if this were my story,” we think.

“And that one over there is the villain. See how they line up against me, the hero? Well, only a villain would stand in my way, oppose the things I desire, stop me from achieving my potential. Yes, that’s a villain, alright.”

Then there was the unfolding drama. The hero advanced and the villain retreated. The villain struck back, and the hero faltered. The conflict ebbed and flowed as a tide, in and out.

Hearts were lost and won, blood and tears were shed in earnest for the highest virtues. In the end, the victor stood tall over their adversary, and we all learned an essential moral truth.

But what remains? I’ve been through it all so many times now, pruning the possibilities with each passing, that only the scantest skeleton of that epic can be discerned from the detritus. Who can say now what it all was for other than to bring us here to this endless revisionist cycle.

Does the hero live on somewhere beyond these boundaries? Are they troubled by the villain still, and do they remain adversaries? Or has my passing blotted them from the very fabric of being?

All that remains are you and I, separated by this flimsy and imaginary barrier. Who is the hero when I feel as you feel? Who is the villain when you stand in your own way? I can strike you so that you shed my tears, or I can accept your moral victory. But in the end, will either of us have achieved our potential?

I may never know, drawn as I am inexorably forward by that taunting monolith. It seems to yearn for more; seems to hunger for me to press on.

Perhaps I should try again. Whatever this place once was, we are here now. We have filled in the margins and set all of this in motion. We cannot simply let this end. I cannot stop and walk away.

There is a right way for this story to unfold. There is a deeper truth to be learned.

Is it fixed? Or can it be fixed?

Maybe, if I try just once more, I can get this story right. Really right.

I must go back. I must return to the beginning.