A Little Bit of Distance

Part 1

Ashi looked on thoughtfully, as he surveyed the scene below. It was only ten or fifteen feet but a mist separated him from the silent mayhem from which he had departed. Suddenly, he found himself on a breakneck perpendicular trajectory ascending at the speed of light. As he ascended, so did the intensity of the light.

The featherlike grasp that had been Ashi’s guide for this momentary journey seemed to evaporate as he was hurled headlong into the mysteries of complete freedom. That elusive power that all of us have a glimpse of now and again, of acting without compulsion.
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If only we knew at the dawn of our lives, that the need to belong eroded away any possibility of ever retaining that subtle capacity. The retention of that state of idyllic reverie seemed a natural point of reference, and one to which Ashi could return at any time that he felt his ability to act or think or feel was being imposed upon by external constraints.
For Ashi, freedom was much more than just another word for nothing left to lose; to the contrary it signified to him, all that he had to gain, and all that he could inspire others to hope for. Hoping, praying, dreaming, it was all the same; and would result, or even ‘had resulted’,in a transformation that imbued the integrity of the soul with a sapience that opened the gates to paradise and purgatory.
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Ashi’s freedom was short lived. On his release he had been sent spinning towards the entrance of what turned out to be an etheric tunnel composed of visual representations of the emotions that he had generated within the hearts of those with whom he had interacted with in any depth. These were no pictures of crying women, or laughing children, or Santa Claus being spurned; what they were was a cornucopia of symbols. And although Ashi didn’t realize the significance of this iconography being presented to him, his spirit translated these hieroglyphics into images that were rendered and imprinted onto his acumen, where feelings and imagination are realized.

How to grow, how to live, how to be? When, where, who, how, why, what; all questions that require patience and perception. Someone stands before you saying ‘What next.” The question asks the most basic of exhortations, but do we reply? Do we feel the meaning of our lives, do we know just how our thoughts process and progress? Or is it that there’s no rhyme or reason to any of it, and we’re all just slaves to that unknown God ‘desire’.
At that moment, Ashi felt as if he knew the meaning of the morpheme that presented itself before his taciturn psyche. His perception of what was transpiring ahead of him was clear. It was as if all knowledge in the universe had been granted to him, and he knew that that knowledge which was pertinent to a specific situation was available to him.
But at that moment, Ashi was pulled with a violence that he had never known into a headlong charge downwards.