Spindle

    It is dark, but moving... thick liquid with currents like the flanks of great beasts rolling about in troubled sleep, buffeting us like a twig swirling in a storm, unnoticed. We can't tell how large anything is, but it's all bigger than us. 

    "What is wrong with you anyways? It can't be everyone else, can it?"

    Life is just a slow hell of goodness and light being mangled and destroyed, you know that. Blame us if you want to, but why does it matter if we're not going to change anything? 

    "What is that?"

    What, the light? Oh god you want to look at that thing again?

    We swim closer, is it swimming? We're silently weeping an ocean of our own, perhaps that is what propels us towards the fractured light. A song starts playing as they start singing to us, at first a nice song with a melody until we hear the instrument, a synthesizer programmed with the cracking sound of a child's fingers as they are slowly snapped, one by one. Click, pop, crack, and the tendons stretching to agony, tearing ever so slightly.

    ¡helados helados helados! 

    Pain, that's all it is dumbfuck. If we weren't so sucking naive and stupid you wouldn't have overpaid and you probably deserved it anyways. ¡helados helados helados! and forever fat and bad with money, congratulations sweetheart! You're fucking useless.

    Lying in bed some time around then is when we first saw that color. The night air thick and wet and boiling hot, covered in sweat lying flat on our back in nothing but our undies. We had already been through food poisoning and culture shock and this was it, we were settled and ready emotionally and mentally, we thought. Some of us always doubted, yes we know, but most of us were still pretty optimistic back then.

    "What a fucking laugh, pussy, just say it." 

    So we're lying on the bed staring at that fucking ceiling, that hideous creepy plaster-cells-with-holes-in-it or whatever that barrio palace was made of. We can't for the life of us remember what we were thinking about before, but staring at that ceiling and watching as a bloody red film seemed to come down over our eyes like a curtain felt then and still feels like the death of all hope. We'd always seen weird things, other things, but this was the first and only one that stuck. It was just like a theater curtain coming down behind our eyes, turning the world a darker and more ugly shade. These are the lenses we have seen through ever since.

        At the center of us is a crystalline spindle thing, the origin if you will, the self we don't know, the reason we must be we and we can't decide on a name when we don't exist, not really and not fully. That spindle, the crystal, is all of the edges of all of the selves that compose us meeting together in a spiky mess of many colors and lines and it is full of all of our original impulses and it also contains, most importantly, the path we took. Why did we get these selves? The angry arrogant self who belittles people and thinks he's too good to give anything to the world? The self who weeps silently at the tragedy of every lost hope and painful thing that happens to black-footed-ferrets and otters and centipedes? Who is the original self or is there even an original self and does it matter?

    Well none of it matters when we feel like this, like we are floating in this void filled with forces we can't see the whole of or ever truly understand. We see all the other people, where we used to be, going about their daily lives, but we've become untethered and we've been floating away from you ever since. We keep screaming for help but our words are swallowed up by the flow of conversation. We're floating away and we don't know how to get back. 

    "Well, you know the chances of that are pretty slim, so what's the plan then?"

    That depends on the transparent and inscrutable spindle