PART THREE
The Escpae
She leaves.
The sound of the gun, when it went off, was simultaneous with her last step. All the writer saw was the sole of her feet when she took that last step, as she disappeared into that escape.
Nobody knows what lies beyond those steps.
As soon that final accent on those stairs is made, you were on your own – it would now be between you and God, your god, maybe your gods. That was as far as the writer could follow her, that was as far as his eyes could see, were allowed to see.
Beyond this point only the traveler went on, on his or her own, not followed, not judged, not graded, and not qualified. Nwanma’s fate was not any different. She had to proceed alone. She must begin the search to find, as far as she would want to, only the things that she wants revealed. The deeper she went into her consciousness, the wider her eyes were opened and the more she would see. And the clearer she saw, the more she would understand, the more she would put in place, and the more she streamlined.
She left at the same age as she had first entered.
She had chosen to leave as exactly as she came. If there was any significance to this, it was one that she, and only she, could reveal. It appeared strange, but it wasn’t, the metaphysical are often times inexplicable. Moreover, things of the mind’s eye, subliminal operations, especially those not sustained long enough to produce any lasting effects, are almost always shrouded in subjectivity, particularly those sacredly obscure ones.
No one can say that it is not mysterious, that the little girl the writer saw grow up before his very own eyes with each of those steps in which she appeared the very age at which those experiences were had, metamorphosed back to the very age he first saw her at this last stage of her journey. To the writer it was like merging the beginning and the end. Could it have been a showing that there were little difference in these timelines and that at the end it all merges and becomes one? It is not for the writer to say, for he is only equipped to relate it as it was shown to him. Having no choice in what he was shown, he resigned to the fact that the logic and significance of it all belong to the esotery of the subject. The writer was neither given to that type of vision nor was he allowed to embellish. He had been afforded no powers in these sequence, so he recounted only as she bade - sometimes as himself telling her story and at other times as her speaking as herself - but through his view. It must be so, for it must be sublime. It is only a conundrum to limited human eyes. Poor writer, she mused, how he must have wished he knew or could see what lies beyond the escape. Down there all they can do is speculate. Pray to God, or their gods. And wonder what becomes of all who take that final step.
Because he is blind to this azimuth, it is here that I must take over for him, to be his eyes for he has reached his zenith. Our roles must now be reversed for now I shall see with my eyes and he shall only be my hand to write as I continue to bid him, but only as I transmit into his thoughts, his presumed imagination.
It is nothing.
Not nothing, nothing, but nothing that they have not seen before. The mystery lies in their inability to make the connection that all that is here is what they have lived and known and witnessed to. The writer called it “up there.” Was it because the steps went up? No it couldn’t be that banal. Many of them also refer to it as “up there” because of the ageless indoctrination and their imbued opinion that “good after life” exist up there, a correlation to Heaven, and that “bad after life” exist down there, a correlation to Hell. But from here you can never tell if it is an “up there” or a “down there.” It is just a place.
It is just a level.
But we, those of us here, can never tell either. We can tell, for we know what it is and how it is. But we cannot tell, as in revealing what it is and how it is. If we do, they might get to know. And if they know, the mystery would be gone. Everyone will eventually find out, though, but only when they get here, for all will eventually revive.
A level is a good way to describe it - to describe here. Not level in the sense of a plane. It is a level because it is a place with no considerable inequalities. There is sameness. There is uniformity. Most importantly, there is a balance, and fairness.
The first thing is the rebirth.
You are being reborn and yet you see your birth and its process. It is nothing like the birth that brings one into the other place, the earth, where all is darkness in the womb - a period which is believed to represent the wiping of the slate and the confusing of the memory from recapturing any previous living. It is a birth of consciousness and rebirth for accountability. Here, you are reborn so that you can revisit the live you had led at the other place, to live it the way you would have chosen to have led it but for human ephemeral temporality, even if only in your mind and perception.
And this is the redo she chose.
And here is how she relived.
....
This book is what the writer saw, what the writer sees, what the writer envisioned, one day when he looked out through that single pane on the window – I AM THE WRITER.
....
To the writer it has been a ramble in surrealism. Was he successful in his attempt to escape the dominance of reason and conscious control? Like the original surrealists - who sought to harmonize, by reconciliation, the contradictory conditions of dream and reality - did he crack the harmonizing and reconciliatory code?
It does not matter now.
In some positions present in the mind of a writer, there exists a merger of conjectural imagination and representational verity – or may be a loss – a loss of continuum of either, or the attenuation of the distinction between that which is supposed and that which is actually existing.
....
As the writer sat on his writing chair, beside the window and the single pane that brought on those thoughts, all he could see, again, is the back of the house - for when all thought is striped of imagination and conjecture, whatever remains is exactly as it is seen - an inert, dull, picture.
All the writer hopes and wishes for is that from whichever pane of your window that you happen to be peering that some light would shine upon your face through it. For in all those things that are lived, imagined, or even conjured, that their purpose and satisfaction be: to bring peace and a smile.
So it shall end where it began.
I didn’t make this up, it has probably existed even before ‘the’ man was born, that:
“Reality begins where fiction ends.”