Silent Alarm

Prologue

Mind-melting. Unbelievable bliss. Excruciating ecstasy. 

A feeling inoperable; unable to remove, or extract. Caving its path inward, it spirals into several thousand different passageways that intersect within each other. 

What sense of direction that was once had is now lost, it is impossible to keep track of. Images and frames dance with each other, exchanging various partners hand-in-hand. They glide ever so gracefully from left to right, and right to left, across the polished floors with jagged steps. 

An incessant pounding, a pummeling cascade of rhythm, a never-ending story. Like the ones read to a child who didn't want to be stolen by the dream catcher, and hoped the rough massages from the bridge of a formed fist would be enough to hold on. 

Stories that they know carry on long after their final pages, even if the main character dies. Even if everyone and everything around them faded to oblivion, that story wasn't nor would ever be truly over. To not know what lies beyond the story after it is declared "over" is a cruel form of punishment, so the child thinks. 

Like all things, imagination is the ultimate double-sword, providing the ability to create a world for the mind that is outside of the one the body occupies. And yet, just as in the world the body roams, the mind can roam to places that can bring it harm. One could argue the harm it brings is far more powerful and affective than any constructed joy or happiness. 

After all, the pursuit of happiness and contentment can lead to the overbearing, crushing feeling of disappointment and dejection when it is not found. Like an average of a grade in school, the failures drop it significantly no matter how high it is, and the successes only inch up that average a little bit further. Even in those successes, there is the thought of still not being enough. Those failures, no matter how small, still find ways to latch on.

So like the child who is left disappointed and frustrated when they cannot have the definitive epilogue, the insatiable scholar too finds themselves in a state of limbo, damned by the gift of imagination. 

A gift that is fully responsible as the vehicle for everything good and bad that has ever happened by the hands of the human race. It's where it all begins: the mind. 

When it isn't busy destroying others, it is destroying itself. It's the person standing on the railing of that bridge, threatening to absolve so it can escape the weight of being itself. And the vessel who has the mind, the friend seeing them on edge, is desperately trying to pull them back. 

Sometimes the person is more willing than others to give existing another chance, sometimes the threshold is so low that if the friend tries to even reach for them, they will jump. And those more willing to break have already been broken so many times that they know what the outcome will be if they're pieced back together. And what would be the point of that?

Imagination is a silent alarm. It doesn't make a sound to the one who possesses it. It comes without warning and may take whatever it wants. And when it takes something from someone else, when it brings harm to the imagination of another vessel, it dooms that vessel.

To the incessant pounding, pummeling rhythm, and dizzying drilling. Plagued by fears of it happening again, fears of when it will end. Fears only the vessel harmed knows, hidden by the trauma it brought, and silenced by those who claim to be trusted. And to act jaded when you found that person on that desolate bridge? To feel hollow when they absolve? 

Oh that silent alarm was meant for protection, for growth, for dreams, for the never-ending stories that you never wanted to stop hearing. All it took was one faulty alarm for the rest to sound off..

And the ones who couldn't bear the sound? They did the only thing they could do to stop it.