I am floating with my consciousness, through different layers of myself. Some layers are soft, others hard and almost impenetrable. There are very delicate  layers, like silk paper – so easy to break with my careless thoughts.

I am a miniature skyscraper made of many levels, so many rooms, elevators going up, or down – and with different views depending where I decide to look outside. On the lower floors, the view makes me feel grounded. I see life outside myself, passing by or being part of me, I don’t know. On the top floor, the view is cloudy, and I always end up feeling dizzy from vertigo.

While standing there, with my vertigo and all – I notice the smallest details hidden in the abstractions of my mind. It makes me feel even more light-headed. And I can see how those details color my perception of myself, life and everything around me. It isn’t the larger picture, the big ideas of things – the whole, that is almighty in our minds. It’s the little stain, the annoying little details – the tiny, dirty spots that makes everything look different and ruined. Emotional pain isn’t a constant texture or form – it only exists inside these small smudges of dirt or old blood stains. These details rule our inner lives.

The view from the top floor is nothing but a white sky. It’s too cloudy for me to be able to see beyond the whiteness. But there is a black stain somewhere in the white. I look closer. Now I can see that it is the smallest Universe. Space. Darker than anything I have ever seen. I realize that this little micro Universe is my pain. An old pain, it doesn’t exist anymore – and now it’s a memory in the shape of fear.

I suddenly understand that inside this dark Universe is everything I have ever known about myself. About life. About love. Pleasure. Happiness. It is so tiny – but when I am floating around in it – it feels infinite. Once I am inside it, it is a closed world, it becomes my everything and I become the only detail inside it. I can’t see that the world outside is infinite, and that I’m just swallowed up by a ridiculous little stain – insignificant even though it’s packed with pain.

Once I am consumed with this world, swallowed up by it and reconciled with the pain, I feel free. There is just me and the dark void. Nothing else. Just like Sandra Bullock in “Gravity”, I tumble and fall through space and I am lost in my direction – letting the darkness take me wherever it wants me to go. Deeper inside. I let go of any resistance. I let it take me deeper inside. I am so lost – but I feel part of something familiar and absolute. There is nothing but me and the familiarity of the darkness. Nothing can hurt me here. Because I am already floating through the pain or the memory of it.

It is my ‘Painiverse’.

The fear of revisiting this place is so overwhelming that I dive right into it, to feel a sense of control. Like an emotional suicide.

The light scares me, more than anything. The light isn’t infinite – it has sharp edges. I don’t know what’s behind those edges – perhaps it’s my Painiverse. The light is blinding me. There is no sense of familiarity in it, only confusion.

I know that light isn’t infinite. It is always slowly dying or being replaced by darkness. I know that I won’t be able to feel free to be all consumed by it, to tumble around in it and to feel part of it. Sometimes I envy religious people, I think they know this light like a home.

Maybe it will take me a lifetime to be able to feel at home in the light, and to forget where the dark stain is so I won’t be attracted its gravity and swallowed by it. The light might not be as deep and overwhelming as my Painiverse, but it is not a memory – it is something real and new. Fresh.

I don’t want to feel the familiarity of the dark anymore. I don’t want to be lost.

But how can I trust that the edges of light won’t be portals to that place?

This is my dilemma.