Entering Travincal.

I've recently come across certain documents whose origin is as vague as the unexplained circumstances under which they were produced. They consist of some photographs, an old wax cylinder that brings to mind a device older than the gramophone, called the phonograph, a little piece of ivory with a little hole, possibly to be used as a pendant or necklace, a jade figurine with the word "Natalya" etched under its base, and a sheet of what seems to be modern photocopier paper, inscribed with the following:

I must admit, that I have indeed ventured under the flesh, as unprepared as anyone. The warmth was familiar to me, although it did feel foreign, exotic even. But I remember the snow outside the window and the creaking of the bed's boards, a sound still untainted and innocent -which is probably why I can still recall it so easily.

I must admit, that I have watched the godhead part its human counterpart, as impassively as anyone. Dying was a notion that adhered effortlessly to my turmoil of a viewpoint already. I must have wondered at the ease of murder, but then again, murder's a name one uses when it becomes one's habit, is it not?

I must admit that I have tried the indifferent, as unattached as anyone. It seemed like experimentation then, but who am I trying to fool? It's only through detachment that observations can be made and they were made accordingly and grew and multiplied and replenished the cortex and were transmuted into doctrines.

I must admit though, there was a critical point when good old reasoning collapsed. I might as well believed in fairies then, I might as well have tried to dig a way away from all that could be measured, I might as well have called up my own personal dreamland and vowed to guard it from the acute handshake with reality. But I got better -and I remember the spell: "the end of the game is to feel real."

I must admit, that I have, like a mindless animal, looked behind the mirror. I forgot why green means always poison for through forgiveness I sought conquest -and I slept with an enemy so much alike myself and so much more malign and so much less inhuman. But the end's not a bang and the end's not a whimper -unless of course one gets a heart attack together with an orgasm- and everything that could be violent, turned moldy and bitter and banal.

I must admit that I have fled -or was it a march?- into completion as well. I have embraced the eternal and it turned out it is sharp. I have bled my forevers in seas and in sips and in pillows. And I was washed out between death and immunity and there's something dangerous filling up all the seams I discover. Made of warmth and habitual murder, one part real, one part daydream, half part doctrine, half part beast.

I must admit, there's a long way to readjustment, a long way to the mapping of the new constellations within. But until then, I carry an old universe with me, like a name that nobody has heard, like a place that nobody has seen. Half of me feels the warmth of a sun that faded before the other half was born.

I stare into a looking glass that won't let malice through and thus confined my silver face observes and studies the other end of the abyss, a crimson counterpart whose laughing visage burns for a madness that, like many other chances, was missed.