back from the future

the future you think you know is never really it. oh i've lived in so many imaginary futures; misty landscapes of hopes and wishes. always inside the illusion, the fear of stepping outside strong enough to touch but too subtle to grasp. right there, feel it? just above your stomach. like a knot, curled so dense it's almost black. instinct keeping it tight, protecting. i've woken up after days inside ... years ... who knows? looking back at the hollowness of it.

this permeating psychosis is sometimes real, sometimes unreal, often everything, subtly massive, deceptively embracing.

and then: the moments of clarity, the braveness to stop, of letting go, one instinct pitched against another. expansion; a sense of strings unwinding, of strands breaking, tearing apart.

but it never quite breaks; an entire universe just outside your reach. the feeling of being tangled up in a vast web of stories, the sense of those endless loops of recursion just outside your consciousness.