Secret place
It is not a clearing hidden deep in the forest, a remote corner of a wild beach, or a bench in a shady side alley of a park. The secret place is elsewhere — it can exist in the afternoon hustle and bustle of the city, in a crowded café, among the unfamiliar faces of passers-by, though always the same, or finally in the reflection of your eyes looking at me.
It is a place that I take with
me wherever I go. My own cosmos, separated from the outside world by
a veil of impenetrable self-isolation, filled to the brim with entire
galaxies of memories and intentions, black energy of emotions, white
dwarfs of unfulfilled expectations, and, time and again, another
exploding supernova of hope.
At any moment, I pull the string of
the mechanism and the walls of the dome unfold around me like banners
of armor. Sometimes it happens unconsciously, I feel that I suddenly
plunge into another dimension and drift like a letter in a bottle in
the middle of the ocean. Then everything that seemed to matter loses
its significance. The conversation turns into a wave of sound, and
the person speaking to me is now just a pair of moving lips. This
strange reduction reinforces the feeling of separation, neutralizes
the exchange with the outside world, and anchors me even more here
— in the middle. I become an objective witness to reality, not just
a participant in it. I perceive more what is happening, rather
than how and why, as if I had lost all the vocabulary
of concepts and meanings I had acquired so far. I am an observer who
has taken a step between dimensions, from my own microcosm into the
other, external one.
By the way, it is interesting that despite being part of the whole, like a component of Cantor's set, something absorbs me and draws me away from it, leading me in the opposite direction, to a secret place. As if my inner individuality were trying to prevent me from being absorbed into the spongy matter of collectivity, which from its perspective sometimes seems hideously uniform. And this is not about contempt for mediocrity, but rather about confirming one's own identity at a moment when it feels threatened. The question arises whether the meaning of this individual existence is its belonging to some whole, co-creating it with others, or whether it should be the deepening of individuality, the cultivation of indivisible monadicity? Or perhaps the latter is a prerequisite for the former—does achieving fulfillment lead through the confirmation and deepening of one's own apperception? If so, will it happen in this life, in the next, or perhaps beyond?