A Note from the Underground
Let me tell you a secret, close the blinds, pull the curtains shut. Hide yourself from prying eyes, and just listen for a moment — that’s all we have anyway. We’ve inherited a sickness, one that might carry us all the way to death. I won’t bore you with its name. No, I doubt you would listen if I did. What it means is precisely this: you, me, all of us, we’re condemned. Not to some fiery inferno deep underground, but here. Now.
I could bore you with a long explanation about how we’re free, ungrounded, at every moment willing ourselves into existence — though sometimes through inertia — and maybe you’d walk away thinking you’d learned something. What an excellent lie that would be.
No. Freedom lulls us to sleep. It’s a trompe l’oeil that makes us think we are not at all times bound up in a tangle of thorns, but even if we cannot see it, we must still feel them tearing our bare skin. Don’t you feel it too? The slow burn of the poison, that is. Perhaps not. We’ve all grown too accustomed to it at this point. I need to show you what I mean, and then you may be able to feel it, even if you still cannot see. But you will. You’ll be able to see with clear eyes the deep terror that surrounds us, and you’ll want to turn back to the comfort of the monotony, the freedom, the scaffolding that’s held your world together. Oh, you’ll be like poor Orpheus leading his love out from the underworld. Never look back.
Speaking of love, another sickness — though not the one at hand, you’ll see that it too is a victim of our condemnation. Remember that one you spent those hours with, basking in the midnight sun, talking for what seemed like a lifetime as the world slept? The voice inside your head was racing too fast for your silly mouth to compose the words, and your face felt full of spiderwebs every second that you paused to breathe. I know it too.
You could have said you loved them then, and maybe it wouldn’t have been a lie. But you were paralyzed by their gaze, the grey eyes that that seemed to peer straight through the fabric of your being. They see it too, the way we shift in our seat, press our hands between our knees, or run a hand down one shoulder only to hold onto the elbow. I’m unsure whether in those moments I am truly myself or merely an object occupying space in their world. In any event, there is no difference. Eyes catching the moonlight are dangerous.
How many times did I say it? Maybe none — not that it matters. Most often, I will have chosen to remain silent not because I wanted to, but for fear of what might happen if I had the audacity to speak. We’re on guard at all times because in their eyes we are inherently vulnerable, inescapably human; their eyes are but one origin of the thorns that have us so thoroughly tangled.
So in that moment, with their eyes facing mine and their thorns encircling my wrists, I froze. I love you. I love you. I love you. It doesn’t seem too hard, just three words, the same as any other. I wish I could believe that still. No, those words are rimmed with thorns. The catch themselves in your throat, I’m sure you know the feeling.
I remember the silence. It doesn’t wrap its tendrils around your throat, it rests softly over you like ash falling on fresh snow. It swaddles you until you’re choked all the same. We freeze, not able to admit that we are lost, and far too scared to risk being found. No, perhaps those words are not so full of thorns because they too are a victim. The words get lost somewhere in the space between our eyes, and love dies in the cold like that. I still hear it when I go to sleep.
But you see, it’s a clever little tragedy; without this other and their eyes that help fill the world with thorns…well, I prefer not to imagine it. We’re almost nothing then. We could scream until our lungs give out, but with no one to hear then it is only as real as the dreams whirring through our head — just chimerical parts trying desperately to piece themselves into a coherent whole.
If the tables happen to turn, which they undoubtedly do, we risk hurting the very people who make us real by pulling them into our world. Suddenly they are at the mercy of our thorns. If you’re kind, maybe you’ll look away, break their gaze, and stare at the ground. But I don’t think you will. They’re stunning, all the disparate pieces seem to fall perfectly in place. Just know that if you look away, they might pull you right back into their world as quickly as you brought them to yours. It’s not malice, just natural as we unconsciously compete to be the subject.
We’re trapped. We’re trapped because we can never make ourselves feel as real as they do, and we can never make them feel real without hurting them as they hurt us. Because, like poor Orpheus, it’s this love that makes us turn back. We feel their hand slip away from ours, and we know that if we turn back, then we’ll lose them. But we can’t escape the fear that we already have. So we look back.
And then it’s too late. They’re gone, and it’s our fault. That’s the real secret. We’re free, and yet we choose to play these silly games, to inherit this sickness because it reminds us that we are here. We are here, and we are broken. We are condemned to be free, and we choose to be trapped. We hurt, and we heal. We love, and we hate that we love.
It’s a disaster. Isn’t it beautiful?
The End.
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[A note from the author: There’s a lot of background that went into this odd amalgamation of philosophy and narrative. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes From the Underground was a major inspiration, and the title is an homage to his work. Riddled with allusions to myth and philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre, this story treads an eerie line between being familiar, conversational, maybe even recognizable in our daily lives, and something mystic or otherworldly. Perhaps it’s the thought that the world of the story is all too similar to our own that makes this liminal piece seem somewhat unsettling. -Damian Walsh]