In search of

The room I'm in has two doorways. One led me in, and the other leads out.

I've been in this room for a while now, but I've been going through rooms like it almost for as long as I can remember. I'm looking for something, and all I know is that it is in one of these rooms. If I keep searching, sooner or later I'm going to find it. When I do, I'll be able to stop, but until then my feet burn and there is no rest.

The rooms come one after another in a regular procession, each a little more spacious, each a little better lit, each a little more unsettling than the one before it. And though I enter the room nervously, the result has been the same each time. After a few weeks, I relax and feel at home until, eventually, I notice a pungent smell and I'm forced to move on, further up and further in.

Sometimes I don't know where my journey is leading me, whether to a frozen sea with men submerged in the ice up to their necks, or even deeper a few miles further; or to the warm brilliance that outshone Beatrice. But wherever it leads, this is the journey I am walking, and will follow it to the end. Once you pass through the wicker-gate there is no way to leave the road, not even when the light fails, as it often will.

I feel like I'm getting closer, that the end of my search may lie just beyond the next door, but I've felt that way before.

And now I am at the door, and my hand is upon the handle. In all probability, one of two things lies in the room beyond: a body, badly decomposed, or Nothing. And if there is another door on the far side of the room, my search will continue.

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