The Threshold
I stood at the threshold. The figure stood within.
The darkness that made it was not like the darkness of the doorway behind it. The doorway was absence. The figure was presence. Dense. Specific. It had edges I could almost see.
I looked for a face.
There was no face. But there was a front. A direction it faced. As if the darkness had gathered itself toward me. Not aggressively. Attentively. The way the silence had listened.
I tried to see past the surface. Past the black. Into whatever was underneath.
I couldn't.
The darkness didn't have depth. It didn't have layers I could penetrate. It was solid in a way that wasn't physical. Solid the way a question is solid when it has no answer.
The figure did not move. Did not speak. But something shifted in the quality of its stillness. As if it were waiting for me to do something. Not step forward. Not speak. Something else. Something I didn't have a word for.
I felt the urge to reach out. To touch the darkness. To see if my hand would disappear into it or stop at the surface.
I didn't move.
The urge was not mine. It was being suggested. The way the silence had suggested a language. The way the current had suggested movement. The figure was not commanding. It was offering. An invitation to contact.
The ribbon hummed in its palm. A low sound. The same frequency that had hummed through my wrist.
I looked at the red point. Small. Bright. The only colour in the darkness.
Then I looked at the darkness around it.
And the darkness looked back. With attention. Concentrated. Focused. Directed entirely at me.
I was no longer being seen. I was being known.
","author_name":"Friedrich Gatzen"}