A Keyhole: The Fish and Crystalline World

I find myself in the Library again. The Library It has become a sort of home for me now. The place I come to contemplate, to write, to explore. A launching point.

I have made it my own. The dust cleared away, the windows opened, the cool night breeze replacing the dusty beams of light. Candles dance on the tables and shelves, wax dripping down to form cave-like stalactites on the old shelves.

I wonder where time went, how all the wax accumulated, but I have come to expect the strangeness of time. I will not ruminate much more on this.

Tonight, I find myself remembering something. An image I seem to recall seeing time and time again while sitting in my sheepskin-covered chair next to the crackling fireplace.

I recall often closing my eyes to feel the warmth of the fire brush against my face, to feel the coolness of the shadows as they dance on my bare skin.

Sometimes there have been storms outside. I remember closing my eyes and becoming one with the storm, or perhaps being the storm itself. It is hard to know. I could feel the wind move through me, the windows drawn closed. I could feel the raindrops dancing inside me. I could see the waves of sound as the thunder struck, moving across my closed eyes, and a charge of electricity rising and falling with the lightning.

But tonight, there is something else I am remembering. On occasions, I seem to recall seeing a place not behind my closed eyelids, but through my closed eyes.

At times, it is as though I can see the library through them—the fireplace in front of me and the bookshelves surrounding me in their protective walls.

Other times, though, it has been different. As I see through the blackness of my closed eyes, another place comes into view.

It always seems blurred, visible but obscured. It lingers for a time and then disappears back into blackness.

In one case, though, I remember seeing a place through my closed eyes that did come into focus. There was a keyhole. A small image surrounded by blackness. But inside the keyhole, I could see with infinite clarity.

I saw a place unlike any I can remember visiting, unlike any I have recorded in my journals.

It was bright and full of light and color, a small dot in a vastness of darkness.

The sky blazed like fire, but not. Mountains rose in the distance, their crystalline surfaces refracting light into cascading rainbows. In front of them stretched a lake as still as glass, its surface a perfect mirror.

The lake did not seem to be made of water, though. It was like ice but not ice, crystal but not crystal.

Above the lake and before the mountains, a small blue minnow swam through the air itself. It was transparent, but not transparent. The World of Crystal

Only paradox can describe what I saw.

Then the keyhole closed. The place vanished, and I found myself back in front of the fire.

Tonight, as I remember and write, I wonder: was this a glimpse into that place that always seems just out of focus? And what is this place that feels so unlike everything else?