What happens if I get to the end of the universe and stick my head out?
First, there’s a white light. That’s predictable. If you’ve gotten this far, you either see it all the time, because you’ve gone either insane or strangely blind, or you know to expect it, because anything inexplicable and devastatingly significant is accompanied by a white light. Like in the last bit of the Lord of the Rings films, if you haven’t read the book and fear that Frodo and Sam will perish in the flames of Mordor on that dratted rock. Let’s assume, for the sake of answering the question, that some semblance of your sanity remains. You feel like the light is eating you… not a burning sensation, or a grinding sensation, but a sensation akin to being grasped very tightly by a great hand, grasping your body and mind and squeezing and losing you, like you’re a glob of corn starch goop in the hands of an irritable toddler. A great rushing fills you, with the light, like you’ve become a tide of whatever is squeezing you, and right when you think your mind will break, everything begins to ebb. You have time to realize that you were pulled in all the way, and that expecting to stick in just your head, much less be able to pull it back out again, was incredibly naïve. But then, as white light usually does, if you haven’t gone insane or strangely blind, it just… goes away. Fades to black. Beyond the end of the universe does not prevent the existence of clichés, after all, and you realize, comfortably, that the physical world is far from lost. Obviously, you still exist, and obviously, so does something else, because you feel like you’re suspended in a bowl of jello. You still exist, and your eyes are flowers. They expand like small peonies with petals of dimensional understanding, clotting the colorful flow of your reeling consciousness, and as your peonies mature and die and are reformed with the bleeding of your ex mind, which divorced you suddenly and without comment upon your exit from its universe of choice, the petals flutter into the sluggish, unpredictably melting and coagulating mass that surrounds you. Your flowers were programmed into you from the start, in case your universe were to collapse, and you were somehow to persevere. The universe has not collapsed… you have just crossed the divide from one land into another, but this one none the less sets off the divine interface to counteract surreality. The petals are antennae, the feelers explore the dimensions that you will never understand, and their processors send signals to your motherboard, which holds the programme that will save you- the metaphor generator. It boots up to make you think you’re a flower, and once it finishes loading, while you remain suspended, it hands to you in a white china platter the product of its labour: baklava.
Melanie needs to write and you, dear readers, need to ask her those questions that have been pounding at your brains for countless aeons.
The Project is also posted (and subsequently stolen from) Melanie's LiveJournal.
