Literary stories and psychological parables about meeting yourself. Entries: 9.
You've got a warm, purring bundle of happiness weighing a few kilos resting on your chest, and you think you're the one who took it in. What a grand, glorious delusion. We build starships, decode the genome, argue about postmodernism, while the leading Zen master naps at our feet and we never think…
You don't exist. What you call "I" is a pirated assembly of other people's ideas about success, installed on your factory hardware back in childhood. Clumsy, with broken drivers, but with a full suite of office programs: "Be convenient," "Don't stand out," "What will people say?"
At first, we are architects. We are born a wild, unmapped landscape. Somewhere lies a swamp of secret wants, somewhere cliffs of irrational fear, somewhere clearings of pure, causeless joy. Very early on, though, an inner perfectionist wakes up with a master plan for the build-out.
A man built the perfect cage for his canary. Every bar was measured. Every perch polished. He calculated the ideal distance to the feeder and the water cup. Everything was done so the bird would be comfortable, her life entirely predictable, safe, and known. He loved his canary. He only wanted to…
Old potter Kenji didn’t produce bowls — he carried on a conversation with clay. His workshop, smelling of dust and rain, was lined with shelves. They displayed not triumphs but scars: hundreds of cracked, lopsided, imperfect vessels. One day a young student, Ryo, arrived with a shining ideal in his…
Arthur was not a person. He was a function housed in a flawless exoskeleton. His title — “Senior Partner” — was a cuirass. His measured, emotionless speech — a sealed visor. His daily commute from sterile suburb to glass tower — greaves that kept him marching in line. Deep inside that armor sat not…
He lived in a departure lounge of his own making. Real life, he thought, hadn’t started yet — it was only a stretched-out prologue where his takeoff kept getting delayed. Through a foggy pane he watched other people’s planes — bright, swift, blazing — lift into the sky one after another.
Ignat didn’t work. He performed a rite. His temple was the city square, his flock the ashy little bundles of life, ordinary city pigeons. Officially, for the odd curious passer-by, he introduced himself as a “municipal ornithologist-statistician.” It sounded dignified, like a verdict. In reality he…
Victor wasn’t living. He was sterilising reality. His apartment was an operating room, and he, its chief surgeon, carved out any tumor of chaos. His balcony, tiled in flawless white, was his personal annex of sterility on the seventh floor. Deep in the basement of his skull, in a dark, reeking…