text: I've gone madly insane and grown to love myself. I've journeyed through a thousand leys where between numbers 9 and 199,500 I found myself, many times. I found myself in a cold room with log walls and wooden floors. The stench of fresh game, peate and cold. An old woman with a bigger mustache than mine licks my face. Slick silvery saliva slide onto my brow as she drags her tongue across my forehead from one temple to the other then tells me to believe in myself. I don't like that so I squeeze through the cracks in the floor boards and... I found myself outside my father's room, not his room now but the one he shared with my momma when he was still my hero. I can hear two voices arguing inside, one squashed and one pounding. When I enter they are both him, and he fights himself until I take them both by the hand and say I loved them. They tell me I must learn to control myself, I thought that was hypocritical so I left. As I close the door they began to argue once more, typical. There is nothing but scintillating lights so I walk until they stop hurting my eyes and I found myself at the mouth of a cave whose path seems to lead up to nothing. Walking inside I see my mother on our old couch with a book in her hand waiting for me, the warm spot where I learn to read and trust sits ready. I am more tempted by this comfort than anything but I don't linger. I move on and my old elementary school appears, where I learn a love for music, stories and the unfair nature of adults. I continue walking towards middle school where I learn how to type 60 wpm and that people can be selfish. I go faster through Highschool, where I learn the most, that the truth is often veiled. That anyone can lie to you. I came to the cliff edge and look over the abyssal chasm that would be the rest of my blip of existence. Then back at the climb I have taken where all the instructors of my past linger in varying forms of interest. Beckoning me to follow paths I have already past. I turn and step off into myself, trusting. I fall for so long that I begin to fly and i found myself soaring above oiled plains heading toward an ocean of water and people. My grandfather is waiting when I land and I cry for hours on his shoulder while he recites every piece of advice he ever gave me. I look up to thank him for making me human but I've wasted my time crying and he has faded away. The sadness is too heavy with the weight of the feelings I cannot express. I am pressed into the hard earth until I am separated and move through it. I found myself disjointed both in mind and body. I float for years through substances hoping to stick myself together, not knowing it was solvent to my glue. I drift into a fairy circle where a woman wearing an apron dress of my ancestors flowing with every color put my pieces back together. She is kind, funny, understanding and fierce. She feeds me from her circle, the taste is bitter but I could not live without it so I ask to take more. I eat until I am full and realize I have left none to regrow. The woman begins to weep in my arms so I pick her up on my back and we move away from her home. I found myself walking for miles through a nothingness that screams out with all the things left ignored and unfulfilled. The words bite and tear at my clothing, taking strips of my flesh, sucking moats of my energy. Regret drives me to my knees where I continue to crawl towards something I do not know. After millennia I come to realize the voices are mine, all of me from all of time who all have a common emotional response towards me, hatred. Before I allow myself to be crushed by the unfathomable burden of my criticism I feel weight lift from my back as my hands are taken. Through the immense pressure of my self worth I am lifted and... I found myself looking into my own oceanic eyes as the woman in the hangerok brings me to my feet. I am frightened and overjoyed to see that she is me in a way I can never be alone. She is everything I have ever thought, everything that I have ever felt, every scar I have created. I look back to the start of my journey and see she had been along the entire path, pushed behind me, ignored. When we had come to the circle we had arrived together, but I was the only one that ate. I apologized and hugged myself, becoming singular for perhaps the first time. The voices do not stop but hinder and cut less as I make my way towards the end. When I emerge, I found myself whole.