As the last iron plates of the tower slid away, a fountain of light erupted from within. But it was not a single being inside, as had been anticipated. Instead a storm of birdlike creatures streamed out, up into the night sky, now full of planets.

There they stood, ranged along the hillsides, met
To view the last of me, a living frame
For one more picture! In a sheet of flame
I saw them and I knew them all. And yet
Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set,
And blew. ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.’

– Robert Browning

This superstructure is not a life. Each year at this time I must destroy its facade, see it plunge from many stories and shatter on the pavement below. It is not enough. The framework no longer serves its purpose. There is nothing for the facade to grow on again. My patience has paid off at last. The faces slough off like dead skin. I am winning.

Such awkward despair. Operating System Failure.

The existential dread continues to build as I pass through the dark heart of June. I sense that a single carefully placed charged of stress will be enough to bring the bridge down, cutting me off from the mainland. Hopelessness advances on all fronts, a shadow army with a goal I cannot imagine. Phone calls constantly incoming, missiles that light up my threat board. The grocery store an incomprehensible maze of choices, the cereal aisle, especially, a gallery of terror. Outside my apartment I meet a bare-chested tattooed man, breaking the cycle momentarily. He promises strangeness from the days that have become the same day. Inside there are gnats everywhere. My Inbox has been empty all day. I can hear it snoring, conserving its energy for Monday when it will rear up, unhinge its jaw and roar, furnace-like.

It taxes my patience to essentially live my life in the third person, a condition to be discussed, a matter for seers to ponder. And now a toll is exacted in the only currency of this country: time. Through a thick window pass the stars of another world’s night and this glimpse is meant to suffice? Tell the beggars to feed their fucking bellies with postcards of fine meals. Even as walls are soluble under the unceasing drip of water, so too do Tower walls fail when met by the constant edge of my will. And where others do fail to act, I would trod emboldened, laying waste to chaff, piercing hearts with silver.

-R

Do we leave any part of the tower standing? Peel it away until it is just a twisted spiral cyclone of abandoned roller coaster track? Wouldn’t the energy just radiate in all directions without a form to focus it? Wouldn’t we just do as we wished when we wished? Wouldn’t we love at every opportunity, even if it had nothing to do with the conversation? Is this freedom or chaos?

As I sat down to write this post, I realized that it could easily be misconstrued as a reference to intravenous drugs. Acupuncture is like the antithesis of that: using needles to heal, sending lines of energy through the body rather than heroin.

Points around my body lit up like nodes on an etheric power grid. Darkness. Then glimmering light at the periphery of my vision, sunlight on waves. The feeling of my whole being rippling in a heat haze. Scene of a woman putting up wallpaper in her living room, turns her head over her shoulder to speak to someone out of frame. Then down, down, down a tunnel. Everything behind a dark scrim. A cavern with a stone bridge, leading through arches. Everything is illuminated with inverted light, like a photo of microscopic organisms. I am flying along the path of the bridge, more of a raised highway running over a dark chasm. Doors of strange material sphincter open to reveal diamond-shaped openings that I fly through. Then it is revealed to me: I am under the Tower, coming in through a secret entrance. Of course, of course, of course… never thought about trying to get in from underneath.