Date: Dateless

Subject: Fear Not Madness

Sender: Rezdnaq Qandzer

Watching from a higher place as always. Get in touch, sister.

I think there is insanity in intelligence.

With greater genius comes a greater ability to cram a greater part of the unknowably vast whole through your perception and into your mind, to perceive and parse through all the horrors without the benefit of separation that the… dimmer specimens of humanity enjoy. They close their eyes, and are happier for it. Why shouldn't they be? The Deep Universe isn't for every mind. One could even argue that it isn't really for any mind. Closing one's eyes when faced with the true, all-encompassing face of the vast cosmos... that is just good sense.

Others have their eyes forcibly opened, by parents or by obsessive teachers and abusive administrations. Genius is beaten into the clay of youth while it's still so pliable, but it's almost always a rush job, so when they put the clay in the oven to bake, the air bubbles expand and the creation is destroyed. All that potential and opportunity to reach the stars and beyond, gone for good. Public schools no doubt know this, aware accomplices in their role of reducing generations to pliable, easily manipulable sheep for their highers to control, forced into a hierarchy unwillingly. Only the chosen few may ascend to higher intelligence.

My, or should I say our, eyes were opened on our own accord, even if the new ones parallel to the originals manifested more violently, unwillingly. My parents didn't have the grit to abuse me to such an extent. I walked down the plank by myself, took a leap of faith and let myself be beaten bloody and blue by the eddies of genius. I take the pain and call it life, and then I get to say that life is hard and then I simply deal. Then I throw myself over the plank again, every day. Even as the scenery and the actions did, my life did not change appreciably after the theft of any shred of innocence I had left in my soul. I was still planning, scheming, daring to believe that I had the right to hold on to my dreams despite my lot in the world.

There are deeper modes of self-flagellation still for people with less willpower, for people less like me. The bold whose eyes were always open challenge themselves to look deeper into the abyss after an easy life. They knew not the pain that unlocking their potential demanded, so how could they know that they were so woefully unprepared for what came next?

I gazed with them, into the abyss, when I grew bored of the eddies. I saw blackness. I saw exactly what I didn't want to see, but expected to. I dealt with it my own way, swallowing the agony, shedding the customary tears, and then I moved on. Nothing had gotten better, or ever would, but that didn't stop me from demanding happiness in my own little alcove of this horrid world. Like so many greats before me, I womaned up and lived life while others rebelled against how things were, currently are, and would always continue to be.

It was a hard lesson to learn, I would admit that much at least, but I was glad that I did. Religion gave me hope, and when I outgrew it, I fashioned my own, and lived, never closing my eyes, but also never rejecting the world for what it was. It helped that I did not fetishize or love my genius. It just was, and so was I. I fed it and challenged myself to watch it grow, but in the end, it was all a means to a more self-serving, happy end. An insane plan based on the oxymoron that the truth can soothe when it does no such thing, not in the magnitude of truth which I desired.

Perhaps I was conflating functional and sane all along, far before that reality-shattering atrocity which befell me, yet mercifully netted you your very heart and soul in the shape of a child. In the end, I knew what I knew and trudged on, uncaring. I was callous, but aware nonetheless, without having a reason to. Perhaps I felt like I owed the wretches of the world a modicum of my attention, the way Western parents remind their children not to waste food because the starving children of Africa would appreciate their gluttony. It was distinctly insane, in a way that hid and camouflaged itself against functionality. I could ace exams, achieve amazing goals and impress teachers and parents, and yet I was beset by an obsession to stare the abyss down, to tell it that I would look at it and remain functional, stable, all in the name of refusing to be ignorant, seizing the ultimate avenue to dignity.

Power.

I carved my name into the Deep Universe, and spoke, will speak, am speaking and always are speaking, to you for this very purpose. Power.

To you, my remarkably tangible child of the phantasmagoric, I wish you success in your attempt to walk the third path of meaning. I will be with you.