Uprooted Radical

“Why keep subjugating yourself to pain?” Frawa spoke as I fell to the ground, unable to move. “Why bother? It’s better to simply be happy, be excited, feel all of these positive emotions. What kind of foolish idiot would willingly choose to live with pain and suffering?”

"You won’t understand….you can’t understand…” I crawled on the ground of the roof, as it started to crack, threatening to send me tumbling back down into the room below. Of course, the shield still held, so I’d probably just bounce of it and land somewhere outside the mansion. That is, if I’d even survive to get to that point.

“In that case, please enlighten me.” She cackled.

“Nah, it’s impossible. A creature like you….you don’t even have the capacity to possibly comprehend us humans….You never will…..I kinda pity you, to be honest….”

“Pity me…?” Frawa looked stunned for a moment, before laughing evilly once again. “You make me laugh! Look at you! Lying pathetically on the floor, moments away from death! Someone like that pities me? You utter fool!”

“You still don’t understand, huh? Well it’s not like I expected you to…”I then exploded into a violent fit of coughs, spitting out a large amount of blood.

I started seeing everything in a daze, and my vision started to go blurry. Fraw no longer held the orb in her hand, it had grown too much for that. Instead, it floated above her like a miniature planet.

“It is you who fails to understand. There is no point of holding on to hope when you have no chance of victory. That only leads to increased disappointment. There is no point of loving if one day you will have to feel the pain of seperation. It is simply better to just be. Not to feel, just to be. It is how everything should be, yet how everything is not. Obrillis is a utopia compared to Earth, because Obrillis is what Earth should strive to be. And yet, it waits in the shadows, despite some people migrating to it, because the majority of humans are stupid and choose to remain in such a hell called Earth.”

“I’ve been here a while….and haven’t seen the utopia you talk about…only a dystopia….” I coughed again and kept struggling as I laid there and bled out.

“I grow tired of this dialogue. This is not a battle of wills, where either side can emerge the victor. No, this is me forcibly imposing my will onto you, just as I did to all of Obrillis. You will die here. There is no more discussion to be had.”

“Yeah, I agree….”

She flung the orb towards me and I got sucked into it.

I entered the void, expecting to see nothing but a world of darkness, but what I saw was different-no, not what I saw, but rather what I felt.

A mother’s grief during her children’s funeral. A teenager’s pleasure during her first sexual encounter. The anger of a middle schooler getting bullied. The sadness in a middle aged man’s eyes as he received a notice of eviction. A high schooler’s guilt as he hid his grades from his parents in fear of getting scolded. Men, women, children, college students, accountants, engineers, athletes, politicians, doctors, teachers, philosophers…

I assimilated all of these possibilities, all of these emotions that were robbed from the people of The Void. Some had deliberately chosen to forego them, but others knew nothing but a world without feeling. I absorbed every single emotion present in this hole, I felt everything they were supposed to feel, but never got a chance to. I cried, I laughed, I smiled, I shivered in fear, I clenched my fist furiously, I dropped my jaw in disbelief, I cried more. Tears of joy. Tears of sadness.

And then, I felt it. I woke up again, back in that hospital once again.

And then, they broke the news to me.

It was at that point, I cracked. My face at that time, betrayed no emotion, showing nothing. I locked myself off. I built a wall around my heart, closing if off to the world. The cracks that had appeared instantly did not have the time to shatter my heart, due to the fact that I’d willingly frozen my heart itself. But deep down, it was there. It did not go anywhere, but I patiently waited for the day my heart unfroze. And when that day would come, it would manifest ten times as hard as it would have had I simply allowed it to escape me on that day.

And now, I felt it all. Why? Why? That was the one thing that I asked myself over and over and over again: Why?

But now I didn’t have to ask that anymore. I simply accepted it all once again, just as I had at that time, with Maria.

It was at that point where I’d finally reached climax. The apex of humanity. The peak of my life. The best and most important moment I could have ever hoped to spend. In the sea of both positive and negative feelings, I became infinite. I became the holder of these emotions, the ones who would usually disappear into nothingness. But now, I gave them purpose. My existence rendered them meaningful, because I was now the observer, who acknowledged their existence. And that’s why I felt all of them, every last one, to the most minute, irrelevant and insignificant.

I became so immersed into my role, I lost track of how much time I’d spent. Had it been years? No, not quite…that didn’t sound right, after all. In truth, it had only felt like a couple of seconds in reality, but my perception of each emotion had gotten jumbled up to the point where I mistakenly thought I’d spent several months simply taking them in. But alas, that was not the case.

A wave of negativity crashed down on me, before being replaced before a more positive one.

Until, finally, no emotion was left, and I remained in this dark void, facing the core of the orb.