Beneath her skin, there’s a labyrinth. You could stare at her all day and not know.
Now, a doctor could claim that they understand where it goes, how it maps out, but that’s a children’s story – like someone using a map to get from A to B, to fool themselves into believing that they’re not lost. From the air, you see, there’s nothing that can’t be seen. You have to go below to get lost.
So it’s a labyrinth then, and we all know what waits within a labyrinth. A labyrinth isn’t a maze. A maze is designed with a way in and another way out: it’s just another map, written into the earth, just A to B. A maze mimics the form of a labyrinth like a jealous school friend.
You could stare at her all day and not know, but once you peeled back the skin, what’s shown on the outside… the labyrinth stares back at you. Follow the paths to the centre. Go on. Leave a thread behind you, if you’re scared.
You should be scared. You could stare at her all day and not know. The places the labyrinth leads to, dead ends and false trails, follies, and berserk inclines, trails that lead everywhere, and because they lead everywhere, they don’t lead anywhere, and could lead you anywhere. Trails that lead nowhere, fooling you into thinking you know.
You don’t know.
Do you think she knows? She probably thinks she does. She probably thinks it’s just a maze, starting at one end, leading to the other. A. To B.
But a labyrinth is an ornate, dissonant spiral, and we all know where a spiral leads. You could stare at her all day and not know. Sometimes that’s all she does.
Sometimes she thinks back to when she entered the labyrinth, and looks back over her shoulder. The thread ran out a long time ago. Occasionally she encounters it strung along a corridor, heading off one way and another, and she knows that she has been here before, and seeing the thread in front of her, she should know what to do. She should know where to try next. She follows it for a while, then sees a fresh corridor opening up, and dares to try something different. And maybe, a long time coming, she’ll find the thread again, heavy with dust. And maybe she won’t.
She’ll follow the paths, and retrace her steps, and sometimes she’ll hear something bellowing in the distance. Sometimes, as she sleeps, curled into a ball at a crossroads or in the shelter of a corner, she’ll feel breath on her cheek and wake, and stare around wildly, looking for something she does not want to see, something she does not understand and cannot know.
She could stare all day and not know.
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