Illusional Plain

    “Where are we going,” she asks squeezing my hand. I don’t know how to answer. I’ve never done anything like this before. Why now? I don’t know that either. It could be the constant drone of news, mostly bad. Bombed daily by news that steals what little hope is left. 

    “We are going to Armageddon,” I reply as she smiles without looking at me, knowing the truth can be told in many ways; but lies?

    “Where is Armageddon, and why are we going there?”

    “It is safe there. Everything that is going to happen has already happened. Times, circumstances, repeat themselves. They have no choice. We tend to forget until we are forced to remember, and by then it is too late.”

     I was beginning to sound like one of those, one of those… The sky is falling, Chicken Little is no more, crushed by a misplaced meteor. The earth is on fire, the planet is drowning, technology will save us, God has left, disappointed, depressed, and yet we are here and have no place else to go. 

     “Armageddon, the last day of the battle between good and evil,” I tell her. She lets go of my hand and skips into the fog, smoke…

     Her voice comes from… “We are going to watch the last battle between good and evil? That seems like a strange thing to do. Should we bring anything? Lawn chairs, lunch? Why are we going? I’ve seen pictures of the end, it looks awful.”

    “Yes, it is awful, but without an audience there is no point. All events should teach us a lesson if we are paying attention to the reality, not the illusion.”

    “What is an illusion?” she asks stepping from the black smoke and taking my hand once again. Her hand feels cold. I look at her and she is covered in what looks like…I can’t say the words, what good would they do. Sometimes words do nothing but aggravate the situation. But I need to answer. I have an obligation, a duty to at least tell her what I believe.

    “An illusion is something that is likely to be perceived or interpreted wrongly by our senses.” I attempt to ease her anxiety by explaining something I do not understand myself. I know our eyes lie to us, our ears deceive us, our minds play tricks; it appears we are being manipulated by our own senses.

    “What does that mean?” she asks looking at me now. Her eyes wide, as if expecting the truth this time; not what she wants to hear, needs to hear, but the truth. I don’t know if I know the truth. The truth has become a product of illusions. We twist and bend the truth to fit our needs, make us comfortable, no matter the atrocities we are to witness, endure. Perhaps it is our only remedy in keeping a semblance of sanity. 

    Good and evil are terms we have manufactured to allow us to accept or reject the actions of others, ourselves. Our way of setting parameters that allow us to live in a measure of peace. When the perception of good and evil are left to us, we will find a way to incorporate aspects of them to benefit our cause. It becomes a product of our survival mechanisms that have led us through millennium of struggles over power and domination. And yet, we have learned nothing.

    Is it possible we are not capable of envisioning another’s perspective? Is it possible to accept the perspective of another and learn anything from the experience. 

    A loud explosion shakes the ground. I can feel the earth vibrate beneath our feet. She says in a giddy voice, “that tickles.” 

    My instinct has driven me to the ground. I have disregarded my senses and have fallen prey to the survival instinct. Perhaps it is possible to ignore our senses. Could there be a place somewhere inside us that overrides the stories our senses tell us. Can we mold our own illusions by listening to that voice, that place, somewhere inside us that tells us that we have a choice. We are capable of ignoring the urges of good and evil, the expectations of what we have learned, been taught to believe. 

    The news bombs continue to fall from the sky, and the ground continues to vibrate with a tension that asks us to choose between extreme perceptions based on what we see, hear, and know to be true. All we can do is watch, or can we change our perception. 

    She extends her hand to me. I take it and she leans back in an attempt to help me from the ground. “What are you doing on the ground?” she asks, straining to pull me up. “Were you afraid of the tickling?”

    “Yes,” the truth. The ground shakes again and I see her face erupt into a smile as I force myself to remain upright. I see for the first time that my perception of events although identical to hers have been interpreted differently. Her joy and my fear both caused by a matching event, and yet our responses based on our reaction to our senses entirely the opposite. 

    “Doesn’t the shaking make you feel funny?” she says grabbing my hand once again. “Where is this Armageddon, and how far is it? Will there be something to eat? Ice cream? A place to get warm, some kids my age, to talk, to play with?”

    I don’t know how to answer. She has questioned my answers, answered my questions with her own. All I can do is offer a smile, and hope that is sufficient. 

    I have come to see we all carry our Armageddon with us. We feel it, see it, even smell it, but we can’t touch it because it is little more than an illusion we have created to keep us from questioning the reason we are here, a part of this world, a part of this family.

    “You have a nice smile,” she says, letting go of my hand and disappearing once again into the black fog that denies our senses the ability to perceive the differences encompassed in the darkness we have manufactured.

"Thank you," I reply, wondering, if we can create darkness, can we create light?

She smiles at me from the darkness; I can feel her smile clawing its way through the blackness in search of a new light.