Vertical Laws

By Jem Morgenstern

The vertical road stretches above the clouds. Gravity makes no sense. Here, the laws of physics aren’t concrete. Although the people here use the lack of physical limitations to their advantage, they don’t use them to be unfair. Where anyone could walk through a wall, or decide a wall didn’t exist and then see it cease to be, nobody does. Anyone could give themselves more to be more and have more than everyone else, but nobody there seems to feel any need to be more or have more than everyone else. They all have what they need and most of what they want, but nothing extraneous. As anyone would expect from the city of indefinite reality, my stop there was filled with fictive scenery.

Skyscrapers criss-crossed. Clouds spilled out of drainpipes. Pigeons flew in water. Baseballs arced downwards. Square balls rolled perfectly. Boats without sails floated atop a lake of solid concrete. Summer was Winter; it was hot, but it felt right to call that time of year Winter. A mechanic in the toiletries section of the grocery store ordered coffee from himself, reaching their hands between the shelves dividing the aisles, as if it were the countertop at a coffeeshop. A woman’s breasts hung off her chest like strings dragging behind her, clipped to the collars of her two dogs like leashes. One of those dogs stood on its two hind legs, the other one stood on its two hind arms. I openly welcomed a flower to pollinate me and I soon wore petals of my own.

My eyes could hardly believe me and they were confused, but this place felt faultless. I could believe me. Somehow, the atypical Seesaw Lane fit my expectation of reality better than my typical reality ever had or does. The innocuous disorder made me feel as if my being made more sense. I was realistic. I was rational, reasonable, sensical, and normal. Thoughts I had always thought before and had thought were insane began floating up, but instead of thinking they were stupid or unnecessary, they felt sensible. When I realized that, I started digging up all of the old thoughts I buried away: the thoughts that buried me, the thoughts that burned me, the thoughts that made me feel like I shouldn’t think. I thought them all back up and I thought them firmly. I balled them all into questions and I addressed each one with direct answers. I gave myself my answers. I let myself have the answers I was always too embarrassed to give honestly. Do you really know what taciturn means? No. I let myself have answers that I was always too afraid to give myself. Did he love me? No. I gave myself the answers I never accepted because of self-doubt, insecurities, or self-hate. Do I make a meaningful difference in the lives of others, no matter how few the number of others might be? Yes.

In complete honesty, I was dreading my visit to Seesaw Lane, as soon as I saw it on the list of places I would be going to for this tour. I thought it would be dangerous. I thought it would be visually overwhelming. I thought I wouldn’t be able to handle it. I left with a better sense of my own reality. Who I am. Why I think. Why I think what I think. What I see. I know now that the people who criticise this place so harshly only do so because they were uncomfortable learning about their reality. They don’t want to know which direction their gears are turning, what oils them, or what brings them to a halt. They would rather stay in their constructed dystopia, and that could be what’s best for them. For me - and many others - I know the best thing is to be less concrete, accept complications, and know that our subjective reality is as legitimate as the objective reality we all expected but never got.

Reality Discontinued

By Jem Morgenstern

With all that was done to prevent it, the fall of the universe was still inevitable. Existence was conquered by a force with no form - a nothing from beyond matter. By the time it was discovered, it was too late. It was understandably difficult to comprehend or analyze and understandably impossible to defeat. By the time the universe ceased to exist, our understanding of the nothingness was just that. That it didn’t exist, but that it was somehow bending reality and invisibly sucking the physical form and the entire concept of the universe out of reality. With such little understanding of the force that was ending us, we didn’t have any chance of survival. Our efforts were mostly trying to exist harder. Besides that, a few people built domes from pure matter, which was basically the complete opposite of complete non-existence, so those people were almost certain that their domes would completely reflect the nothingness. We didn’t understand pure matter at the time; it was discovered only a short time before the nothingness warped us outside of reality. All that we understood of it was that it was essential complete concentrated existence in material form. Given our understanding of it, I do understand why people would had thought that it could have potentially saved them from non-existence. Though I think they overlooked the fact that they themselves weren’t pure matter and that the nothingness wasn’t flooding inwards, so they couldn’t have possibly evaded its reach. The nothingness, really, was everywhere already. It was there. It was in them. My theory is that all things were some proportionally adequate combination of nothing and something that allowed them to be. Having some nothing in things is required for some reason that I have not yet thought of. This does conflict with the existence of pure matter, I realize, but I do have an explanation for that. Nothingness appearing precisely after we created pure matter is not a coincidence, I believe. I firmly hold the belief that creating pure matter threw reality out of balance. I think the universe only has so much allotted space for existence. As soon as we began manufacturing concentrated existence, the universe had to begin extracting existence from previously existing things to compensate. We did produce an incredibly selfish quantity of pure matter, so I wouldn’t be whatsoever surprised if that amount would have required the universe to completely remove everything else in existence to allow our stockpiles of pure matter to continue in reality. If that’s not the case, I’m also willing to believe that our expedited production of pure matter crashed the universe’s system - we were creating so much pure matter so quickly that the universe broke and it was stuck with its (metaphorical) finger on the the delete button. Either way, I would like to place the blame on humanity. Even more, I would like to place the blame on myself because I really do enjoy feeling sorry. I’m a bit of a sadomasochist and the extermination of the universe is the biggest punch in the face I could land on myself. You see, I’m the one who discovered pure matter and I’m the one who monopolized on the industry, completely blowing its production out of the water. Sure, pure matter is a wonderful construction material - it basically does whatever it’s meant to do and there’s a zero percent chance of it failing, but there’s no reason to have absolutely everything made from it. I did enjoy having all the money, when the concept of money still meant anything, but I do miss physicality and knowing what that actually means.