The Enlightened One

To become enlightened, walk through the darkness of disillusionment.

A word torn in half that feels like the part nobody tells you about the journey through disillusionment, which doesn’t dismantle you neatly, by the way. It rips your whole reality mid-word and leaves you holding handfuls of pieces that don’t fit back together, and you have to decide whether to mourn the missing parts or build something new out of the fragment you kept.

I chose to build. That’s what these two pages represent, the residue of doing the work.

The first page is a coastline. Shells, coral, a girl in a long coat walking away with her hands in her pockets, threaded stars falling like rain. I don’t know where home is, but I’m on my way. That sentence is the whole architecture of walking out of anything that once called itself your world, a family, a church, a belief system, and a version of yourself you were told was the only acceptable one. You don’t leave necessarily for a certain destination. You just leave, calling the distance itself a kind of home, an in-between place.

The blue glitter cord winds through the page like a nervous system, or a river that keeps doubling back on itself instead of running straight into the sea. That’s accurate, because disillusionment isn’t a long hallway. It’s a coastline you keep walking without ever quite reaching the water, and somewhere along the tideline a fragment emerges. I think that’s what disillusionment actually looks like from the inside: language that used to organize your whole reality, now reduced to a shard you can’t stop staring at even though it no longer means anything.

And at the bottom, half swallowed by the edge of the page: I still wait for you. Not I’m still waiting for rescue. Waiting for you; me, the self that existed before the journey of leaving the old behind even started. She’s not gone. She’s just behind you on the coastline, and every so often you turn around to see if she’s caught up yet.

The second page is where all that walking stops and the looking-through begins.

A clock with roses pressed under its glass, stopped at whatever hour, because time doesn’t move the way it used to once you’ve watched your own history dissolve in front of you. A butterfly, something that first died, and fell apart completely before it could fly. Nobody warns you that the wings come soaked, heavy at first.

There’s an old currency exchange slip, dated 1954, decades before I was born, someone else’s transaction, someone else’s proof that a thing was worth exchanging for another thing.

Disillusionment is an accounting problem before it’s anything else. You spend years paying into a currency, obedience, belief, and silence, until one day you find out the bank actually never existed, and that currency was actually worth nothing.

And then the frame. Lace-lit garden, a figure standing inside it that could be me or could be no one, golden, blurred, facing away, glittering like she’s dissolving into the trees behind her rather than reflecting anything in front of her. A key hangs beside the frame. It says Master on it, half worn away, and I didn’t clean that up either, because the half-erased word is the truest part. You don’t walk out of disillusionment holding a master key to someone else’s house. You walk out holding a key to your own authority, albeit worn, secondhand, and from wreckage, but yours.

Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it; the magic of insisting, after everything that tried to convince you, reality was fixed and small and owned by someone else, that there is still more world than you were shown.

Disillusionment doesn’t kill wonder. Cults, control, collapsed belief systems, dark triads, they kill it first, and then hand you a smaller, uglier substitute and call it realism. Getting the real thing back is the actual labor of enlightenment. Not transcendence. Repossession. Integration. Individuation.

I didn’t plan either of these spreads to say what they ended up saying. That’s the whole reason I work this way, in creative stream of consciousness. That girl on the coastline and the ghost in the mirror; the same person at two different distances from the wreck. One is still walking away from it. One being transformed by it.

Enlightenment, if that word means anything to me anymore, isn’t the moment you stop grieving the truth that got torn in half, or some grand realization. It’s the moment you notice you’re still holding the scattered pieces, and you glue them down, thread and glitter and all, and you let it be beautiful and incomplete at the same time. That’s the only kind of magic I’ve ever found; the kind that makes something worth keeping out of it.

I write to live.

I wrote a song for this time-lapse art. Enjoy!

~Vennie

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