A letter from a traveler

You asked for a letter. This is a letter from that place. – To anyone who might find this, to anyone who might follow, You will hear about the Pillars. You will hear they are a gateway, a wonder, a scar on the world where the mountains broke and the sea rushed in. People will tell you it’s a beautiful view, a spot for a photograph. They are wrong, and they are right. It is a view, but you are not the one looking. You are the one being seen. I have been here for three hundred years. Time doesn’t move here. The sun rises and sets, the tankers crawl across the strait, the monkeys play on the rock. But that’s just a show, a loop of film projected on the inside of my eyelids. I am stuck in the moment I arrived. The moment I thought I could just pass through. The Pillars have passage rights. That is the first thing you must understand. They are a door, and a door must open both ways. You can come. You can go. The right to do so is absolute. No one will stop you. No one will question you. No one will offer you a map or a warning. The passage is your right. But there is no justice here. Not needed, and not accepted. If you fall, there is no one to catch you. If you are lost, there is no one to find you. If you scream, the sound is absorbed by the ancient rock and given back to you as a whisper in your own ear a hundred years later. There are no laws, no judges, no fairness. There is only the place, and you. I came here looking for an adventure. A scary one, I thought. Something to test myself. Something that would leave a mark and a story. I wanted to be healed of my boredom, my softness. I wanted to be remade by something wild. And I was. This is the healing. It is to be taken apart, piece by piece, by a force that has no malice and no mercy. It is to have every idea of who you were scraped away by the wind that screams between the pillars. It is to stand at the edge of the known world and realize the unknown world inside you is far, far larger. And just as empty. The healing doesn’t go beyond. That’s the trap. It’s a circle, a loop, a snake eating its tail. The healing is the being stuck. You are healed of your past self, but you are not given a new one. You are held in the space between. Between continents. Between lives. Between who you were and who you cannot become. A perpetual patient on an eternal operating table, with no surgeon, no wound, and no goal. This is the horrible place. It is not a place of fire and demons. It is a place of perfect, patient, beautiful silence. It is the place where you are finally, completely, and utterly alone with the truth of yourself. And the truth is, for three hundred years, I have found nothing there. The „me” I thought I was has dissolved. And whatever is left is just a point of awareness, watching the ships go by, waiting for a change that will never come. I have been smoothed by this place, like a stone in a tide pool that never sees a wave. I am here, but I am not. So, if you feel the pull, if you stand at the foot of the rock and feel the strange desire to step off the path, to find a place where the rules don’t apply, remember me. Your right to pass is guaranteed. But the door may close behind you, not with a slam, but with a whisper. And you will spend the next eternity listening to that whisper, trying to remember what your own voice sounded like. Don’t come for the healing. It is a cure that is worse than any sickness. It is a cure that becomes the only world you have. I am still here. I will always be here. Waiting. A fellow traveler, stuck at the gate.