You are trying to enjoy a simple breakfast—not the taste of it, which you find yourself indifferent toward, but the ritual process of it—the preparation, the movement of the fork from the plate to your mouth. But you cannot simply enjoy it because the food is beginning to run low—not dangerously low but to the point where you have begun thinking about what you might have to do about it.

You wonder if someone will either intervene and restock the food or else communicate to you that you are permitted to do so. Otherwise, you will be forced to disobey the note (which was perhaps never meant for you anyway) and venture away from the house. Some mornings you actually expect to walk into the kitchen and find that it was surreptitiously restocked overnight!

It has been at least a week since you discovered the trunk, but without a calendar or the landmarks of a structured day, you’re not sure exactly how long ago that was. It has been even longer since you have had contact with another person—there was only that unidentifiable person walking by who may or may not have been knocking on the front door of this house. Before that, who knows?

What a delightful relief this has been! A relief to be spared having to hear and see the opinions of other people about everything. A relief to be spared seemingly constant inquiries regarding your own opinions about everything that you are perfectly content with having no opinion about. Still more relief at not being made to feel ashamed and idiotic for not having a clear, definitive opinion on all of this everything! Utmost relief at having no opportunity to bore yourself and everyone within range with your impetuously stated opinions that hide your hesitant uncertainty and that become regrettable monuments that you immediately wish to topple over and trample into the tiniest unrecognizable pieces so that they might never become whole again but for oblivion.

You have not even had indirect contact with other people nor means of getting information about other people: no computer, no tv, no phone, no radio, no newspapers. And now, you’re not even sure what use such information would be to you. With no memory of interests to speak of and nobody anyway to communicate them to, what should be the use of viewing random information and forming opinions for yourself alone? No, you are pleased to focus almost solely on the trunk in the room upstairs and what has proven to be the difficult task of opening it.

The trunk has a keyhole that appears to lock and unlock a clasp. You would prefer to open it properly with the key, but you have not yet located it and your frustration has boiled up at times leading you to attempt several manner of tricks:

• picking the lock (which you don’t really know how to do but which you assumed would work if you kept at it for long enough)
• breaking the clasp (once with a large rock and once with a hammer that you found alongside some other tools in the cellar)
• prying it open (with kitchen knives and then with the screwdriver you found near the hammer)

All of this has, of course, been to no avail, and you resent not being more clever than you seem to be.

You have spent an unreasonable number of hours searching the upstairs room for hiding spots and the outside of the trunk for secret compartments where you might find a key or some other solution. Unreasonable—because you find yourself looking over and over in the same locations and performing the same fruitless actions. There is only so much for you to do in a small, finite space! But up in that room, you feel like a child who has endured the grocery shopping and the clothes department and finally been set free in the toy department or the candy shoppe. If only you could have a glimpse inside its most intriguing feature!

You have spent more than one night there in the armchair having fallen asleep with the small lamp still lit or a gentle flame in the fireplace. You have pictured, in that vague state between sleeping and waking wherein loose connections and fluid transformations are accepted as everyday lucid observations, this upstairs room from below on the lawn—your hands on your hips, the moonlight omnipresent except for where it is covered up by lamplight from the room of possibility reaching out just a few feet, perhaps, beyond the window. Upon waking, you wonder: memory or new creation? And the more you try to picture opening the door to this room for the first time, the less certain you are about the degree to which you are presently creating that picture of it with the lamp already on.

The books on the shelf of this upstairs room are a curiosity. You have not made a thorough count but estimate there to be about 400 of them.

They have an old look to them as though they were printed many years ago, but their condition is rather crisp suggesting that they are either new and were merely made to look old or else they have been sitting around unused, ignored, unnoticed. Each one appears to be a unique piece—different sizes, materials, bindings, page lengths and what-have-you. But these books have a common feature that makes their differences superficially pointless: at first glance, they are all equally unreadable—an incomprehensible visual chattering.

They seem to you as though a bored child or an uncontrollably obsessive person had quite systematically and beautifully filled a blank book with random symbols and incoherent drawings, diagrams, and photographs—strange masterpieces of chaos. They make you a little bit dizzy and frustrated.

But you also can’t seem to stop flipping through them, spending large chunks of day and night in confounding awe. Though they resist at every turn of the page, they entice you to attempt to make sense of them. You keep hoping for some decipherable clue to present itself or to discover a key translating all this gobbledygook—you keep hoping that some such clue or key will tell you something about your situation.

While clarity and satisfaction regarding these books remain elusive, you are beginning to see something in them. In brief sections here and there, you see layers—letters upon letters, words upon words, diagrams upon photographs, words upon diagrams, even letters upon letters upon letters! They are like overused palimpsests in which there was no attempt to remove the previous work before overwriting the new one. Letters, words, and phrases slowly and haphazardly bubble out of the messy stillness. You find yourself writing down the following:

“…my fantasy lady of children and meats, fresh from the fruity womb of Jesus.”
“Alas! People too easily ooze harmonies.”
“Not every vessel presses like gold.”
“…like a relaxed grove. Yesterday was hushed.”
“What ninnies! There were only jubilant drums here before.”
“…but a faint gizzard might spell tilt for a grandfather.”
“Having knowledge is not ideal, but it keeps things flagrant.”
“…you are the crevice of my life.”
“…with a collection of birds in his pocket—quite solemn and…”
“…some would polish infinitely if they could…”
“…in the interest of freedom: neither terribly memorable nor entirely forgettable.”
“…the last discreet syllable forever jumping away from you.”

Rereading what you have written, you wonder what any of this double Dutch means. Furthermore, despite that these phrases seemed to spring quite naturally from perusing certain sections of the books, you wonder how it is that they did so since it has not made you capable of deciphering or translating any particular portion of the books that you choose.

---

Meanwhile, you have been making yourself meals, keeping the indoors and outdoors of the house up as best you can, searching the rest of the house for more clues, and with some frequency and for great lengths of time, doing nothing more than thinking—thinking of new methods of opening the trunk, thinking about the words “Von Kriege”, thinking of new places to search in the house, trying to recall memories of yourself, of this house, and of how you arrived here—and sometimes not even thinking at all—merely sitting and listening and seeing and feeling. It sounds as though it should be boring, but you do not find it boring.

Silent.

And still.

But silence and stillness themselves have a fullness of being. One needn’t think of them as a deplorable absence. The absence is the lack of words and suppression of action that people ordinarily use to confront, manipulate, and control other things in the world. Sitting still and silent need not be a route to certain incompleteness and emptiness—every route offers those qualities if one is so inclined—just as incompleteness and emptiness need not be solely pejorative terms. Stillness and silence and incompleteness may also be or imply a fullness, the fullness of simply experiencing events that happen without the attachment of words and the effective action—utilizing events for a particular purpose—that inevitably conjure limits upon that fullness—that pre-linguistic, pre-responsive fullness which we might just as well call the unlimited possibility inherent in mere events, unlimited possibility that we might choose to only vaguely notice and let pass on by.

Sitting still and silent keeps possibilities alive that can sometimes feel like everything, just what is needed. Sometimes words may even be a sitting still and silent in a corner that was just nearly empty—words whose use is unfamiliar to us but for which we should like to find some use or else merely bask for a time in their avoidance of use—sometimes this is even called poetry. But you can’t just be peapods in the mist all the time either. There comes a point at which the pendulum swings and one longs to jump back into the ring, to be a part of an interaction, something even petty, perhaps—to have a trite conversation, nothing more interesting than an exchange of common phrases describing the weather—an entirely other sort of boredom and stillness that pretends it isn’t (and sometimes even succeeds).

You have received no more visits, no more notes, made no new interesting discoveries about the house, and made no progress in determining where this house is nor how it is you happen to be here. You have made no further discoveries about yourself aside from the fact that you are able to do a passable job of performing the daily activities required to survive with a certain degree of civility. You finish your breakfast and do your dishes. You fold and put away the clothes freshly laundered in the appliances found in the cellar. You take a shower. You put on the outfit you were wearing when you first remember waking up in the bedroom here. You think about the repetition and boredom and tedium of doing things here. You try to remind yourself that it is no different out in the world—the same repetition of meals and outfits and chores and mundane activities. Over and over the same control and manipulation exerted over parts of the world so that you may survive another day. And yet always the same silence too. The same ever-present nothing lurking, waiting—not out there, but right there. The same boredom and tedium all the time for everybody forever ago and forever on. But isn’t there a greater possibility out there for something new, interesting, different, or unique to happen? More variables, more possibilities? And isn’t that a worthwhile trade-off for dealing with an often unyielding and unbearably routine society that nonetheless sees itself as special? And, after all, while there are some people who are able to turn a festive event into something drab, routine, and depressingly blah, aren’t there also people out there capable of turning an everyday ordinary meal into a fun, even exhilarating, experience that you wish would never end and that somehow alters the very prospects of living and of the future for the better? You wonder which sort of person you are. Or were. Or will be.

How much longer can you remain here obeying words on a piece of paper? How much longer can you convince yourself alone that you are alive, visible, still existing? But what if existing out there means working on a farm all day everyday or dragging yourself to and from a convenience store five days a week or endlessly carting some children to all of their appointments and obligations forever and beyond? What if this is actually a preferable respite from being inescapably surrounded by other less desirable repetition, boredom, tedium and seemingly endlessly complaining about and frustratingly thinking about the endless repetition, boredom, and tedium we swim, constantly swim through and can’t possibly scrub away for all our continuous swimming, swimming—

You begin doing some jumping jacks. You may not be able to scrub the repetition away, but you can change from one sort of repetition to another. And so, the repetition of jumping jacks and the necessary changes that physical exertion brings.

But something more interesting keeps you from getting worn out. Something has fallen out of your clothes and clattered loudly onto the indifferent wood floor—a cure for repetition and boredom you now hold between your thumb and forefinger.

How many exhilarating dinner conversations have been followed by genuine personal change and how many have been followed by a quick return to everyday repetition pierced with longings for those fleeting feelings of possibilities? You wonder . . . yes, you wonder as you gaze at three keys dangling from a metal ring.