Photo: Hadrian's arch in Athens.

POV: DANTE

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"Strange," he thought, "very strange."

He wondered how it was possible that his gaze was fixed on that specific point that had never been this special to him.

But he couldn't help it.

All of a sudden the things that were normal at first had become strange.

What first sounded normal in his head, sounded strange now. And the fact that it sounded strange was strange. It was normal, and yet it was strange.

It was strange that he only now saw what he had known for years, but now differently.

It was strange that he found it the way he found it now, even though he found it the way he found it years before, without really finding it that way.

And that while nothing had changed, except that the abstract concept of "time" had passed by .

"Strange," he thought, "very strange." And he blinked.

The next moment he found himself in an ocean without water, an ocean without a clear color, but a predominant proportion of blue. He received no sounds and impressions from the world that people considered "reality." He no longer felt that he was part of that reality, this was his reality. An ocean without water and the noise of silence.

The blue was very intriguing. Where he was, it was as light as a misty sky, and the proportion of darkness in the grayish blue increased the further he looked.

He suddenly wondered where he was and who he was. He looked around to find clues, but then he saw the blackness.

The black blackness, which became increasingly black , until it was blacker than the black of the black, shapeless form that he saw when he looked down, he no longer saw the envelope that people call "body."

He blinked his eyes. But which eyes? Then he realized that the ocean was not an ocean, and that the black that he had seen was not black, but the opening in what humanity calls "an eye".

Belonging to the point where his gaze had now fixed, which looked straight at him.

The fact that point was, by the standards of humanity, removed too far from him for him to define its color with such tremendous, dizzying accuracy, plus the fact that he had just done that, made him frown with the supercilia of his corpus.

"Strange," he thought, "very strange."

He decided it was time to turn his physical eyes and his mind's eye to another place, and he did.

He turned his head and looked in the opposite direction, where he was soon prevented from looking any further.

Two ink-black depths grabbed his soul and pulled at it, with a power stronger than Theseus when he overpowered and killed the minotaur.

He closed his eyes, but did not, because he no longer knew what eyes were and how to close them. The only thing he knew was his own soul in the reflection of dark depths, the busily moving nothing that was filled with an indefinable void.

"Strange," was what his cerebrum came up with, "very strange."

Something in its existence blinked, and its world returned to normal.

No. He thought so, because the world had become strange to him. Or had he become strange to the world? Or had his world become strange? What was his world anyway? Was it more than a nothing that was considered a something?

He didn't feel like thinking anymore , so he squared his "nothing", subtracted two, multiplied it by 7, added 789 million and forgot the outcome, after which he turned his eyes to the wall and thought : "This is a wall. Period."

And so his strange stream of thoughts stopped and his world became as it had always been.

But unfortunately, that was just what he wanted. In its vague existence, the wall was not a wall. The wall was only a rendition of the emptiness in him, that strange void that could be filled only when his soul was in the undefined ocean with the dark depths.

But he did not know how he could once again enter the ocean of inner peace. He only knew that his search for the ocean and the dark depths had begun.

Yet...

It was...

He stared at the wall. "Strange," he thought, "very strange."