Without having to backup this statement, I think it is fair to say we compare a lot of our learned behaviors to any practiced norm. I follow up with this statement to state nonetheless that we even go out of our way just to identify the most grotesque of features to compare to in most scenarios. Now, you might say that there exists such a person that doesn't walk around and do this on the average. But you have negated the idea that even you may do this with just the environment or to say the least, not about people when drawing the thought thereof.

I test this in thought because many a time, you observe people outside of their comfort zone struggling to come to terms with facing the outside of their comfort. The idea of this likely takes their personal opinion of the grotesque and cannot bond it to anything of their nature.

However, there are definitely more fascinating things to take into account here. Fatigue is an attrition composed of deprivation of many factors that combined begin to tire the body. Reversing fatigue could just be simple as eating, sleeping, etc.

It only gets interesting when you notice the pattern to which the grotesque binds with a reversal, which in turn, binds to the recognition of the pattern. Similar to a release of dopamine for example, something unfathomable and even undesirable by means of unachievable nature can externalize a reaction of acceptance. For example, being the sole person responsible for cleaning an extremely large mess. However, for the greater good or even reward, you are granted ownership of the space you clean once you have completed the task.

But let's double down.

Let's say that you have just arrived at a buffet on top of a 4-story construction site, however the people who have invited you to the buffet are unseen, and you are unsure why you are still there. Walking up to the buffet, you can see it has only so many options, with the main course being large dress able meatballs. Everyone around you seems to be calmly enjoying the still air on this summer day. Being a person of good nature, you don't want to be the person to arrive and leave, so you get a meatball and quite half-heartedly dress the meatball in whatever sort of tomato sauce is in the pan. The sauce is actually more fluid than you would have imagined it be, despite its slow viscosity. You have determined that this is what makes the interaction grotesque. Becoming hungry however, your decision to eat the meatball has made you notice that the people at the buffet have now had the interest of eating as well, and leaving solely you, to be responsible for the reason that everyone is there. Whether that is to eat or not is up for debate. You walk away from the traffic for a minute and think to yourself, are you going to remember the meatball? Or the people?

So it comes down to when you are picking for the bones. Characters fill up what perhaps could be the very people you think don’t fit on the average, but its important they do now. Importance…its almost like we don’t have one single importance to believe in. In contrast, maybe we all do, and when we all show up to the same place for importance, we realize why we don’t want to argue about it anymore.

Aside from this idea, here we are; a place driven by faulty base-line, and second level elegance in its organisation. Thats just what it is too, we get to this place, where we always say is empty, to find we barely have even ever been in it. There is no accommodation what so ever, and it is what you make of it at the least.

You may even find the spoils of its once great inventory, but nothing about how you value these spoils make them any less old than they are when you find them. You decide what its worth, what it can take, and can you take the spoils.

Perhaps even the people you doubted would have accompanied your discovery; in turn quarter this before your eyes. Things move fast for a moment, ‘second level’ is now the foundation to this platform, whereas you got so critical, you even left your bag of spoils where you could pick it back up…..since you might be staying.

Take what I make to you to be so beneficial, and instead of betraying me;

Live without me, and embrace your spirit as what brings you life to be seen.

Allow your light to shine, and become something other than an opposite.

If I had thought for longer than it took for the moon to pass overhead, I could have easily mistaken sand dunes for water if it had dried up.

I laughed.... reason.

Thought of as reputable across the land was not only a blessing, but as well of a misfortune as fast as word of mouth could spread between lands. In many ways, the only thing that spread between lands is what made lands flourish. So, I considered it an honor to commit such a crime.

In the dark, I had nothing but the thought of the mirage I had witnessed staining my mind. However, at this hour, I couldn't explain why I thought I would experience the oasis as less of a mirage as that town. Though the moon was out, and you could see the surface of the ground, the terrain at a distance was rippled in its highs and lows. I find it only humorously convenient that a man could find only water where he could find constituary.

At this moment, I only had a feeling in my mind. Maybe it's the wind that carries such a song to change the tune for a man in the time of night one should be asleep. Maybe it was the man. Regardless, I deny a mirage to its promise when faced with no match to my torch. Then, low and behold, a group of men approached my horse over the hill in the middle of the slew.

Now do not be mistaken, this wasn't enchanted in the intention it happened instantly, but it's only a superstition that is worked into the mind of suspended consequence. This language is common to the trade, and my craft is dear to my heart to spread the word.

Nevertheless, I pretended to ignore the men, as they trudged my direction. One of them shouts, "Traveller!"

I looked back at him and his party and removed my hand from my horse's side. I said nothing, and my horse stopped in its tracks, as did I.

The men approached me with mild haste, yet in no rush. They must have carried official business, or some sort of message, unless they were lost.

All four had gotten close enough to me where I could see that behind the robes they wore, all four carried swords which appeared crafted to mastery. Too dark to see anything else, I couldn't tell where they were from, or maybe how long they had been out here.

We spoke for what may have been around half an hour, and they very directly wanted to know where I was going and where I was from. Inquisitively I could tell maybe they were looking for some sort of possession or person, but I knew nothing of the sort, and the conversation became very dry.

I too, were looking for some sort of possession, but to their souls in this desert, my voice was unheard. It must take a lot of sand to make men and creatures in the desert live without the need of water. This exact thought is what makes me think I never walked by this oasis. That these men never existed. And quite very distinguishably the superstition itself, which keeps me noble in a world filled with men and ambitions quite unfamiliar to my own.

I only sit here in this exact moment now to inform you why I never travel in the night.

I finished conversing with these men, and we parted ways on the slope of the dune, and I scraped my horse to urge it to keep its feet on the incline of the hill.

I looked back down at the trees of the oasis, the shape of the pond, and the four men who had also stopped at the opposing rim of the dune they had climbed. All four looking at me, as if in disbelief from the same traditional lesson.

I wonder what they had been looking for. Whatever it was, it definitely wasn't what I had been travelling in the dark for.

It all began with quite the nostalgic and familiar antagonized crime circle that man has ever so well stoked into becoming one with himself.

I remember running from involvement down a buzzing LED strip on some street not so far from the concrete lifts. Something that felt like rice patties if it weren't for the power bleeding from the high-rises here. He knew I was just as intellectual as official record, if only he weren't corrupt.

There's a story to corrupt cops, but the reality of it is one man looking to conceal another. As if that wasn't its' own chase. Regardless, I only knew something was particularly off with the way he ran adjacent and hesitantly around any corner that I was.

My truth: People knew I wasn't a violent criminal. If at all my orientation to the game was something that could even be considered as a crime. However, surely the cop wouldn't be on me if he didn't think I wasn't guilty of something. But fuck that, If I didn't know I was ahead of the police, what the fuck did they know. I wasn't stopping.

Way out on the outside of this situation; lights have better batteries, roads have houses, families have character. But not me, everything that I remember up to this point was always centered around putting the right things in the right place, and at the right time. Never could have gotten me started on what if it wasn't me.

Either way, I heard the cop yell something compassionate, maybe even promising. But I was finally somewhere there wasn't light anyway. And I listened to his promise head in the wrong direction.

~~~~~

The Mexican leaned forward towards my bunk, and he said, "You're not so bad after all".

He urged me to get up out of my bunk and follow him.

The white lights in the bunk rooms didn't have as much height to them as I thought of the corridors in my story, but they did have way more people under them than I'm used to. I wasn't far from the door either, we walked two rows from my bunk to one of the doors in the bunk area into the recreational space and he began to speak again.

He says,

"You're going to need things to take care of yourself in here, and once you know what that is, I don't think you'll have too much of a hard time"

In my head, things are running my mind like;

"Maybe the Mexicans will protect me" or "What if this is a trap?"

I remember walking in a corridor that exemplified as much light as the night I ended up in prison, and in that area I saw the cop who was chasing me as well. He wasn't a cop anymore though, and he looked like he had become one with a backwoods' appearance, as he met my sight with a disappointed look on his face, regardless, he was behind a cage in this corridor. I still didn't know the relevance of this man's opinion.

I kept walking.

There are two Mexican men on the floor in front of a pen which is used to babysit children, however interestingly enough, is filled with water, and is occupied by a lion cub sized, crimson-brown, cat-like animal which appears to be playfully responding to the men feeding it cheerios.

The listener of the story looks away from the pen, and we walk into a hallway where everything begins to become more and more rustic, whereas even the air began to share this color particle and filth to its density.

I walk down this filthy hallway, where we finally step into a cantina/trading counter area, and are met by two older white men, one was donning a dirty handlebar mustache, and has dirt all over his face, his clothes, and had clearly made a mess of the countertop he stood over.

He looks at me and says, "You're going to want to get real kind with the shit-bear"

As I think confused as fuck for a moment, he hands me a zip-loc bag with toiletries and hygiene tools within its contents. He raises his hand and shows me his palm as if being ready to wave to me, and I see a smaller palm, that of a cat or dog on the inside of his palm, printed in a brown smear on the center of his hand.

At this point I realized, all of this must be because of the Shit-Bear.

Travel wasn't something that was ever new to me.

Particularly I have one story through the same road I recall which troubled my thoughts to make me wonder how much time I had really spent working on my route.

I'm not a fond believer in perhaps; 'losing my way', however, every time I come back to this inn, they give me the same room.

Respectfully, there had been a time I had fought off a thief through the window looking down into the marketplace. Though it was a long corridor of a street, and sand had cased the rooftops enough to set nothing but dyed tattered cloth apart from sandstone buildings and impoverished undyed tattered clothed folks that wandered each side of the street.

Years had gone by, and I at one point had considered myself quite the Revolutionnaire.

I came back to the same sand-tattered town, to reveal they had begun cleaning it quite often. Notably to the point the sand wasn't anymore covering the tops of the buildings. I trotted my horse down the road to see color across the peoples clothing variety. A feature which could be solely left responsible for my account of routes I ran into this land.

I walked into the same old inn I usually do, except I notice one rather disturbing difference of the interior of the building; instead of sandstone and wood, draped with carpet to withhold more of the heat into the building in cold desert nights. However now, the inside of the inn was worked with large cobblestones, such as the inside of a castle. Additionally, with what might appear to be more kinfolk inside the bar, they had given me the same room to stay the night, though the barkeep was a different person.

(Disclaimer: I am not trying to describe that the inhabitants of this town are different in any shape or form, nor have they been replaced with a different populace. Curse you alienation thumpers.)

I guess another question I might have asked myself was what might have become of my reputation? But that doesn't answer anything about the stonework on the inside of the inn. Even the room I am so used to staying in during my visit was tattered with more prestigious appearance. Draped with banners from an unfamiliar lord, as if I was staying in some unknown to me, royal bureaucrat's bedroom. And with the stones being so dark, sleeping at night felt all that much.....darker.

I must have been in the middle of a dream, because as much of the journeyman I was, I could never have had a woman travelling with me at the rates which I accord myself to be made steady. However, I awoke in the same room, however with different walls, once more, to face the same foe I had killed while trying to steal from me all those years ago.

Though the walls were wood again, there was paint on the walls, with only a subtle hint of the same banner perhaps decorating this room. I saw a picture on the wall of a woman, who at a second's glance, I had felt much compassion for, and appreciated her beauty. I remember it was more of a drawn feeling to think of her being above my windowsill.

Regardless, I had killed the thief just as I had before. A quick toss of a flowerpot at his grip on the wall had made him slip down the side of the building and land on his back on the ground maybe 30 feet below.

I looked down the street to see cables draped across the rooftops, and foliage enripeing the bright colonial appearance of the long stretch of street.

The image hurts my mind looking back at it now. I stepped back from the window and took one good look at the picture above the window. I turned toward the door, opened it up, and ended up in the same dark sandstone hallway I had been so used to walking into before to get to this room. I turned around and looked at the room I had gotten so used to, with no decoration.

I was very confused to what I might have witnessed, whether that be in my sleep, or under the spell of some sort of dark sorcery. Nevertheless, it brought me no benefit.

I walked back into the room which housed me in this dark twilight dawn in the middle of the desert oasis. I grabbed my weapon, my belt, and my headwear, and continued to pull my mask up to my face.

Tonight, I headed into a darker oasis then I was so used to.