My entire life I’ve been lucky enough to be blessed with good long-term memory, at the same time I have a horrible short-term one. I guess you could call it selective. Growing up, I recall, I had a close group of friends that I could tell you every single detail about. I also had a very similar experience to the story of The Colorless Tsukuru Tzakai written by Haruki Marakami, an amazing Japanese author, who wrote about a boy forced to grow up and find himself when his childhood rejected him. This may be somewhat harsh in manys’ eyes, but it is somewhat closer to something real than what I have tried before. For now I am present, but I’m not sure how long it will last. For next comes the wall, but first we must escape the inverse gobstopper,
or is it just a cave?
We begin not at the surface, rather at its center. A cave carved by memory, instinct, and inheritance. This is our core, the first shelter. Not the world as it is, but the world as we first knew it. A place of shadow and story, soft echo and blind certainty. It is womb-like, familiar, a grime-caked refuge where we’re told we’re special, but still of little concern. The first layer of the inverse gobstopper.
And then comes a’ knock. A crack. A breeze. Something calls us outward, beyond the neon glow of a world that sidelines us.
To step outside the cave is not to destroy it. It is to test its limits. We enter the next layer with a step into a wider chamber, a slightly brighter light, a sharper air. Here, the cave becomes visible from without. What once held the whole truth now becomes an earlier version of it. We may rush back to the warmth, or let this new outer layer become our new center. Either way, the motion reveals us, planting seeds in the cracks of our own becoming.
Issa E
Each person carries their own gobstopper: a layered, concentric spiral of selves and perceptions, all shaped by experience, desire, and fear. My second layer might overlap with your third. Your cave might sit adjacent to mine, unknowable but sympathetic, like voices through thin walls in a city’s peeling room. We trade stories across the divide, shouting truths some prefer to ignore.
In this world, truth is not singular. It is textured, refracted, something that changes color as we shift layers. This doesn’t make it meaningless. It makes it personal. It makes it a journey, one we walk together despite people calling us superfluous.
Susan Sontag might tell us that interpretation is itself a form of layering. A veil we place between sensation and understanding. Orwell would warn us that even caves can be constructed by power, language, and fear. Fear of what more powerful people do that affects you while they sit in their glass towers. Joan Didion would remind us that we tell ourselves stories in order to live. Some of those stories are walls. Hunter S. Thompson might light his torch and declare, grinning, that the cave is on fire and we’re all dancing inside. Edward Abbey would urge us to break free, to feel the earth outside the cave, to live deliberately, even if it means solitude in a boneyard of our own excess.
But the layers are not escape routes. They are opportunities. You do not shed the center. You stretch it. You allow it to expand, absorb, adapt, like a seed taking root in defiance of the sands of time.
Yet still our caves we carry with us. Each layer we occupy becomes, in time, another cave. Comfort solidifies into dogma. Belief stiffens into identity. So knock again. Ask again. Step again. Live again and again. Even when the world says no fight back, choose to step forward instead? Push and pull with all your might, for it doesn’t matter what you do, for as long as it’s in your bubble, who’s to say? How big of a bubble can you maintain?
You choose whether to return to your task. Whether to defend the heart of your cave or risk allowing the next ring of your gobstopper to become known. Your new shelter. A new truth, south of our high horses.
There is no final layer. No flavor that tells you: this is it. This is truth. This is self. There is only the next knock. The next choice, the next movement. That thing you see, that is, until you realize it’s the light, and as it softens you leap again into becoming.
What you find outside may thrill or terrify you. It may unmake you. But that, too, is part of the absurd freedom to create your own meaning.
Some of us go in circles. Some stay curled in the center. Some build maps. Some build doors.
But for those willing to walk outward, there is no final truth—only the growing freedom of knowing that all truths begin as caves, and can be outgrown.
Let each layer be both a boundary and a bridge.
Let your gobstopper never stop.
And let each knock on the wall be answered not with fear, but with a flower pressed into the crack, blooming defiantly in the light beyond.
Thank you as always,
Hope this finds you well,
Aecurus Dione
