I hate those moments. Unironically. Every time I have to remember that there's something beautiful and inexplicable and genuinely terror-inducing outside the pane that separates the real from the hyperreal, I remember that there are people making money off of so thoroughly destroying it. I remember, for all of about a second and a half, that there WAS once magic, wonder, ethereal paracausality that didn't NEED for explanation, it could just exist-- and that the order under which we live is such an utter perversion of nature that the magic has died, and that the people who killed it, are killing it, and will kill it all have addresses.

Those moments of leaving the cave make me reckon with the potential that I could do something glorious, but awful; necessary, but stupid; liberatory, but sacrificial. I hate those moments, because they never fail to make me jeopardize myself and the peace I try to cultivate, if even for a moment.