In the beginning, reality seems but a dream. My fingers run their own race while I bear witness to the spectacle that eludes my understanding. An array of tan lines sweep across the keyboard, performing to the rhythm that integrates flashes, punches, and motion. After a point, the performance turns into a whir; I look below and wonder what those fingers set out to achieve at the outset. But then I remember that they play the agents of my cognitive machine. They turn the electrical instructions that blaze trails in the mind into words tangible and infinite like the sea. The whir that momentarily escaped my grasp transforms the fleeting, the abstract and the inconsequential into the everlasting, the raw, and the momentous.

When I step away from the machine, I know that the writer and the writing have detached. But the detachment speaks to my capacity to push forth eternity. All I have to do is let go of time and its pressures, and the way of nature flies into command. Creative freedom is no more an asset but rather a product of choice. What may seem to be a glorious achievement, the unfurling of my fourth dimension, results from an urge rather than a naturally artistic streak. And such is the urge that I, like this dimension, open the doors in every direction. Second to none, I can now surge through any door and brave the currents that will fight to knock me aside, released from the standards of pragmatism. Such is the urge that I can roll forth with the hunger to discover the limits of the human experience. Second to none, I will never stop and ask myself if I missed something important. I am free to explore unchartered terrain and brush through the truth. The writer may have broken free from the work, yet the graceful aggression before the eyes uninhibitedly flows into the self.

But the force behind the words grows not simply into the writer, but into the reader. Among the many reasons I write, some known and many unknown, is the dream that I can achieve immortality in the readership as well as on the page. Maybe my sparks of consciousness will pass through a phase of tangibility until they multiply into even more sparks and perpetuate themselves over all of mankind. Knowing that my words can extend beyond just me and pass creative thirst to many more individuals turns my self-indulgence into an act of charity. Once I let go, I have chosen to serve. Once I let go, I have chosen to mark my territory in the human story as the stimulus for the descendants’ work. Writing reassures me that my descendants will turn me into an infinite being, free from decay and disillusionment.

But penning abstractions into stone reminds me that I do not just strive to serve, but to empathize. Unequivocally locked in the encasement of my own emotions and battlefields, I recognize my nakedly human self. A self without sugar coatings, endorsements, or pride. I recognize that I am one grain of sand on the beach of the human race, one among billions of others reeling from the currents that rushed into the past and awaiting the tsunami to come. None of us know whether this tsunami will drag us into the confusion of the ocean or drench us with an awakening. Nevertheless, I wait and watch the many grains clustered by my side, asking the same questions that I am. What has just passed, and what will come to pass? We don’t know all the answers, but the mind buzzes as theirs do. Their callings to justice become my own. The salvation of their singularity becomes my holy grail. We cower and dance in the same space, and my fingers tell stories that belong to more than simply me. All our fingers flash forward as a clan, lunging for revelation.