1. The Dream

Your Double is everything you are

and also everything you are not.

Who are you?

Who is the Other?

when you meet yourself in the Other

a star is born.

Captain Nora's Journal – fragments from an edge of Universe

I slowly drag my feet on a dusty, broken road. The hot, dry atmosphere tortures my senses to the edge. The pain inside me makes me more aware of my surroundings.

Eyes pierced by a ruthless sun, I can barely distinguish the remains of a pave walk on which I haul my steps along. I carry a suitcase, yet I don't know where from. I can hear it only now, scraping the broken sidewalk, the sound abruptly bouncing off fragments of what used to be a city.

War leaves similar signs in its wake, no matter the time or place where it happens. Destruction, pain, forgetfulness, burying trauma deep into the unconscious all the while bodies of loved ones sink into the dirt, transforming into worlds we will never know.

We are left with as many memories we are brave enough to keep in our consciousness.

Absolutely everything we ever did remains in our shadow and even if we no longer feel their traces, they shall haunt us and take a chance at shaping our future until we forgive and start loving wounds and assassins...the two faces of a coin we deceive ourselves with.

I walk, I stumble, I walk again.... a repetition that anchors me into a time and space I don't recognize. My mind is filled with dust and chaos, a deaf, heavy tone that blocks my reason, keeping me one step away from awareness.

Coming towards me, two human figures. Out of the reddish dust a familiar shape emerges along with a shadow form.

I don't know who he is. He looks at me with a desperate gaze, filled with despair and darkened by weariness, wan skin, flat cheeks, carved with traces of old wounds. I believe I look as awful, I haven't seen a mirror in...I don't even know.

I slowly turn my head, following him as he is moving away. Each one of them carry a suitcase, I should've probably asked what's inside...a step, he doesn't look back, another step, HE DOESN'T LOOK BACK...

I stop and stare for a second. At last, he turns his head and I held his gaze for a glimpse. I felt it and it fell inside me like a fallen star on a sky, leaving no trace. Stirring up nothing. I started crying. I continued to walk.

I don't know where I am. I have no friends. I have no family. There is no one around. There is nothing around. Only Nothing resides here. I have no idea where I'm going. I don't know where I'm coming from.

A few moments later, his hand touches my shoulder. The familiarity of his touch sends shivers through me, more like a sigh. I turn around and recognize him. We quietly gaze at each other.

We've met recently, probably in my most recent life, yet the roundness of his figure resembles those from our youth. Do I look like back then as well?

I remember we loved each other enough that it hurt and I wished I could forget him, without ever being able to accomplish that. Something inside me pushed me to hug him. I rest my head on his chest and squeezed so hard as if I could hold his entire being, convince myself he is real. He had no pulse.

My eyes went upward, I rest a palm on where his heart should be. Felt nothing. Then I tried feeling mine. Absent. No heartbeat. My eyes were heavy with despair, the same kind a man who forgot everything has. He wiped my tears and kissed me. I believe he know who I am. I am no longer alone Here.

We lingered, watching each other's emptiness. An eternity broke away from between us and we became One. I was lost inside him and he in me. I was so empty inside that his presence only increased the hollow. I knew nothing. I was not existing, then, in a blink, I caught a fragment of memory in my consciousness. Out of pieces like this came some answers: who I was, who I am, who is he.

Where we are now nothing is. We don't really exist.

If you define life in heartbeats per minute, we don't have that. If you define life by family and friends, we have none. If life is interaction, there is none. You have no pulse here. You have nothing, yet we found something. We found each other in a vast emptiness. In the Darkness, a Light was born.

We must be knotted together with a thread beyond Time, if Life is not needed to find each other.

His eyes are bewildered with questions I have no answer to. I need to help him. To escape this place. I know there is a way to leave this nothingness. I feel something crucial revive inside me: I am here for the Other.

Only when I mirror myself in the Other I am truly seeing myself,

Without connections between us, we're nothing. Exactly as here.