You can’t start until I start, Nancy. You’ll be my sister, and we’ll be best friends, and we’ll play every day after Mom sets us free from dumping the vegetable peels in the garden and gathering the sticks from around the yard and folding the clothes. Don’t worry, I’ll pay close attention to your dresses and shirts. And I promise I won’t lose your shoes or laces.

The little girl left the room and Nancy promptly fell over, crashing outside the walls of the dollhouse. The little girl’s puppy, seeing her chance, latched onto the plastic leg, sinking her sharp teeth through until the tips hit air. Puppy yanked and pulled and one leg tore free and then, bored, she dropped Nancy by the laundry hamper, and poor Nancy, who couldn’t figure out her story without the little girl, stared with sightless eyes and tried to describe the empty, cloudy spackle that lay at the top of her world. But she couldn’t find the words.

You can’t fool me. The sky is a bowl above me, the earth dry and broken. I sense the world on fingertips, eyes closed, the wind around my index. I touch the sides–I feel them. You can’t tell me the rain has disappeared. It’s outside this globe of sun.

I may be stupid, but neither am I clever.

Janet Frame creates the topology of my mind:

” . . . it would be nice to travel if you knew where you were going and where you would live at the end or do we ever know, do we ever live where we live, we’re always in other places, lost, like sheep, and I cannot understand the leafless cloudy secret and the sun of any day” (from The Day of the Sheep).

Anita stopped at the animal shelter on her way to the mall. She would have liked to adopt another dog, but Danny had put his foot down after she brought home the fourth. Their children were grown–what could it matter? Instead, she spoke softly to the dogs and left a sizaeble donation. Danny, when she spoke to him at all, always put his foot down. She wasn’t sure what the expression meant, but he was the sort of man who had firm feet, and where he planted them, there they remained.

Then she was off to the mall because she needed–she needed nothing. But how else would she occupy herself? She entered the mall and breathed in the fragrance of cinnamon that reassured her that some parts of the world remained stable. What might Danny like? She could buy him a new watch, or a tie, or a new pair of comforting dress shoes. She could buy her way back into his heart, force him to speak to her, acknowledge her existence. And after he noticed she was not merely alive, but also the woman who shared his bed, then she would bake him a venison casserole, his favorite meal–the dinner his mom whipped up after the men of his family brought their game back. They were men with money who hunted for sport.

Danny hunted nothing except money, and that was fine by her. She could buy a venison roast at Heller’s gourmet meat market. And then she could bake it and serve it with a fine red wine, and she could eat it herself. When was the last time he had left work early enough to eat dinner with her?

She bought him a light sports jacket, perfect for a windy day at the beach. She bought him cashmere socks. Everybody needed socks, especially her husband, who, with his firm feet, wore them out in six months. She maxed out one credit card after another with de-crinkling creams, whatever that meant, and expensive wooden toys her grandchildren would never play with. And when she could think of nothing else, she had her hair cut and styled at the Lanstrum’s salon–no appointment necessary.

After the haircut, her head felt light, but not in a good way. Her body buzzed with dizziness, and it was only three o’clock. What could she buy? What, what? As she passed the MapWriter store, the Cartographia, she stumbled slightly, stopped and righted herself, and peered in. What would Danny say if she bought her Life Map? He wouldn’t say anything because he wouldn’t know about it until he saw the credit card bill, and then he would pay the bill as he always did, without question. In his own way, he was a generous man. He never questioned, never yelled. Did this mean he loved her, or that he no longer cared?

She walked in, a little bewildered by the computer pods where others worked to build their Life Maps. She bypassed the stations and stepped lightly to the counter, hesitant, but ready. She must have smelled of money, a fragrance Danny brought home that lingered in his hair and hers, too, because the salesman tried to sell her on the latest model. She declined. Her credit cards had already taken a beating–she would take the 7.0 model, which would give her the option of three life paths, without the extra programmable features.

Half an hour later, she carried away her Life Map in its sleek case. Over a double mocha coffee with extra whipped cream, she unfolded her map and tentatively ran her fingers down the three paths. Her possible major life events lit up: Divorce. Divorce. Divorce. The word obstructed all three paths. All three. She couldn’t help it–she cried. She cried into her stupid high-calorie beverage and then bought herself a package deal of three cookies, fourth one free, and ate all four. Her husband hated her. There was no other explanation. What had she done? She had done everything, sacrificed everything for him. And all her efforts would end in divorce.

She drove home, determined to stuff the $1000 map in the nearest neighborhood recycle bin. But she didn’t because it might still help her, not if, but when Danny left. Her dogs barked at her from the backyard, and she let herself in the front door, swept through with her packages into the dining room, meaning to sit and cry until he arrived to witness her desperation.

He was already there, waiting, a beer sitting in front of him. She paused, shocked, unsure. His hair was so black, but was silver at the temples, as if he’d painted the silver himself. And maybe he had. He turned to look at her.

“God, I’m tired. Where have you been?”

“Shopping.”

“Do I bore you?” he asked. “Is that why you shop every day? Because you’re tired of me?”

“No, I . . .”

“I don’t blame you,” he said. “I’m tired of me, too. Let’s go fishing, Anita. Do you want to hire a boat and go fishing in the bay with me?”

Did Danny enjoy fishing? How would she know? He looked up at her, and the pleading in his dark eyes gave her pause. He needed her. No, no, that wasn’t right. He loved her. That’s what his eyes said.

“I bought you a fishing jacket,” she said, and handed him the bag.

He accepted the jacket with a pleased but surprised smile. Anita left the dining room to change into her cooking clothes. She would stow the map at the back of the closet, in the farthest place possible, and never look at it again.

Most of us are lost in Plato’s Cave, though some of us are more firmly shackled there, and those who refuse to turn to the right or the left care only for watching the passing shadows on the walls. The shadows give us enough “substance” to discuss, argue, predict, and expound our great understanding of what we refuse to know.

I’m in Plato’s Cave. I’m not shackled there, except by my own self-limiting thought processes. I’m shackled by my own need to understand what I can’t see from my perspective. I woke here, on this damp earth–I woke facing red flesh, and my face is still planted there. I scrape at the flesh with a sharp rock. I peel off a pale green substance and hold it in my palms and sniff at it. I dig around the perimeter of the red-fleshed beast–I dig, and I search. I listen, I smell, I taste. I feel the soft dampness, feel the prickles that dig into my skin, feel the dampness in the space around me.

I’m confused. I’ve used my five senses, and I can’t figure this out, any of it. I can’t determine a name, an understanding. I can only chart my observations. I can chart them for the benefit of future understanding.

And just as I begin this lengthy process, in which I gather my wits and the materials around me and begin scratching out my data, I hear an irritated voice speak to me: “Are you still there?” the voice asks. “Are you still in the same place you were when you were born?”

I force my body around, even though it’s both painful and difficult. I look at the man who towers above me. “As soon as I figure this out, I’ll move,” I tell him. Without constant interruptions, such as his own, I might have finished years ago. There are interruptions, too many–they sway above, patter below, shriek circles around my head.

“It’s a tree,” the man says. “It’s a cedar. Look around you. You’re in a forest, and you’re missing it because all you can see is the bark of one tree.”

I’m a little irritated by his need to explain this to me–typical man. I could have figured it out on my own, eventually. But I rise, anyway, and admit that not only am I in a forest, but I’m in a forest with an entire eco-system at its floor. Beyond that, the ocean stretches with its own systems, and to the south, the sand hills stretch with worlds within worlds. Soon, I’m lost in these worlds, and when the man finds me again–he does, every once in a while–he shakes his head at me. I might as well have remained at the base of the cedar because I don’t get it, and I never will.

If I were to create myself as an archetype, I would be the researcher. Sadly, the researcher is a lost soul–not the hero, no, never the hero. The hero deigns to visit the researcher and discover certain facts important to his heroic mission, and then leaves the researcher in his cave, in his darkness, in his web of cryptic knowledge that can’t fit itself into a larger picture, at least not in the researcher’s mind. Meanwhile, the hero uses his instincts to save mankind, and nobody cares that the researcher translated the archaic language on the ancient map that leads the hero out of the cave.

At this point, I’m not about to change my archetype. In fact, I don’t think it’s a possibility. But I’m ready to circumvent the labyrinth. I’m ready to stop wasting my time planning, thinking, reading and researching in order to, at some point in the distant future, begin.

How have I come to this? Recently, I read Tolkien’s biography, and his method of writing was so eerily familiar to my own that it made me physically ill. He researched. He wrote. He edited. He edited again and again and again and conducted more research. I don’t want to edit and re-edit and research and dig deeper. I don’t want my magnum opus, whatever that may be, to remain incomplete at my death because I couldn’t wade out of the details. I don’t want the process to replace the work, and I’m firmly convinced that, to Tolkien, the process of creating legend was more important than any completed work of literature.

I need my story to have an ending. No longer ask me how far in I want to go, because I don’t want to go in. I want out. Some of us, deep inside, are asleep, and others are awake and studying shadows on the wall, convinced the shadows are truth. And others have left the cave. I want that to be my story, my end.