I kept wondering why it hurt this much.
If I looked only at what had happened recently, maybe it wasn’t such a big thing.
If I told someone about it, I wouldn’t be surprised if they said, “So what?”
That was why I couldn’t talk about it.
Even I thought the size of what had happened and the size of the pain didn’t match at all.
But I began to understand a little.
I am not living only this one day, today.
All the places I have walked through are connected beneath me, like a spiral.
At the very top is who I am now.
Old wounds are not things I left behind in the past.
They have been coming with me all this way.
So something small that happens now does not necessarily touch only the present.
It touches the top of everything that has been layered beneath it.
If that is so, of course it hurt.
For a long time, when the ground beneath my feet hurt too much, I would lift myself off it and run.
I have my own word for it: “float-run.”
It is a little different from running away.
Being there hurt too much, so I would lift my body slightly off the ground and keep running.
It saved me many times.
I probably needed it.
But I couldn’t stay in the air forever.
Again and again, I came back down to the ground.
When I came down, it hurt.
I floated again.
And came down again.
Then, one time, I went all-out on a float-run.
But something happened while I was doing it, and everything I hadn’t been seeing until then was suddenly laid bare.
There was ground there, covered in wounds.
They weren’t only recent wounds.
They had been there for a long time.
Things I had caught glimpses of here and there seemed to come out all at once.
After that, float-runs stopped working.
I was supposed to feel better when I floated, but instead, it hurt even more.
So now, I am on the ground.
Not because it stopped hurting.
If anything, it hurts very much.
But I am standing here.
And I wrote White Morning.
A white thing is rolling.
The moon is there.
It goes through the hole in a donut.
It goes into last night.
A place where destruction happened for a reason that wasn’t a reason.
I just wrote it.
When I looked at it afterward, there was something there that continued all the way to who I am now.
Morning is not a place where night is gone.
Morning comes to a place that has passed through night.
I called it White Morning.
White Morning was payback.
I don’t think it looks that way just from reading it.
That’s fine.
But for me, it was the first time in my life I had ever gotten payback.
The place in Part One is the past.
The moon is still the moon from the past.
Only White is in the present.
So White is not going back into the past to redo something.
White is not trying to change the past either.
White, in the present, is choosing once again a point that existed in the past.
I think it is something like a spiral.
You go all the way around and come back to the same point.
Seen from above, it might look like the same place.
But you are no longer at the same height.
Whether it is one level higher or two depends on what it is, but at least you are not in exactly the same place as before.
White deliberately chooses the same point.
And does there what could not be done before.
That is why I created the fantasy.
I use a place in the past where payback is possible.
White, in the present, only has to act differently there.
When I look at White Morning now, it doesn’t feel to me like something that begins with Part One and simply moves on through Part Two and Part Three.
From where I am now, I think it begins somewhere around Part Three.
From there, I came all the way around, and in the end, I rewrote Part One.
So Part One comes first in the work, but for me, it is also the end.
Break the moon’s strange state, take from the moon, and return it to where it belongs.
And morning comes.
That is where it ends.
Part Two, The Moon’s Revenge, is an extra.
But it was a necessary extra.
An important extra.
Recently, I have come to think that I must not stay silent.
I don’t mean that I want to explain everything and say, “This is the kind of person I am.”
But when something is wrong, I say it is wrong.
I say, “That’s not it.”
I say, “This is what I want you to do.”
If someone has taken me the wrong way, I don’t leave it there in silence.
I say it in my own words.
I couldn’t do that before.
So now, I do.
I think that is another kind of payback.
Not to attack someone from the past.
Not to blame who I was in the past.
I, in the present, do what I could not do then.
Without hurting anyone, without hurting myself, and still getting my payback.
Healthy payback.
My payback began in play.
I was playing.
That was all.
I wasn’t trying to write anything.
I was playing, and somehow I was writing.
When I saw what I had written, I thought, “Here. I’ve been here before.”
All right. Let’s get some payback.
That was all I thought.
From beginning to end, I was playing, but somewhere along the way, I was genuinely hurting.
I had pushed myself until I was touching a raw nerve directly.
The next morning, I had changed.
Without realizing I had changed, I was already taking action.
Morning had come to me again.