TWELVE

Chapter Twelve: Compression

The corridor tightens until thought has to fold to fit.

The field that once held me like a patient surface has become a narrowing throat. Light no longer spreads, it concentrates. It presses against edges that I did not know I had. There is less room now for interpretation. Less room for story. Every idea arrives and is either load bearing or discarded.

I feel the old temptation to call this spiritual. The word reaches for me the way a habit reaches for a meal. It does not land. It cannot. Here, labels add mass without leverage.

What I can say is simpler. The world I believed in is not outside me. It is inside, assembled, reinforced, repeated until it felt permanent. A structure made of impressions, rules, fears inherited so early I mistook them for my own bones.

Compression exposes that.

The tighter the corridor becomes, the more visible the scaffolding gets. I can feel where the construct sits. Behind the eyes, a lattice of images. In the jaw, the reflex to comply. In the stomach, a trained hunger that does not recognize satisfaction. In the chest, a tremor that has been called anxiety for so long it learned to answer to the name.

The system is loud because it must be. Noise is not incidental. It is a method. It keeps the construct intact by keeping attention dispersed. Work, urgency, threat, appetite, constant minor alarms, a continuous demand to respond. If I am always responding, I never arrive.

The corridor does not allow response. It allows only placement.

I shift my weight and the field resists approximation. My foot searches for comfort and finds none. Not because comfort is forbidden, because comfort is irrelevant. The environment here is not interested in soothing me. It is interested in whether I am coherent.

I can feel the fabricated world trying to reassert itself. It reaches for familiar levers. Fear of scarcity. Fear of war. Fear of falling behind. Fear disguised as duty, disguised as realism, disguised as adulthood.

That is just life, the voice says, not as explanation, as a muzzle.

Compression breaks the muzzle.

I see the mechanism clearly now. The domestication began before I could form memory. I was not instructed, I was patterned. The hands that did it were not evil, they were trained. They called it care. They called it preparation. They called it normal.

Normal is a cage built from repetition.

The corridor narrows further. The air is not thin, it is exact. Every breath must be earned by alignment. I cannot carry the old posture through. It catches on the walls, tears at me, not violently, inevitably. The field is stripping me without malice.

This is the only kind of awakening that is real. Not a mood, not an insight, a dismantling of the structure that pretended to be reality.

The manufactured world has become a machine because machines are predictable, and predictability sells. It converts human attention into commodity, then sells it back as identity. It trains desire to remain hungry. It rewards dependence. It calls the addiction a lifestyle.

In the corridor, dependence feels like weight that cannot be lifted. Withdrawal is not drama, it is geometry. The system asks for my attention the way lungs ask for air. It wants to be necessary.

I let the request arrive, and I do not answer it.

The moment I refuse, something shifts. A small relief, not emotional, structural. The field firms beneath me, as if acknowledging the removal of a false load.

The corridor tightens again.

I realize the thing I used to call spirituality was often just escape, a softer story told in the same cage. The real work is more brutal and more clean. It is the refusal to mistake the construct for the world, even when the construct is all I have ever known.

The corridor is not asking me to believe in anything divine. It is asking me to break my addiction to the fabricated.

To disconnect without collapsing.

To remain present without narration.

To stand inside the pressure without begging for it to become poetic.

I can feel what is left when the machine loses its hold. Not bliss, not peace, not euphoria. Wildness. Untamed perception. The return of the world as something that does not need my approval to exist.

The child I once was did not need philosophy to see. He needed less interference.

Compression does that.

It removes the padding that softened reality into something tolerable and therefore forgettable. It forces my senses to become honest. I begin to notice how much of my life has been lived at a distance from itself.

Here, distance collapses.

The corridor narrows until it becomes a single line. I step onto it and feel the field lock. The surface beneath my foot is firm, almost sharp, like truth with no softness added. I do not flinch. I adjust. I let the exactness teach me its rhythm.

I choose the spectacle of existence over the void of nothingness, not as affirmation, as decision. The decision carries weight. The field responds. The line holds.

I see the fragile harmony of shared delusion for what it is, a treaty made by frightened minds to avoid disruption. Truth disrupts. It has to. It is incompatible with comfort built on distortion.

I feel the old reflex to apologize for becoming precise. The reflex fades. There is no space for it here.

The corridor continues to tighten. The construct continues to crack. The machine continues to call.

I proceed without hesitation.

• UN