I’ve been a bit preoccupied with infinity especially as it relates to death. These are some themes I’ll be incorporating into my short story. It’s something I’ll attempt to articulate but how could you fully articulate something that’s mostly ineffable?

I remember the nighttime desert roads that we drove on our family trips from California to Las Vegas and vice versa. The only thing illuminating the inky blackness were the headlights. It felt like there was a blanket smothering over me where I felt myself slowly suffocating and contracting under the obsidian dome. When I looked outside the window, all I saw was black, horizonless flatland, and it was both captivating and terrifying. I experienced a primal terror that seeped down to my marrow and viscera. But in all its horror one is stupefied.

The devouring maw of infinitude only gave me a small glimpse of what’s truly out there. What is revealed to me was the fact that I can’t help but cling onto the concept of “me” and “mineness” – even though the self is hard to define personally and ontologically, I still come home to the entity that’s me, a thing that belongs entirely to me. And that sense of me is what carries me through life. But part of the veil of Maya is the belief that self is an entirely separate, permanent thing, but it’s hard to detach from that illusion because it feels like what we do and what happens to us have immeasurable weight.

For a very short period of time, I was into Vampire the Masquerade and was fascinated by a clan called the Tzimisce. They consisted of a vampire clan of serial killers and psychopaths, but also priests and scholars. But the connecting tissue was the desire to transcend their humanity into something far monstrous yet greater than their previous selves. They essentially were the Hellraiser cenobites of that universe. But I deeply connected with that premise especially as it involved body horror and stretching one’s physical and psychological limits. To not be a person, but an entity. Something that’s entirely boundless and inflated.

I think the terror and seduction from those childhood memories still loom over like a spectre. The desire to transcend my humanity seems to reveal both the fear of and draw towards infinitude. To desire to be beyond human is the desire to escape the clutches of death but it also betrays the desire for timelessness as it rejects the impermanence of our being. I myself want to be infinite but I’m unwilling to submit to infinitude itself. I think of the skeletons of dead animals in the desert and how they disintegrate into the sands of time and return to the plenitude of infinitude.