Rain pattering on the ground. It was comical, the way it splashed in between my fingers, sudden stains of clear in the red surrounding me. It wasn’t blood, no. Rather a bed of roses I lay on, the ticking of clocks around me in my strange world of upside downs, red strings connecting everything except for me, distancing me from everything.

I was crying. The rain falling onto the gear I lay on was my tears, spiralling down in fractals until they began to fall as rain above me. I couldn’t help a sad laugh that escaped my mouth, a bitter noise of sadness and agony that caused a ripple of rose petals to suddenly fly upwards from below me.

Why was I sad? It was a time for celebration, a time for me to be proud, to accept gifts unto me from those I loved. I was loved, I was appreciated, I was cared for… Why was I being so selfish as to cry alone here in this place for only my soul and mind to know, where even myself wasn’t allowed?

I didn’t know.

These feelings I can’t put into words, I felt them drowning me, suffocating, and I was fighting everything, so sick and tired of them treating me badly, their expectations tying me down. I was beginning to change who I was to become like their expectations, and I didn’t want that, so I fought it, and when I took a break from fighting I felt sad and wrong. I was sad, and alone, so I did all I could when I was running out of ways to fight with the fake self, the shards of lies and deceit that threatened to consume me; I wrote.

I left my place of gears and clocks and roses and string, returned to the world I created to house my conscious, all of the people figments of my imagination yet real, realer than anything I could create I never made these people they made themselves, and they made me and I wrote. And as I wrote, invisible tears of roses fell down my cheeks, real only in the world I made for myself and not anyone else, not any other me’s just the real me, the Center me the ME me. I wrote and wrote and vented and poured my heart and soul and despair into words, words that meant nothing to anyone but meant the world to me, words that created the world into real with a power both used passively and actively by someone who just wished.

I slowed down, music ringing through my soul as I listened and wrote. My feelings poured out in a stream of endless roses, another string being formed in my world that connected two more stories, and I understood more.

I knew. The cathedral blossomed in my mind, another rose in a garden and I understood part of what had transpired there. I knew, and I cried, and I remained stoic as I stared at a computer screen with meaning on it that only I understood. Meaning that I hoped others would understand through the strange continuity in my mind, this mind that connected to all other fragments.

I knew their stories, I knew their songs, I knew their faces.

I knew there were others as well, others that I’d know that weren’t me, weren’t part of the fragmented soul that was mirrored so long ago. I knew they were important, they were my friends, the ones I knew and loved.

I finished writing. Almost. I still had to convey the message. I knew what I’d do after the paragraph was over, after this chapter in my splintered story was over. I’d leave it, another piece in a puzzle that might never be solved, the finished image one only I knew and understood. A image, a story, a song that I wanted others to understand. So for now, the Center fragment stopped writing their strange story, and placed it where it would be seen. Next, I retreated back to my world of self, and decided to learn more.

I would then discover the Cathedral.