When its Time: On the Revision of the Mind. (Patreon)

When its Time: On the Revision of the Mind by Zyra Blue.

It is said—though I have never found the passage in any trustworthy codex—that every person, upon suspecting the fatigue of being themselves, inherits the obscure right to revise the architecture of the mind.

One must proceed with ceremony. Imagine, first, that the skull is not a fortress but a cabinet; not sealed, but discreetly hinged, awaiting the hand that dares inspect its hidden geometry. Remove from it, not the mind itself (for no one has survived such simplicity), but its likeness: a second and perhaps more exact version, a simulacrum entrusted to contemplation.

The ancients, or those whom memory has transformed into ancients, advised placing this duplicate upon a shallow metallic vessel, though not one intended for ordinary domestic rites. There, with the patience of a librarian of ruined empires, separate the luminous from the excessive.

The worthy fragments reveal themselves readily: they possess the stillness of crystal, the pale dignity of pearl, and that inexplicable aura which accompanies truths we recognize without having learned. The rest—those cumbersome faculties once necessary for survival in a hostile century—must be relinquished with measured pity. Among them are suspicion, predation, the vulgar instinct of fear, certain indispensable falsifications, and the habit of mistaking one’s own shadow for an enemy.

Yet one must not be naïve. The discarded functions are persistent. Like forgotten dynasties, they attempt a return. Observe, therefore, whether the diminished mind, sustained in its invisible field, restores what was excised or instead invents gentler arrangements for inhabiting the world.

The final test concerns not metaphysics but affection. If this second mind proves more prudent in love, less obedient to old griefs, more capable of distinguishing devotion from repetition, then perhaps the exchange should be completed.

For what is a life, if not the prolonged negotiation between the self we inherited and the stranger we might, with hesitation, become?