There seemed to be no bottom to this upside down underground metropolis, and Persephone, who was more versed in the intricacies of subterranean living than her mother, expected to see the glow of red flowing lava at any moment as they continued their seemingly endless descent.

The journey ended in the lowermost chamber, a huge arched cave, fifty feet tall, with painted walls depicting epic battles, and scenes of daily activities, prayers for the dead, devotions of the living.

The echoes of hundreds of voices were reverberated and amplified by the tall stone vaults, walls and floor, reaching a deafening, disorienting loudness.

The high priests bowed and prostrated themselves at the goddesses’ feet and when bid to rise, they guided them down the central isle towards their stone thrones, carved with agricultural scenes and symbols of the dead, and surrounded by garlands of yellow buttercups and bowls of pomegranates.

A young maiden, obviously overcome with emotion, approached them humbly and placed crowns of buttercups on their heads, and then retreated, stricken with awe, to touch the cheek Demeter had caressed in passing.

For a moment Persephone felt like she was back home and was grateful to her mother for this unexpected gift.

The voices ceased suddenly when a group of priests brought grains and fruit and livestock for the blessing, as the sacrificial fires were stoked and made fragrant with large bundles of dried sage, chamomile and mint.

“They’re not going to sacrifice those here, are they?” Persephone whispered to her mother, who rolled her eyes at her with disdain.

“Now you have a problem with death? Of course they’re going to sacrifice them! That’s the whole point of the trip!”

She looked at the horrified expression on her daughter’s face and got instantly aggravated.

“Oh, grow up, will you? People have been looking forward to this feast the entire year.”

The anticipation of the smells, the horrid sounds of agony, the blood, and the choking smoke of burning meat brought Persephone to the verge of vomiting, as her mother watched her with expectant curiosity and just a hint of happiness.

“Can I dare hope that husband of yours finally made himself useful in some capacity? Are you...”

“No! Mother, how can you be so calm? This is horrifying!”

“I’m sure Tartarus is a pleasant vacation spot, dear. Keep your wits about you. You’re embarrassing Olympus.”

Persephone sat on her throne, stone faced, trying to find a happy place inside her mind as the ritual unfolded and the offerings were sacrificed and burned, grateful for the efficient ventilation system and the platform which put a height barrier between her and the blood on the floor.

The ritual finally ended, and the goddesses got up to leave, and as they stepped down from their podium onto the central isle, the high priest advanced towards them with a bowl of fresh, still warm blood, and marked their foreheads with its sacrificial offering.

For a fleeting moment, Persephone’s spirit left her body to see herself walk down that isle, deep inside the bowels of the earth, with a garland of yellow wedding flowers on her head, pale as a ghost, and dressed in immaculate white gauze, which was in stark contrast with the bright red markings on her forehead, the archetypal image of old goddesses of death.

She looked at her mother, who was as poised as ever, assuming her role as patroness of the crops and chtonic bringer of the harvest with graceful ease, at peace with life, death and all the stages in between.

“You acquitted yourself well of your task, daughter,” Demeter commented on the chariot ride back. “I was worried you were going to faint or something. A fainting goddess! That would have been the laughingstock of all of Cappadocia, like we don’t have enough problems to deal with already.”

She looked at her daughter, who was still too shaken by the experience to engage in conversation.

“It’s about time you got baptized into the next stage of your existence, Persephone. You’re not an innocent maiden anymore, you’re a mother now, in spirit, anyway,” she commented, displeased. “Us mothers live to serve the needs of others,” she continued bitterly. “The gods know I do.”

Persephone wondered what would her beloved think if he saw her this day, his innocent young bride all gone to leave room for the stone idol of blood sacrifice, and the disturbing imagery reminded her she still owed Dionysus a conversation regarding the details of his upcoming feast, a bacchanalia, no doubt.

She suddenly got angry, thinking this was exactly why she’d rather not leave Hades and its quiet peace.

For all the times she saw lamenting souls wondering aimlessly the banks of the Acheron, and sought to comfort them, they were all hailing from here, from this place of life and light, where everybody was constantly striving for power, where the primary emotions, urges and unseemly desires drove everything, a puddle of grandiose and callous ambitions as red and impossible to wipe clean as the stain of the sacrificial blood on the floor.

“This is life, daughter,” Demeter replied in a more comforting tone. “Life is brutal. Not everyone enjoys the privilege of skip-stepping over its challenges directly into the Islands of the Blessed. Don’t you dare judge. You’re here to serve. Serve.”

“What’s next on the calendar?” Persephone effectively ended the subject.

“We’re going to Epidaurus. You’re going to tend to the sick.”

‘As long as I’m not there to kill them,’ Persephone thought, relieved, and contemplated the irony of her, of all people, bringing comfort to the afflicted. One would think the mere sight of her was the last thing those people wanted to experience.

“Well, since your fated decided to cut Asclepius at the knees for messing with his incoming headcount, and kept him hostage in Hades for his reward, you’re here to assume his duties.” Demeter couldn’t help herself. “Such a harmonious place of love and light your home is!”

“Actually, it was Zeus who stroke Asclepius down. He’s in Hades because he’s dead.”

“And I’m sure your husband had nothing to do with it.”

“So, what exactly am I supposed to do in Epidaurus?”

“You will provide dream visitations with advice, comfort and cures for the sick.”

Why can’t it all be like this? Persephone thought. She loved her work, most of it, anyway. The plants, the oracles, the comforting of souls. It was the brazen, thoughtless infliction of intentional harm she couldn’t come to terms with, and that, as she’d just learned, was the red blood of life itself. No wonder she’d rather be dwelling elsewhere.

“You should wipe that off,” Demeter pointed to her forehead, “it might upset the patients.”

“I can’t imagine why!” Persephone replied bitterly, promptly handed a napkin to clean her forehead by one of the attending Aurae, and a bowl of fresh water to wash up her face by another.

She saw her face in the water's surface, unchanged, if only a little pale, remembered the saying after a certain age people have to wear the countenance they earned for themselves and was now sure that wasn’t true.

All of world’s cruelty stays neatly hidden behind a facade of blameless faces, of faces just like hers.

She rested her eyes on the slow-moving landscape below. She was sure they were traveling faster than time itself in Helios’s chariot, it’s just one could barely tell, so high up in the sky. From far above, the cradle of life looked so beautiful, so peaceful, a true blessed Eden. No wonder the Olympians did not understand its struggles!

Dusk was approaching, and as Persephone’s friend Nyx covered the earth with her mantle, the landscape turned into a black velvet map dotted by points of light, almost like a mirror image of the starry realm.

The thick or rarefied clusters of those lights marked the edges of the seas and the crossroads of traveling routes, a very different way of experiencing life’s activating principles than one got to see during the day.

The night map was so much more telling in terms of people’s priorities and focus, stripped bare of the artifice meant for life’s embellishment.

“You’re biased, of course,” Demeter commented, then turned to the phaeton driver. “We made good time. We’ll be there just after the afflicted fall asleep. I’d like to skip the pageantry and get directly down to work for a change, and hopefully get in and out without unnecessary delays. It’s been a long day. We’re all tired.”

She brought her attention back to her daughter.

“Persephone, have some ambrosia, dear. You have eaten nothing all day and you’ll be useless if you’re lightheaded.”

Persephone received the bowl promptly offered by a third aura and obediently ate the food of the gods.

She settled herself in, grateful for its softness and suddenly remembering how tired she was, and was still adjusting the pillows when she met the young man’s gaze again. She felt absolutely ridiculous sitting there, buried in a mountain of pillows and floral motifs for no particular reason at all.

“I’m touched you found your way to comfort, that’s exactly why I teach this class, to encourage people to settle into their comfort zones.” The sarcasm wasn’t lost on Taylor, but since she had made the first socially unacceptable move by walking into another person’s room uninvited, she ground her teeth and didn’t retort. She regained her composure and asked the obvious question.

“What class?”

“Welcome to WAI 106.67 - Introduction to Wayfinding Systems. It’s an introductory class,” he pointed out the obvious, and Taylor wondered what remedial Wayfinding Systems class she had missed to justify the additional explanation.

“An introductory class in what?” she pushed back.

“Wayfinding,” he pointed out, looking at her as if to assess whether she had the required level of intelligence to attend the class. Taylor sat back in her cozy chair, still trying to figure out who was pulling a prank on her and why, and amazed by the lengths that someone went to in order to generate this level of detail. The doors alone, for one. So she decided to play along and asked.

“Where do the doors lead?” knowing full well after the exploration trip she had taken around the building the day before that they couldn’t possibly lead anywhere.

“We’ll get to each door when its turn comes, but I need to give you the disclaimer about door number eight, it’s university policy, safety training, release of liability, that sort of thing. You get the idea. In short, don’t go through door number eight.”

“Sure,” Taylor replied, with a hint of sarcasm that didn’t escape her conversation partner, “But all the other ones should be safe, right? Or do I have to review the door handle operation manuals before I go through?”

The young man rolled his eyes, clearly irritated, and scrunched his face a bit to adjust the glasses on the bridge of his nose. He spoke sharply.

“God, I hate freshman class, and for some evil reason I always get stuck with it, every single year, at least once! You all think you know everything, this gets so tedious after a couple of decades!”

“How old are you, exactly!?” she thought, shocked, and then remembered she was playing along in a prank, and decided to let go of the question, to see what tall tale he was going to make up next.

He didn’t look more than twenty anyway; in fact, if she had to venture a guess he looked exactly her age, and she wouldn’t have been surprised to run into him in one of the courses she had enrolled in.

She looked at him carefully, to figure out if she had seen him around campus. He looked very familiar, she didn’t know why, there was something about his facial expressions, his hand gestures, the way he sat in the chair, that she was certain she had seen before, although she simply couldn’t remember where.

He was relatively tall, with an athletic, but slender build, dressed in a solid dark t-shirt and jeans. He could have been any of the hundreds of students she passed by as she walked across the courtyard to go from one class to the next. Finding no answer, she shook her head and gave up, and tried to wrap up this charming interlude to go veg out in her room.

“You do know this is a mandatory class for your study major, right?” he asked, even more displeased than before, and the furrow between his eyebrows deepened.

“Of course it is,” she said, and got up to leave. He didn’t try to stop her, so she headed, very sure of herself, in the direction from which she had come, only to notice, in disbelief, that there were only eight doors on the walls, none of which led back to her room.

“No doubt you counted the doors when you came in,” he commented on her bewildered expression. “How many were there?”

“Eight,” she mumbled, still in shock.

“And there you go. There are still eight doors.”

“But...” she protested, really terrified this time.

“Stop fretting, the door will be there when class ends. Sit down, you’re wasting instruction time, you’re not my only pupil, you know.”

She sat down, waiting for him to speak, but he didn’t, he just looked at her, expectantly. They sat in silence for a while, staring at each other, until eventually he looked at his watch and restarted the conversation.

“So, are there any questions you would like me to answer before we begin?”

“Where do I even start?” she thought, simultaneously wondering if the class they were talking about was still forty eight minutes long and glancing furtively at the wall to see if the door was back yet. Her instructor was staring her down, waiting for a question, so she wrecked her brains to come up with one that wouldn’t sound completely idiotic.

“Don’t worry, there is no such thing as a stupid question,” he encouraged, doing his best to contain a restless streak. She obliged.

“Why eight doors?” was the first thought that came to mind and straight out the mouth it went, unsifted.

“Because the curriculum didn’t allow enough time for nine, and seven would have been too few,” he shed light on the issue.

“What happened to room number eight?” she blurted, almost against her will.

“Oh, now we really do have a good question here, but you need to pass this class to understand the explanation. The short answer is, room number eight is where it has always been.”

“Is the class about these doors?”

“Yes. When you’ve successfully walked through them, the class ends. We’ll meet every day for an hour, just like today,” he said in a voice that started to sound more amenable.

“So, this course is only eight days long?” she asked, still skeptic.

“First, what makes you think you’ll be able to successfully walk through the doors on the first try, and second, what did I say about door number eight?”

“Don’t go through it?” she asked, tentatively.

“That’s right,” he responded. “We’re going through the doors in their order of difficulty, starting tomorrow with door number one.”

“You are coming too?”

“Oh, definitely. I’m responsible for your welfare for the duration of the class, I don’t even want to picture the bureaucratic nightmare that would ensue if you got lost!”

“Got lost where??!” she panicked.

“Don’t worry, as I said, I’m coming with.”

“What do you mean by ‘successfully go through them’. What’s so hard about walking through a door?”

“You can’t walk through it if it isn’t there,” he smiled, and from the corner of her eye she noticed the door leading back to her room, wide open as she had left it, staring her down from across the room as plain as the nose on her face. He turned his head.

“Well, it looks like the class just ended. See you tomorrow,” he dismissed her.

She hesitated, not knowing whether it was OK to leave and troubled by a thought.

“So,” she finally uttered, “what if I decide not to come back here?”

“It’s your education, not mine. If you do, however, decide to return, class starts promptly at four. Don’t be late, I loathe that.”

“What am I supposed to do in the meantime?” she mumbled confused.

“Go to your other classes, of course.”

Heeding her grandmother’s advice she went out into the garden to enjoy nature and stopped almost without thinking to sit under her oak tree. She unfolded memories inside her mind like one spreads photographs on a table, grouping them together, singling them out, looking for patterns and organizing structures in their jumbled mess.

There were too many those special moments she had greedily accumulated, and they had too many connections between them, made without rhyme or reason. Like the brain of a three year old gobbles up reality with no discernment and creates extraneous neural pathways it has to sort out and discard later, so did Claire’s insight get weighed down by an unseemly amount of irrelevant details.

Hidden in that foggy maze were her pivotal moments, the events that had charted her life’s path. She was surprised to notice that many of them were eminently forgettable, like for instance the day when it started raining and she sought shelter in the cafe where she ended up working for two years; that’s where she made the friend who introduced her to the local art community and a way of life which had unfolded right under her nose for years and yet she knew nothing about.

She’d spent some time in their world and dedicated herself to her painting, for which she ended up deciding she had no talent, but which gave her a reason to remain immersed in this different atmosphere she tried so hard to understand.

Her inexplicable devotion to the artistic milieu threw her into the unlikely job of art curator, which required writing reviews and got her tangled in the publishing world, from which she got side tracked into travel writing and culinary reviews.

As she looked back at her life she was amazed at the amount of living she had managed to stuff in such a short period of time and even though she was slightly disappointed that her loved ones couldn’t see her footprints on the world, criss-crossing its shifting sands like openwork embroidery, she didn’t resent them for it. How could they experience her point of view while standing in a different spot?

Despite the fact that her family deplored her lack of focus nobody accumulates this amount of life experience so young by planning for it. The complex patterns of life are so much richer than one’s ability to process them and so filled with information and details they can only be experienced in part and in context, a single layer of an infinitely thick set.

It’s been mentioned so many times that our lives are unique that the meaning of the words got dulled by cliche, but it is true: no two of us see the same reality, we all have our own worlds to live in, coexisting with the others’ and impossible to peel apart. Claire had experienced her own existence in motion since she was five years old and she had seen the shadow for the first time. The shadow had called out to her ever since, trying to entice her back to the uncharted place she knew existed but kept ignoring in order to stay the course.

It is interesting how life has ways to return one to their fated path when it deems it necessary, almost surgical in the way it eliminates anything that stands in its way. There is nothing it won’t reshuffle, add or remove in order to achieve this goal. Nothing.

This lengthy session of navel gazing did yield a useful conclusion: most of her life’s defining moments were not of her doing. She shrugged the irritating thought and got up to get back into the house, since the sun had already set and the violet shadows of the night were getting thicker. As she passed through the front doors she got a glimpse of herself in the mirrors, donning a garden hat and the same unnerving smile.

This time Claire didn’t cave. She stared right back at the stranger in the mirror, to get to the bottom of this crazy reflection well, but there was no bottom, just an infinite number of hers fading into the vanishing point. She gasped when she realized there were subtle differences between all of these reflections, not so pronounced that a careless glance would find them jarring, but inescapable to the attentive eye.

Behind the surface of the mirror dwelt relaxed hers, and thoughtful hers, and tense hers, and excited hers, and sad hers and absentminded hers, but there was one thing they all had in common: the garden hat. Claire wasn’t wearing a hat.

“How on earth is this even possible!” Claire thought to herself, more fascinated by the fact that the hat that didn’t belong in the reflection seemed designed to draw so much of one’s attention one wouldn’t have enough of it left to focus on the much subtler differences the Claires had between them.

She looked behind her to make sure her grandmother wasn’t around to give her a piece of her mind about standing in the doorway again, and when she looked back at the mirrors she noticed the hat was gone. She got mad at herself for not taking a picture of this strange phenomenon before it was gone and promised herself that the next time the mirrors decided to go all alternate reality on her she’d snap up some evidence for posterity.

The grandfather clock struck eight and Claire headed to the dining room, where the table was already set for dinner. There were only two place settings.

“Your grandfather’s business in town took longer than anticipated. He called to let me know he’ll be staying overnight. It’s just the two of us this evening,” her grandmother smiled. Claire sat down, bewitched by the comforting aroma of baked macaroni and cheese that was filling the house. Her grandmother appeared, carrying the hot casserole from which thin wisps of steam managed to escape, even though it had the lid on.

“Did you have a pleasant day outside?” the latter started the conversation while dishing generous heaps of gooey goodness onto the plates.

“Yes, it was very relaxing,” Claire replied, eyeing her favorite dish while her mouth watered. While she dug in, gleeful with anticipation, she realized she had no idea what her grandmother did on a regular day. “How was your day, maman?”

“Oh, you know, the usual,” her grandmother gave her a vague response. “I had a few things to attend to, there is always something that needs done in this house.”

Claire wanted to ask for more detail, but her grandmother didn’t leave her time to do so.

“Speaking of things that need done, I found a hat for you to wear when you go outside. I know you spent too much time up north to remember, but in our neck of the woods it’s too hot to stay outside all day without a hat, you’re going to get yourself sunstroke. And don’t you tell me you’re going to keep in the shade. You’ve been using that excuse since you were this tall,” she held her hand slightly above the table top, “and it didn’t fly with me then either. You can get yourself a different one if you don’t like it, but in the meantime...”

Claire didn’t comment, nor did she wonder what the hat looked like. She had a vague idea.

How? I’m constantly in awe, although I could say I’ve been chasing this dragon for over a decade now, though nobody would take me seriously about that, but yes, I am in awe of this patterned tapestry that shifts meaning like the shimmer of an oil slick, as light passes over it.

How is it so sudden, this change from watching pretty black markings on paper to the revelation of their meaning, like a light switch, no rules, no matter what you say, there is no logic to it, no rules other than the presence of that hard object underneath the ever shifting fog, an object everyone senses exists but no one can describe how or prove why.

How can you listen to the same phrase four different times and it means something else every time?

How is it so common, this intrinsic meaning, to every language and every culture, in customized ways only that culture understands?

Where does it come from?

Is it an inherent property of consciousness or an extension artificially installed, like connecting a printer or a scanner to a computer?

If one were to relate it to mathematical precision, a triangle would have three vertices sometimes, if it’s Tuesday and the Lakers won the championship, depending on the air traffic report, and this explanation would make perfect sense to everyone who hears it, in almost identical ways.

I understand I’m spilling truisms right now, and that’s exactly my point! What makes these comments truisms to you? And why?

For people who are bilingual, there is the additional terrifying layer of understanding contextually embedded language without the need to translate it.

You slip from one loosely gelatinous structure to another that doesn’t in any way resemble it in the same phrase sometime, and in real time, all the while feeling your way blindly around the surface of that hard object, sight unseen, through mixed goo.

To say nothing of the unspoken meanings. No goo, no hard object there, but you can still feel it under your fingers while holding on to thin air.

Nothing to see here. Nothing behind the curtain. No mirrors, no strings.

Also, I’m too afraid of this thing that isn’t to even ask. You can’t ask a person why they understand what you mean without looking like a lunatic!