At first, recovery felt like investigation. Just a basic survey, gathering clues as to where I had buried my heart, picking up bits of broken warmth and shattered ego where I could. Nothing really penetrated. My heart was buried too deep for any sunlight to reach it. Buried down deep, where it is always cold.

Then, it felt like drilling. Excavation. I had a good idea where it was, but it was buried so deep that it took months and months of steady digging just to reach the chamber where it was held, and further months to carefully remove all the layers and layers of rough cut stone and pure smooth ice that swaddled it.

At that point, I was beginning to feel things. A vague sense of warmth, a delicate feeling of connection. It was not much, but it gave me a sense of direction, a target for my drill. It is how I found my heart in the first place.

But now, I am in the heart’s chamber and the casket is exposed. I stand on the brink of opening it up and letting my heart shine into the world for the first time in decades. It will shine a warm and dazzling glow, focused through the lens of a brilliant mind, and many will be warmed and comforted by its light.

However, first, I have to fight the demon who guards the casket, and that will not be easy. The demon has grown fat and strong by having things all its way for a very long time, and it knows that this is the final battle. This is the endgame. This is a life or death struggle, and it is not going to die without a fight.

But I have a secret. I have the key to its defeat, and I will thrust that key into the demon’s cold and spiteful heart.

You see, I know its name, and when you know a demon’s true name, it cannot resist you.

Its name is Nothing. It is the void wrapped in anger. It is the freezer that has kept my heart frozen all these years. It is the malevolent force behind my self-loathing and self-destruction. It is the demon that buries icy daggers in my flesh and denies me the integration I so desire.

And right now, I am wrestling with it. It is strong, but I am stronger. I am fully committed to this fight, and I cannot lose, because with every victory, the demon loses strength, and I gain it.

So it is just a matter of time. I will crack its armor, strip it bare, then plunge my dagger into its heart and it will die forever. It might be a very long fight, but I have nothing but time.

And I will never, ever give up. I can smell victory and that gives me the strength to drive ever onward toward it. My goal is in sight and no force in the universe can keep me from achieving it. My strength of will is my courage, and my long years of isolation are my engine. I will not be denied.

And when victory is won and the demon defeated, I will open the casket, take my wounded heart lovingly in my arms, stroke it soothingly and tell it everything will be okay. For my heart is a lost and lonely child that has been wandering in the dark and the cold for a very long time, always looking for the way home but never finding it.

And when it is calm, and warm, and safe again, I will gently slip it back into my chest, and I will be a real little boy for the first time in a very long time.

Damn, I get poetical sometimes. That is the skeleton of a pretty excellent story I just wrote. It would star a lonely robot who
has been looking for its heart, but cannot find it until he meets a man who can show him the way.

And then he has to go to the planet where it is, and search for where it is buried, and drill down to find it, and then do the whole demon fighting thing. It would be wearing its metaphors on its sleeve, granted, but perhaps it’s all the Once Upon A Time I have been watching lately, but I am perfectly fine with writing something that reads like a fairy tale.

Fairy tales have their power precisely because they are so very clear and obvious in their symbols and meanings. Their simplicity makes them accessible to everyone, even children, and like a lot of children’s stories, the fact that we absorb them when we are children ourselves makes them especially strong.

Childhood is, after all, magic. The world is magical to a child precisely because they understand so little of it, and one definition of magic is things that work and you don’t know why.

Hence Clarke’s Law about sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic. From the point of view of a human being of even just 150 years ago, our world is full of magic and wonder that they could not even begin to understand. They simply do not have the mental machinery to even understand the principles. We easily forget just how much you have to know to function in society because we all learn it as children, and it is so ubiquitous that it fades into the background.

But to a child, it is all magical. They can’t understand how any of it really works, and they definitely do not have the right spaces in their heads to develop a comprehensive world view, so to them, everything is magic and every adult is a wizard.

That is why fairy tales make so much sense to them. They offer a version of the world they can understand, with rules that make sense to them. No wonder so many people grow up wanting to live there.

Me, I wanted to move to Narnia.

That’s all for today, folks. See you tomorrow!