This would have been the perfect day; my first Carnival, some of the tastiest food I had ever eaten and best of all time spent with great friends. It would have been the perfect day if I had ended it when I should have, leaving with my friends and not letting my curiosity get the better of me. But that is not how it happened. I made the mistake of following the dreamy figure that appeared in a mysterious doorway that I would have sworn wasn’t there when I walked into the carnival.
I first had to open a door into what seemed like complete darkness in order to follow the figure. Looking into the darkness, it seemed like the further into the passage I looked, the wider and lighter it became. What looked like a huge cavern with an eerie glow was100 yards in. At first I was scared to move from the door, for good reason: this wasn’t exactly a common occurrence. It was as soon as I was out of reach of the door it slammed shut and the darkest expanse imaginable became the wall I had just come through. The only response to the slamming door was to move forward. Into the glow. But as I approached the glow, it began to appear as if the floor was sloping downward, at a steeper and steeper grade that made the already high ceiling seem impossibly high. Approaching the end of the incline, the slope very rapidly approached being flat.
It was unimaginable to think that a carnival had the resources to build such a huge subterranean chamber, but who was I to doubt the magic of the Carnival? All insecurity left as I entered the glow, which still continued to increase in intensity. It might not have been bravery, perhaps instead indignation, which led me to continue my trek even as the glow became painfully bright. And in and instant, there was no glow. There was hotdog aftertaste. There was no heat or cold. My five senses had disappeared. But almost as suddenly as they had left, they were back. But to a much higher degree than I could have imagined possible. And my senses no longer referred to the stimuli in the environment local to my body; instead I could sense everything going on in a wide expanse of Russian Tundra. I smelled the trees and sap, the decay of each log… I could smell everything that any animal present in the Tundra could smell. Then there was sight: It was like watching 4000 computer screens at once, but each with a degree of attention that requires my complete focus. And I realized how, to every animal, an environment as potentially inhospitable as Arctic Tundra could present opportunity.
I heard a million sounds: the creaks of branches as squirrels moved aggressively through the home they knew so well, the sound grass makes as it is ground into a pulp along incisors. But some senses, like the vibration of the earth from a walking elk as sensed by an earthworm, were like nothing I could have imagined before. To the worm the vibrations were all around them, their tiny sensors bringing information from all directions. Now to a worm there is very little comprehension of this information, but to my real-life human self, there was too much information to handle.
Then suddenly, it was gone. I was staring into a wall, my friends shouting that the Carnival was about to close and that we had to leave, the sensory overload of a second earlier was replaced with my normal instantaneous senses, and the feeling of completeness was replaced with an emptiness. Replacing nature with the perfect carnival left me empty, the vivaciousness of the glowing room now the dreary prospect of solitude.