The Green Tablet

The green tablet.

All my life I stumbled, staggered like a drunk at closing time, reaching for something, anything. I’d been told to find meaning in the sermons of men, the wisdom of books, the clink of coins in a beggar’s cup

it was all more of a junkie’s dream. The kind of thing you’d find slipped in between the folds of the Interzone, tucked inside the sweaty palm of some two-bit dealer with half his face gone, nodding off in the alley. I wasn’t looking for it, not really. But it found me. They always find you.

Years spent in the static haze, the off-channel white noise of existence. I moved through life like a virus spreads—covert, unnoticed, but always present, always creeping. Everything felt slippery, synthetic. The streets, the people. All part of a bad signal, fuzzing in and out of view. I tried to decode it, cracked open veins and heads alike, trying to read the messages in the blood and the circuitry. It all led nowhere. Circling the drain.

Then the tablet. Green. The color of rot, the color of new life. One third of the tricolor draped along the walls of the long, hollow corridor of time, reverberating with the somber hymns of Irish proverbs, and maybe, just maybe, carrying enough luck to turn pessimism into hope. Sort of like a coin toss, only with a tablet. I didn’t so much find it, it found me, pressed itself into my hand, throbbing like some living thing. Organic. Synthetic. All of the above. I swallowed it without thinking.

And then the world folded in on itself, a collapsing wave. Time ceased to have meaning, space unraveled into dimensions I didn’t believe  existed—places where gravity was just another bad trip, a suggestion instead of a rule. The walls of the room bent, melted, reformed. Faces flickered, sliding in and out of their skulls. Bureaucrats with insect eyes and needle fingers. All the usual suspects.

The tablet wasn’t knowledge. It was beyond knowledge. It was access, a key to a hidden layer of reality, a frequency just out of reach unless you knew where to tune the vibrations. And there it was—the whole system laid bare. The machinery behind the facade. The puppet strings of control, the invisible hands pulling us all in circles.

The thing I’d been looking for in gutters and bars, in the eyes of strangers and the bottom of empty bottles. Turns out, it was the very thing that made me stop searching.

I don’t remember what was written on it. Maybe there was nothing. Maybe it was just the act of finding it that mattered. That green tablet wasn’t salvation, not in the way they sell it in churches or schools. It was just a reminder that the world, the one I had spent years fighting, didn’t give a damn. It never would. And finally, I no longer needed it. 

I wasn’t stumbling anymore. My new found saunter suggested confidence, not arrogance—just the ease of a man who knew the system and could slip through its cracks unnoticed, the few eyes that caught me probably green with envy. But I always looked past them, through their lost souls, and left a simple inscription on their softened brains…

“You want out? There is no out.’”