Secret December

Written 57-H07 [2026-02-08], Edited 57-H07 [2026-02-08]

Image credit: Twitter Twemoji

I walked across the moonlit room and looked at the tiles. All of them were identical, all of them were square. Covered in polygonal shapes. Triangles of various kinds, trapezoids, hexagons, all overlapping, and multicoloured.

But they were not all rotated the same way. I turned on my flashlight and pointed at the floor.

The tile closest to the door, the first one most people would step on, was at a 0 degree angle compared to the design on my paper. I stepped forward. The next one was rotated ninety degrees. I rotated myself ninety degrees, then stepped forward. I looked, I stepped, I looked, I stepped. I followed the secret path that was no path, the roundabout tour of the straightforward room.

And finally I made it to the last tile. It was rotated zero degrees, at least from my perspective. But if I stepped forward, I would step into a wall.

I turned off my flashlight, and took a deep breath.

I looked out the window at the moon. I saw its mountains, its craters, its curves. Will I miss the little things like that? I thought. Will I miss them where I’m going?

I stepped into the wall, and disappeared from the room. Or perhaps the room disappeared from me.

The realm I entered was a realm of perfection, a realm of forms. Circles, squares and equilateral triangles. Numbers, independent of the objects and symbols used to track them.

In this realm I had stepped into, the idea of time existed without the passing of time. The imperfections of the Gregorian calendar were banished. There was no variation in days between December and February, indeed there were no days, no stars, no moons.

The concept of space existed here as well, even though there was no space. It would be futile to start and argument over metric and imperial units because this was a singularity, an infinitesimal point where all of Plato’s forms were contained, without any of the impure and worldly atoms of Epicurus.