a, e, i, m, n, n, g. He marveled at these letters. me, a ning? mean ingme ani ng. What did they mean? He laughed, for they meant meaning. He did not understand, but it was okay, for no man ever could. But he looked for answers, as every man always will. He approached his letters, his temple of meaning, and looked within for his answer. I emerged to him, not I but 'i'. But he also found me, not me but 'me'. He wondered which he was. He laughed, for he realized he was both. But what is me with only i? He wondered this and did not understand. But then he found ‘l’ and ‘o’, and in this he found what he was missing. Through love he joined this other and shared his world, their world. They continued to explore and discover, finding and filling the holes in their alphabet and expanding their world. But he stopped to wonder, with his vocabulary, what lay outside it. He had not yet found ‘death’ amongst his pile and so did not fear it. What he pondered was the 27^th letter, the one he had not yet found and would not find. He found かin a dream but could not remember. With his limited toolkit he had forged a lock he could not break, one outside the bounds of the symbols he had come to know. By now he had found ‘time’ and wondered what came before him. How did those without the gift of ‘a’, ‘e’, ‘i’, pass through this tunnel and make ‘meaning’? Perhaps they did not. Perhaps they did. He did not know. But he then found ‘color’ and ‘analogy’ and realized he was the same. Just as he did not know of color until that moment they did not know of letters and sense and maybe meaning. Then, his gaze shifted back to me, ‘me’. He knew of i for certain, but he did not know of me. Does me know color, he asked. For it is not me but the lover of me that decides this, he replied. He did not know. With this he lost ‘love’. It returned to the letters from which it came, although it did not come from those letters. Alone once again, he questioned what he knew. For he once knew ‘love’ and now did not know it: did ‘i’ still know love? Which ‘i’ was he? And with this he lost ‘i’. Lost, he wondered how his treasures had disappeared. But in wondering this he pondered ‘have’ and ‘lost’, and these also vanished. He turned to his remaining tool, the original tool, the original sin. And he wondered what ‘mening’ meant, for he no longer had ‘meaning’; and so it departed. So he was left with nothing. But he had nothing, so he had something. And he found ‘paradox’. With paradox he found ‘death’ and ‘life’, life in death and death in life, meaning in nothing and nothing in meaning. And he rested, content.