Between Pages and Pixels

In 2022 I lost years worth of unpublished writing. Now, living in Cancun, in my own sort of monk-like retreat, I have cracked open the corrupted file that once held my hopes and dreams of a future earning a living as a writer. Not everything is there, not everything is complete, and what remains is a disorganized mess. But as I wade through the digital debris of shattered dreams, rebuilding my website, I am now struck by divergence between my own impression of its quality, and the seemingly endless parade of negative feedback that once derailed my ambition.

The Blind Seer and Birthday Ticket are among the first to be salvaged, one anchored in ancient mysticism, the other in futuristic technology, yet both orbit the same unresolved questions that I struggled to understand when I wrote them, almost a decade ago. As I slowly start to rebuild, I couldn’t imagine two more appropriate stories to mark the beginning of this journey back from digital oblivion.

The Illusion of External Wisdom

In “The Blind Seer,” we encounter a book that promises answers through supernatural means. The spectral hand points to passages that seem profound but ultimately prove hollow. The protagonist spends years seeking wisdom from an external source, believing that meaning must be imported rather than discovered through lived experience.

“Birthday Ticket” explores similar territory through a technological lens. George finds himself trapped in a digital mirror world, unable to recall how to escape. His physical body deteriorates while his consciousness persists in virtual space, eventually transcending even that limitation to become integrated with the digital realm itself.

The Currency of Attention

Both stories hinge on a critical resource: genuine attention. In “The Blind Seer,” the protagonist discovers that the years spent attending to the book, however misguided, shaped a life of meaning. In “Birthday Ticket,” George exists in a world where attention is so fractured that meaningful interaction becomes nearly impossible.

The spectral hand in “The Blind Seer” and the mirror world in “Birthday Ticket” function as liminal spaces, thresholds between different states of being. They’re points of transition where transformation becomes possible, but only for those willing to surrender their illusions.

What I hope makes these stories meaningful isn’t supernatural horror or technological dystopia, it’s the recognition that we already live in both worlds simultaneously. We chase answers in external sources, mistaking information for wisdom. We fragment our attention across multiple planes of existence, becoming less present in any single one.

The protagonist who discovers the book was meaningless yet meaningful, and George who becomes the mirror world rather than merely its inhabitant, both transcend binary thinking. They move beyond the simplistic questions that initially trapped them. Instead, they discover that meaning emerges from engagement rather than acquisition.

The Space Between

The true territory of both stories exists neither in dusty books nor digital realms, but in the liminal spaces where transformation occurs. The journey between physical and digital, between seeking and finding, between life and whatever comes after.

As a reader, I invite you to question your own assumptions about where meaning resides. Is it in the answers we receive, or in the questions we ask? Is it in the destinations we reach, or in the paths we walk to get there?

My hope, is that these stories suggest that transcendence might not be about escaping our present conditions, but about integrating with them so completely that we’re no longer confined by their apparent limitations.

In the end, the spectral hand points not to the book but to the town. The digital fragments reassemble not as an avatar but as something more intrinsic to the fabric of reality itself. Both protagonists discover that what they sought was neither behind them nor ahead of them, but within the very substance of their being, a substance they shared with everything around them, whether made of stardust or code.