It seemed harmless enough, just a collection of words. Little did I know then just how careful was the selection. The cunning of it all.
What was the attraction? What drew me in? Ask yourself the same and we will have entered into this adventure together. For me it was idle time waiting on another's attention (I had made it in: the doctor was still out: the magazine pile was close to hand) and the choice for this particular offering was made easy by the cadence of the title, the single word. Rigamarole. A word not in many dictionaries, the meaning left to our own interpretation, if we think on it, based on past assumptions, of which we have a surprising number.
I am intrigued by intrigue. After merely two paragraphs into the article the warning and the (implied!) disclaimer hooked me.
" Remember: YCSRAAT! "
What a clue. It had its own paragraph, even! Was it an acronym? For what? Or to be taken literally. YUCKS, RAT? Or was it trying to alert me to motive, trying to tell me there was far more here than met the eye, that the "idle time" I have aforementioned was, in reality, a beckoning toward some quality time. In fact, was there something to be discovered here? Or,in the highest sense, something to be LEARNED?
Of course, this piqued my awareness. What exactly was I doing? Why, reading, of course. As are you. Never forget, that I am aware of you. As they were of me. (It wasn't they, just as I am not they, but how we love to imagine in the plural. It eliminates the awkwardness of he/she authorship while somehow welcoming us suddenly and wholeheartedly into the give-and-take sphere that occurs whenever we write, whenever we read.)
Ah, reading. R. Place it into the YCSRAAT. YCSReadingAAT. It took me awhile but I got it. I got it quite quickly, actually. How are you doing. Aha. Yes. You Can Stop Reading At Any Time. I could. You could. I didn't Have you? It isn't that easy, is it.
The feeling of being manipulated, almost cornered by cleverness, gave me a nudge akin to a shove at this point and I did take my eyes away and consider ending the matter. But then amusement took over from irritation and I looked back and continued.
Maybe there was no huge message beyond the balm of the inner smile that comes when we cheerfully allow ourselves to be trickily led.
Maybe in some universal plan it was deigned that I be delayed for the time it took to put my mind around the words and draw them to me, one by one.
Maybe they needed to contact me for whatever reason, for whatever time, and the words were just a meaningless conveyance of communication on some different level.
The suspense built and then broke as those waves of "maybe"'s crashed on the shores of my consciousness and humour, intellect, and - fantasy spread across the sand of my being and resulted in, once again, knowledge of the true mystery of WORDS and the power they hold over us.