deeper down the rabbit hole

"that's where i draw the line."

because there always is one, isn't there, a line, your personal maximum. a line of how much you can and will take, a line of your moral and of your integrity, a line you refuse to cross; a line on the other side of which you can't ever imagine being.

there is so much lines and they are set in a way that they form a web, a spider web of what is your limits and borders. outside these lines you think that you are not you, that these lines are what you are made of, that they create the structure inside which you are defined. you don't know what you would be without these lines, maybe you haven't even thought about it, but you surely wouldn't be you any more; because in these lines you end.

they draw you, very much like an artist would, create you from the blank of a paper; the lines, your lines, the artwork of you. but different to a drawing where the lines are, once drawn, immobile, your lines are flexible. there are lines you want to push, move further, and there are lines beyond which you are not willing to go. and what would happen if you would, if you were to cross a line you held holy, what would happen?

would you break? would the web of your lines collapse, would your mind derange, would everything that is you escape through the hole created by that broken line? would you die?

of course you wouldn't. maybe you would find out that the line wasn't there after all, that you had just thought it to be there; and now, once in a place you thought to be on the other side, you realise that the real line is much further. and maybe this realisation makes you stronger, or it may make you something else entirely, but what it makes you for sure is something you didn't previously thought you could or should be.

and once you are on the other side of that line, and it doesn't really matter if it was really there in the first place or whether you just thought it to be - once you are there, the new line is now somewhere further, and once the line is further there is no way for it to come closer again; there is no way you will be the same person again. this is both fantastic and frightening, and it is the cause of the greatest of achievements and most horrible of actions; the simple fact that the lines always move; but they move only further.