The fighting room.  Twelve by ten.  Walls the color of sand on a deserted l island, painted unprofessionally.  A few scabs and discolorations.  Carpet long enough to hold dirt and dog hair in a headlock.  This is the room where fighting happens.  Physical assaults.  Mental warfare.  Spiritual disobedience.  The room where ideas are pulled up like fish with bulging eyes, from the depths of hell, or heaven…or some place in between.  Most come from some place in between. They are snatched, summoned, birthed into this room.

Ideas form on the page.  They squirm and kick and vomit blood.  They’ve got sharp claws and teeth made only for puncturing the arteries in the neck.  I’ve heard hisses and deep, full-moon howls echoing off the walls of the fighting room.  Tears, from my eyes and all eyes.  Groans, growls, distress and heaving flailing kicks.  You don’t wander into the fighting room.  That’s not how it works.  You come in ready for battle.  Ready to kill and die and for any remains to be spread across a page.

No one is welcome.  There is no welcome mat.  No special code word or knock.  When the fighting room is occupied, DO NOT ENTER.  Don’t stand beyond the threshold and whisper messages.  Notes aren’t to be passed under the door.  The smoke detector has been ripped from the ceiling.  Do not disturb.  The disturbance is already in progress.  Outside help isn’t necessary.  Save your message for another time.  Silence the dinner bell.  Tell the delivery man to exit quietly or face furious repercussions.

From the outside, it sounds like cannons firing into the open mouths of pianos.  At times there are jungle noises escaping beneath the hatch.  Twisting metal, tearing paper.  This isn’t normal.  It shouldn’t be normal.  After all, it is the fighting room.  The climate is too thick for the mundane to survive.  Air the texture of day-old shredded cabbage.  Extraordinary is par for the course.  It’s strange, frequently, and getting stranger by the minute.  Every minute spent in the room is like years on the outside world.

This is where I go to untangle my brain.  Uncertainty and hesitation bleed and peel away.   I choose an orange steel desk for working.  The cutting board.  The chair is reinforced.  The restraints on the arms have been chewed so thoroughly that they can no longer be identified.  The seat has wheels but the carpet holds it hostage.  From that chair no emergency exit exist.  One could fling himself through the windowpane, or tear through the hinges on the door, but what good would that do?  The fighting room is made for fighting, not running.  It’s impossible to run fast enough to escape these things.

The only option is fighting.  Not fighting by reaction or self defense.  True aggression.  Gritted teeth.  Late at night, after the world has massaged their cheeks into soothing pillows.  Early in the morning, before the birds.  Mid afternoon, when the sun stomps down on everything.  Time is irrelevant.  Come to fight.  Fight hard.  Don’t expect help.  Any mercy waits patiently outside the door.  This is a brawl.  In the same way that a storm has an eye, so does a brawl.  The fighting room is that eye.  Peering in, it may seem calm, inviting even.  When the door closes, the walls close in.  The carpet turns to molten lava and the center breaks away into bottomless pits of black seething soup.  Chaos breeds in the fighting room.  There’s no avoiding it.  You must face it, lean in to it, head on.

The fighting room senses fear.  It boils fear and evaporates it from the heart of anyone who enters the fighting room.  Resistance, cowardice, indecision, these things are gunpowder.  They ignite.  They burn through flesh and bone and stink of destruction.  Holding on or hiding fears in the fighting room is a direct insult.  A blasphemous sin against the room itself.  The room sniffs it out.  It has no qualms against stomping the fearful flat until any hint of trepidation oozes out.

A vent on the floor along the wall lets out hot breaths.  It offers neither approval nor judgment.  The air itself moves like a pod of venomous jelly fish.  Some days, the jellyfish are irritable.  They stab and inject.  Other days they’d rather drift, watching over the fighting room, always ready to pounce.

This fighting room I speak of is not a place of hostility.  It is a sanctuary of sorts.  A great divide.  A realm between the outside world and beyond.  A place where the truth prevails.  Where problems are hacked at and bent until they makes shapes.  Those shapes gnawed on until they make sense.  This is a place where all thoughts can flow, without inhibition, with courage.  Many great things arise in the fighting room.  Many things are crushed and trampled as well.  In the end, what is good will remain.