Cloudscape

If you do not love life, life will not love you; if you do not love yourself you will not love life. For life is you.

Think of life as a beautiful garden maze. In the maze every passage has its own beauty: here there is a fountain, there there a flowerbed, somewhere further a statue or sculpture or a pond a tree or just a tirelessly singing bird…
Perhaps you are just passing them by as you are running through each passage to go to the next, around the next corner, always looking around the corner to find the exit in the maze. Perhaps you are trying to find a destination in the maze, but there isn't really one.

Don't seek, and you will find.

After another look at the showcase, I came in. Glancing at the pale golden words "Life Shop" painted on the door, I reminisced on when I first saw them - I was too little then to know what they meant, let alone what secrets I'd find beyond that door. I dared to come in, and since then I'd come back every day for more. I got addicted to its merchandise, so much so that I felt it'd kill me if I didn't get any more for even a single day. There were all sorts of things, and I'm quite sure that even if I'd live to be a hundred years I could never try everything there was.
The shopkeeper was a little strange, though. I'd never actually seen him. And since he never showed himself in the shop, and everything was for free anyway, I do wonder if one could call him the shopkeeper at all. It's just what I call him since, well, I wouldn't know what else I should call him.
"Ah, Eligio!" said a voice from nowhere. "Same as always, El, you know the drill."
"Right. Self-service." I looked around. My eyes skimmed over the thousands of potions in the room. Every potion had another effect. There was joy and hope and fear and love and sadness… I looked longingly at happiness, a potion which was tantalizingly outside my reach on one of the higher shelves: it was too high. Every time I made this objection Eligio laughed and said: "Why, there's ladders!"
I then replied that I was afraid of heights. This made his laugh even more merrily, and he said, "Well, you can remain down here all your life if you want to, but that's not going to get you anywhere. You've been in here often enough to know all the more interesting things are up there."
He pointed and looked up, and I followed suit. It was, indeed, a long, long way up. The strange shop was actually so high that he could not see the roof, and he wondered if there actually was any at all, even though at the outside the shop seemed small. An endless series of ledges and ledges and stairs led up.
Oh, he'd been up there, and actually far higher than most people here cared to go. Every level actually had the same potions, but they were somehow different. At least, they were given the same name. But the "happiness" you could drink at level five was nothing compared to the happiness down at the ground level: richer, warmer, and strangely more complicated. In fact, once I'd drunk the happiness in the higher levels I was quite tired of the happiness at the ground level: it tasted cloying in comparison.
Yes, it's true that I've often fallen down when I climbed higher, and it did make me more cautious about how high I'd go. When he'd find I'd broken nothing, Theo, the shopkeeper, would merely laugh and say that if I fell, it was my own doing. This would make me so angry that I'd fly into a rage. My doing? Couldn't the bastard at least build a safer shop for his customers? To my irritation, as usual he would just laugh at this, and say that this was just a quicker way down for people who wanted it. He'd then ask me how it happened that I'd fallen, and with extreme vexation I'd admit that as usual I'd looked down. He'd told me not to look down, but it wasn't easy when you knew there the only thing that kept you from falling down hundreds of feet were a few inches of floor at your side. Yet I'd found that I would fall only when I did look down. I'd feel my body being sucked into those vertiginous depths as soon as the fear of falling down came over me.
I'd be convinced I'd broken every bone in my body even when I'd go home, but to my surprise, I'd never broken anything at all, at least, except for some vials and potions in the shop.
Strange to say it often felt safer in the dark cellar, and when I'd fall from the higher levels the first thing I'd do would be too rush down into them. There, at least there were safe balusters, and if you'd go down at least you knew you could get up again, at least if you wouldn't get lost in the dark.
And when his accursed shop had just been responsible for another of my falls, there was no way I wanted to hear or see that freak Theo then - or that's how I thought of him then, even though he could be a nice guy, at least, in his own ways. Strange to say, I had never even actually seen him, which had made me make the joke to ask if he wasn't just some kind of cassette player - it was meant as a joke then, but I'd actually wondered for some time if it wasn't close to the truth.
Either how, when he'd just been responsible for another of my frequent falls I liked not to see him for a while, and besides, well, if I may whisper something in your ear, there are actually many, well, noteworthy potions in the cellar, too. But don't tell that to anyone, because most people will think we a psycho to say that. And yet, people keep coming down here and drinking the potions in the racks here. I wonder why. But when I ask why they do it, they just say that they are meant to be here.
But somehow, I find the potions here have something strangely, and perhaps deceptively addictive - like the songs of the Lorelei. Once you'd get down here, you were almost sure to come back someday. Strangely, the potions here were almost always bitter or acrid, or ice-cold or very hot. Sometimes, they would burn in your throat or in your stomach, and more than once I've actually vomited from them. I'd then try to get back up as fast as possible, but then I sometimes realized that wasn't always easy, finding your way back. And there were always those horribly tempting smells of those strange potions. Why ever the shopkeeper held these potions here, I don't know. I asked him, but all he'd say was that there were very many tastes, and he wanted to satisfy everyone's.
It was very dreary here. But above, when you'd look straight up in the shop you'd look into a blinding light like that of the sun. Some supposed there just had to be a very bright lamp there, and others thought it was a window to the sun, and wondered what it would be like on the roof. But I thought there was no roof, and there was no window up there either: I believe the shop was so high that it went all the way up to the sun.
Indeed, once when I'd gone up to the nine-hundred seventy-sixth floor, when I came down, panting all the way, I asked Theo: "Where is the roof of this thing?"
"You know there is no roof, El," he'd say with his usual laugh, "What do you take me for, an ordinary junk shopper? This is a real place, y'know: it goes up into infinity."