Korridorium

♫ On a Secret Trail ♫

41/398

I enter the cor­ri­dor lead­ing to one of the tem­ples in the Pirámide del Adi­vino in Uxmal. The Maya were great builders, but ulti­mately, their suc­cess led to their down­fall: despite sophis­ti­cated irri­ga­tion sys­tems, sev­eral years of drought brought their rapidly grow­ing pop­u­la­tion to its knees. They left behind mag­nif­i­cent struc­tures and a com­plex cal­en­dar that—as some believe—predicts the end of our world for Decem­ber 21, 2012.

Typ­i­cally, I expe­ri­ence panic attacks in nar­row cor­ri­dors and pas­sage­ways; how­ever, since I set foot on the Yucatán Penin­sula, strange, long-for­got­ten mem­o­ries have come flood­ing back to me. The ruins appear as though I knew them in their orig­i­nal state—these inte­ri­ors do not cause me any dis­com­fort; on the con­trary, they draw me in as if by magic.

Have I lost my trou­ble­some claus­tro­pho­bia, which I’ve been try­ing to com­bat through a kind of self-treat­ment with a blog? No, a rem­nant of panic remains. But there’s a notice­able improve­ment, and my efforts to con­quer my fears seem to be bear­ing fruit. I’ll give myself exactly one more year! Then, I decide spon­ta­neously right here in the tem­ple cor­ri­dor of Uxmal, the world will end—at least the world of my lit­tle ther­apy blog, which I will ruth­lessly delete on that exact day. It will be a sign that I can now take on cor­ri­dors in nat­u­ram—the phys­i­cal ones made of stone, metal, wood, and glass. While an entire uni­verse of real cor­ri­dors awaits me, a world of imag­ined cor­ri­dors will be con­signed to destruc­tion in a sin­gle stroke. As if the Maya had fore­seen it…

Pyra­mid of the Magi­cian: