Diamond Glimpses

Dizzying spirals convinced him that his seat was the most comfortable place to be.  His frozen hands were as immobile as if they'd been tied behind his back.  He was, theoretically, free to go.  However, his body didn't seem to agree with that.  He sat and watched his world twirl and spin.  Shimmering pinpricks of light appeared, first in this corner, then over there, then in the center of the spectacle, all over, like peaking at diamonds in a separate, yet desperately close, dimension.  The effect deepened and moved from his body on into his mind.  He reeled with the possibilities and endlessness of the abstract.  He floated, free from constraints, expectations, social dictates.

Alone in his room, the beige walls sighing, he experienced something spectacular.  A once and unique expression of what was happening in his head was allowed to appear before his eyes.  The straight lines of reality blurred and fell away, leaving--everything else.  Underneath the golden circles forming in front of him, he began to see without needing his eyes, and envisioned his life, that of his mother, his barber, some child in a distant country.  He saw them all coming together, overlapping in certain areas, parallels developing along their memories, their thoughts, their joys.

His long-forgotten muscles began to move, to strain and twitch: the corners of his mouth headed north and his eyes borrowed some of those other-dimensional diamonds.

He could see so much more than he ever could before.  And the straight lines in the world fell away, completely, to reveal the web, pulsing, alive, connecting him to the chair, the chair to the tree it came from, the tree to the earth, and the earth to the stars.

He fell away, inside that web, into what he could now see and the borrowed diamonds in his eyes found their way down into his soul.

No one else in that web, those who saw in straight lines, ever figured out where that sad old man could have gone.  All that was left was the chair and the sighing beige walls.

In addition to general comments, I would love to know how people interpret this piece.  What do you think is going on?