The midnight air was chill when he stumbled away from the Tree. He’d always remember it now. Even though he’d rather forget it. Here, in these unwritten hours, the moon was full. Always darkest before the dawn.
He recited clichés to keep him going. None of them felt right. None of them stuck.
The fly was long gone, but his arm still ached. He couldn’t remember whether he had ever had shoes, but he now noticed the ground against his feet. Here he was again. Back on the journey. He wondered if anyone else ever got tired. It’s not fair, but it’s the way it is.
The path took him into a forest. Forests at night were different. This forest was different. It spoke to him. The whole journey was a soundless conversation. It came to him in fragmented pieces. Wood would creak, and then a stone would fall. He didn’t have a response. He hadn’t learned how to speak that language yet. But he was certain someone was talking.
Someone whispered in his ear. And then he knew, someone always whispered here.
There was very little light. He did not just stumble, but here and there he had to crawl. The path was broken, and hard to feel for. The shrubbery and fallen wilderness covered his path. It cut at his fingertips, and his knees began to ache. Dewdrops fell on his face. The forest was very sad.
‘Tis better to have seen beauty and lost it, then to never have seen it at all.
Then, he lost his way. For a full minute he sat in the dark, feeling around him for the path. He couldn’t see anything, and the path seemed to stop. He cursed the darkness. He cursed the chill. He cursed being lost in this damnable place. He cursed the fact that he had lost count of the number of mountains and the number of valleys he had climbed. He cursed, and he cursed, and he cursed.
You can take my life, but you’ll never take my freedom.
He guessed. He should have been more scared, but he didn’t care anymore. Anything was better than being a prisoner in a place without walls. He gave in. It didn’t matter which way he went. It was heartbreaking, but that’s the way it was. The world’s not fair. He’d never see the Horizon. He’d never see those stunning cement fingers in the sky. He’d never have all of those things that he was supposed to have.
Sticks and stones, sticks and stones.
The forest lamented his leaving. But it didn’t seek to stop him. All along, it knew he had to go, even when he didn’t. He didn’t think of the Promises anymore. He didn’t remember them. He didn’t believe them. All he had was the journey now.
It’s the journey that matters.
Moonlight shone through a break in the trees. He found a way out, even though he didn’t know the difference anymore. Standing again, squinting against the darkness, he looked up at the forest. Once he left, he wouldn’t know what to do. But, if he could speak to the forest, he would have whispered back: I’ll always love you.
Friday, June 18, 2010
Thursday, June 17, 2010
The Pilgrimage – Part 4
“You sleep perchance to dream?”
The voice reached across a hazy void to reach him. He felt it pulling him, physically from a place within his chest, back into reality.
“Hehe.” A child of 10. Dressed in a colourful midsummer’s dress, standing before him. “You are sleeping, silly.”
He stirred. But the tree was comfortable. The sun was still out, somewhere beyond the thick canopy above. The shade was almost too cool. A branch had fallen down, dewless, yet thick with heavy leaves. He pulled it towards him, covering his bare feet.
“It’s okay. You can keep sleeping if you like. We love visitors.”
Her voice was sweet. Innocent. And, just as it had pulled him out of his slumberland, her last words began to tuck him back in. Her acceptance made the grass more comfortable, and the breeze a little warmer.
“Stay as long as you like.”
He dreamt he was a butterfly. A beautiful yellow butterfly fluttering about a giant cement tower. He was free, flying and floating at his leisure. All the fatigue of a terrible journey was somewhere else, it was a different world. Here was where he had always, truly, lived. Here, with happiness on his wings, was the real world.
He shared this world with other beings. Things with pink skin and two legs. Things that had delusions of grandeur about owning a world. They laboured day in and day out to turn the land into cement, with cement ground and strange moving metal. It was perverse. It was the silly construction of silly little beings. He had flown by them countless times, laughing under his butterfly breath. One time, he even flew all the way up the glass tower, just to see what they did in there all day, walking on the sky.
Turns out they were even more boring there than they were on the ground.
Whenever he decided to care, he pitied them. But most of the time he didn’t bother with concerning himself with them. He was busy swimming in clouds and dancing on flowers. Eternity passed within a few days, and every moment was vibrant.
One day, he decided to see how far he could fly, just for fun. Turns out, he could fly forever. And forever was an ocean, with horses galloping in the waves. In and out, in and out, the horses galloped always, for as far as he could fly. The beach was endless. Their ceaseless, powerful stride was perfect against the white sands. He flew with them always.
When one of them slept, as even ethereal things do, it transformed into a beautiful flower. Some of them were daises, others lilacs. And the finest, proudest, waves formed roses along the banks. A forest of flowers rejoiced in the music of a world at peace.
When he had spent a thousand years, and a thousand more, he came to rest upon a little green leaf. There, he gradually fell into a slumber of his own, drowsily.
“Lester, don’t.”
The majesty of paradise wrapped his little butterfly wings in a blanket of colours and sounds never before felt, but that he had always known.
“LESTER. DON’T!”
And then, as another rosebush sprouted into being, he was being transported into an entirely different world. He was ripped him from his gentle process of subtle transcendence by a sharp pain in his arm. He had arms again.
He regained focus to see his toes poke over a fallen branch in the moonlight. He vaguely thought he remembered seeing a girl, but she was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps, he thought, she was just a figment of a dream. He could hear an annoying buzzing sound and his body was chill from the cold. He rubbed his arm and found a tiny bloody patch in his shoulder. A gadfly landed on his hand for just a moment, before flying loop-de-loops away again.
The damned thing had bit him.
The voice reached across a hazy void to reach him. He felt it pulling him, physically from a place within his chest, back into reality.
“Hehe.” A child of 10. Dressed in a colourful midsummer’s dress, standing before him. “You are sleeping, silly.”
He stirred. But the tree was comfortable. The sun was still out, somewhere beyond the thick canopy above. The shade was almost too cool. A branch had fallen down, dewless, yet thick with heavy leaves. He pulled it towards him, covering his bare feet.
“It’s okay. You can keep sleeping if you like. We love visitors.”
Her voice was sweet. Innocent. And, just as it had pulled him out of his slumberland, her last words began to tuck him back in. Her acceptance made the grass more comfortable, and the breeze a little warmer.
“Stay as long as you like.”
He dreamt he was a butterfly. A beautiful yellow butterfly fluttering about a giant cement tower. He was free, flying and floating at his leisure. All the fatigue of a terrible journey was somewhere else, it was a different world. Here was where he had always, truly, lived. Here, with happiness on his wings, was the real world.
He shared this world with other beings. Things with pink skin and two legs. Things that had delusions of grandeur about owning a world. They laboured day in and day out to turn the land into cement, with cement ground and strange moving metal. It was perverse. It was the silly construction of silly little beings. He had flown by them countless times, laughing under his butterfly breath. One time, he even flew all the way up the glass tower, just to see what they did in there all day, walking on the sky.
Turns out they were even more boring there than they were on the ground.
Whenever he decided to care, he pitied them. But most of the time he didn’t bother with concerning himself with them. He was busy swimming in clouds and dancing on flowers. Eternity passed within a few days, and every moment was vibrant.
One day, he decided to see how far he could fly, just for fun. Turns out, he could fly forever. And forever was an ocean, with horses galloping in the waves. In and out, in and out, the horses galloped always, for as far as he could fly. The beach was endless. Their ceaseless, powerful stride was perfect against the white sands. He flew with them always.
When one of them slept, as even ethereal things do, it transformed into a beautiful flower. Some of them were daises, others lilacs. And the finest, proudest, waves formed roses along the banks. A forest of flowers rejoiced in the music of a world at peace.
When he had spent a thousand years, and a thousand more, he came to rest upon a little green leaf. There, he gradually fell into a slumber of his own, drowsily.
“Lester, don’t.”
The majesty of paradise wrapped his little butterfly wings in a blanket of colours and sounds never before felt, but that he had always known.
“LESTER. DON’T!”
And then, as another rosebush sprouted into being, he was being transported into an entirely different world. He was ripped him from his gentle process of subtle transcendence by a sharp pain in his arm. He had arms again.
He regained focus to see his toes poke over a fallen branch in the moonlight. He vaguely thought he remembered seeing a girl, but she was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps, he thought, she was just a figment of a dream. He could hear an annoying buzzing sound and his body was chill from the cold. He rubbed his arm and found a tiny bloody patch in his shoulder. A gadfly landed on his hand for just a moment, before flying loop-de-loops away again.
The damned thing had bit him.
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
The Pilgrimage – Soliloquy #1: Forbidden Fruit
Is this one special too?
We are watching. He is special.
What will he do? What is different about him? Is he dreaming again?
He is seen, that makes him different. You must learn that that is all that makes anyone “special”. We make them special. We are their reason for being. We are their being. We are their hunters, and their purpose. We are always watching. When we stop, they cease. Theirs is a pitiable existence, but we will make it for them.
Does he know yet?
He will never know. The Bitches have robbed him of that.
He wants to die.
No. He wants to never have forgotten. Only they who forget where they come from lose sight of where they are going. He doesn’t know the difference. He doesn’t know that all beginnings despise endings. If he did, he would not slumber. If he did, he would not-
Look at him roll in discomfort! I want to taste him.
WRETCH. You know you can’t! You know that’s against the rules. Put your hunger in your eyes, and let him see it. But if you so much as taste his sweat, I’ll disembowel you myself. For us are only the offerings. The rotting scraps left from Aphrodite’s table. They must be handed to us. Offered by Her slaves.
I know, I know, I know. But I just want to. How can there be rules? We are the rules. We are their world. You said it yourself! Why should we beg?
Ignorant pup! Listen to my growl. We are their world, but they can never be ours. We were never meant to be equals with the likes of them. Stoop to their level, and you can never return. And you endanger us all.
From Her? Would we be in trouble from Her? Wait... do you think she knows?
Ha! She knows. Do you think we are unlike Cerberus? Do you think we are leashless? Your trouble would not be from her, little one. She is benevolent. But beware offering yourself to another master.
Do you think this one will laugh? Like the other one laughed? I love it when they laugh.
In the end, they all laugh.
We are watching. He is special.
What will he do? What is different about him? Is he dreaming again?
He is seen, that makes him different. You must learn that that is all that makes anyone “special”. We make them special. We are their reason for being. We are their being. We are their hunters, and their purpose. We are always watching. When we stop, they cease. Theirs is a pitiable existence, but we will make it for them.
Does he know yet?
He will never know. The Bitches have robbed him of that.
He wants to die.
No. He wants to never have forgotten. Only they who forget where they come from lose sight of where they are going. He doesn’t know the difference. He doesn’t know that all beginnings despise endings. If he did, he would not slumber. If he did, he would not-
Look at him roll in discomfort! I want to taste him.
WRETCH. You know you can’t! You know that’s against the rules. Put your hunger in your eyes, and let him see it. But if you so much as taste his sweat, I’ll disembowel you myself. For us are only the offerings. The rotting scraps left from Aphrodite’s table. They must be handed to us. Offered by Her slaves.
I know, I know, I know. But I just want to. How can there be rules? We are the rules. We are their world. You said it yourself! Why should we beg?
Ignorant pup! Listen to my growl. We are their world, but they can never be ours. We were never meant to be equals with the likes of them. Stoop to their level, and you can never return. And you endanger us all.
From Her? Would we be in trouble from Her? Wait... do you think she knows?
Ha! She knows. Do you think we are unlike Cerberus? Do you think we are leashless? Your trouble would not be from her, little one. She is benevolent. But beware offering yourself to another master.
Do you think this one will laugh? Like the other one laughed? I love it when they laugh.
In the end, they all laugh.
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
The Pilgrimage - Part 3
It had been weeks since he had seen anyone. The woman in the wagon was the last. He didn’t think he’d see her again.
His mind began playing its own tricks now. Puddles held his reflection, he swore just a little too long. Inside them his green eyes - like peacock feathers – looked at him. They looked at him, like they were something else. Something not human.
What happens when someone loses his humanity? What do they become?
He thought he saw cat-men and horse-women in the sun’s refractions. The leaves began turning purple and orange. Neon pink, before a double take returned them to their pristine green. Things were flying in the sky. Things that were not birds shadowed the ground. But when he looked up, the sky was clear.
Time went on. He walked across another field. Through another valley.
He felt like he was an eternity away from yesterday. It was the day before the day before anything would happen. The Horizon was not around this corner. It was not around the next either, he already knew.
The scraps on the road let him know that there were still people. Somewhere, there were people like him. Had they gone through what he’s going through? Were they like him?
Was he still like them?
Another valley. Another hill.
Another week. Another month. How quickly they passed. How painful they were in the passing. Slowly the scraps thinned.
Was this what it felt like to be alone? Were the Dogs even here? It seemed as if they too had abandoned him. His flesh and soul no longer worth having. So wretched that even the vile would not have him.
His tears were yellow. He didn’t know why. He just watched as they fell.
Another hill, and a stream that ran parallel to the road awhile. Another huge tree. So large, that it blocked out the sun.
He sat. Fuck it. Just like that, he sat. He was a Child of Reubin, and his were the Promises. And he was going to sit. What did he have to lose?
His mind began playing its own tricks now. Puddles held his reflection, he swore just a little too long. Inside them his green eyes - like peacock feathers – looked at him. They looked at him, like they were something else. Something not human.
What happens when someone loses his humanity? What do they become?
He thought he saw cat-men and horse-women in the sun’s refractions. The leaves began turning purple and orange. Neon pink, before a double take returned them to their pristine green. Things were flying in the sky. Things that were not birds shadowed the ground. But when he looked up, the sky was clear.
Time went on. He walked across another field. Through another valley.
He felt like he was an eternity away from yesterday. It was the day before the day before anything would happen. The Horizon was not around this corner. It was not around the next either, he already knew.
The scraps on the road let him know that there were still people. Somewhere, there were people like him. Had they gone through what he’s going through? Were they like him?
Was he still like them?
Another valley. Another hill.
Another week. Another month. How quickly they passed. How painful they were in the passing. Slowly the scraps thinned.
Was this what it felt like to be alone? Were the Dogs even here? It seemed as if they too had abandoned him. His flesh and soul no longer worth having. So wretched that even the vile would not have him.
His tears were yellow. He didn’t know why. He just watched as they fell.
Another hill, and a stream that ran parallel to the road awhile. Another huge tree. So large, that it blocked out the sun.
He sat. Fuck it. Just like that, he sat. He was a Child of Reubin, and his were the Promises. And he was going to sit. What did he have to lose?
Monday, June 14, 2010
The Pilgrimage - Part 2
It had been just over a month since he stumbled.
It concerned him, to say the least. Stumbling was always a sign of the Sacrificial. Traditions and hunches were as close as anyone got to the scientific method on the Pilgrimage. Journey was faith. Knowledge was only experience, filtered through hope and expectation. And everyone who experienced a stumble expected a fall.
He hoped he was wrong.
Someone he met on the road once, driving a wagon, and said that she traveled with a Sacrifice before its fall (all sacrifices became an “it” after they were lost). That’s where she got the second horse. She told him that it was sort of like coming down with a cold. It starts with an unexpected symptom, a cough, immediately followed by personal denial. Like it wasn’t a sickness, just a tickle in the throat. Just an accident.
“It kept saying, in the beginning, that ‘I just tripped.’ But I know it didn’t. It was leading this horse, when I saw it lean on the reigns.”
Then, apparently, the symptoms get worse and the afflicted begin to accept that they’re sick. They begin to think that they could beat it. If they just walked a little slower, if they just took their time and their vitamins it would get cured before it got too bad.
Of course, it always got worse, she said. Once you’ve got a cold, you’ve got a cold. She’d never seen anyone get sick and not die. But, she said, it fought. And the symptoms got worse. Then, like everyone who gets sick, they eventually resign. Just give in and accept that that’s all life was. Pain and suffering. And then there was the wait for it to all be over.
“That’s when it gave me its horse. Said it didn’t need anything anymore. That’s when I knew it knew. I took the horse and gave it the Last Thanks.”
He hadn’t really asked her. He secretly wished she hadn’t. She just rode up and started talking. He figured she just needed to talk about it. A coping mechanism. It was always tough when someone went to the other side. Very little was more haunting than someone being food for the Dogs.
But it did give him a certain calm about the whole thing. Like someone else was looking him in the eye, even though she never – not once – actually looked him in the eye. No one did. He couldn’t remember the last time he saw the insides of real eyes. It was too dangerous.
He didn’t tell her that he had stumbled, but somewhere, he was pretty sure she knew. After she finished her story, she just moved right along. She was careful to move the wagon to one side, so that there was no dust kicked up into his face. They didn’t say goodbye. No one fare-welled here. To do so, when you knew better, was downright malicious. The Dogs were bad enough; no Children need do the Enemy’s work too.
He continued diligently, telling himself that one stumble needn’t define him. If he was careful, he’d never stumble or stagger again. He could just keep going, as he was supposed to. As he had always thought he would. No – as he always will.
He let his mind protect itself with all the usual tricks. He thought again to the Promises. The honeysuckle of a man-made heaven. Of finally inheriting the gifts for which he had already been damned for. There was a fuel that righteousness gave him that nothing else ever had. The rituals and old traditions gave him strength. The Promises. The Ladies. The Horizon.
They were the reason to answer the Call that Must Be Answered. No, they were the Call that Must Be Answered.
The Last Thanks. It was neither a goodbye, nor a vindication. The Sacrifice was stripped of its identity, its gender, and age. It was the ritual preformed when one of the Children had lost their way. Knowing it had become an object, a tool of the Dogs, it was removed of all that it possessed, materially or socially, within the eyes of the Children. It was not so much sacrilege as inherently detestable to leave those monsters beside the path anything. They had taken enough.
But, paradoxically, no Sacrifice had ever fought to keep who they were. They always gave it freely. And so, in a moment of uneasy clarity, The Last Thanks became a defining hesitation in the Journey of all the world’s inhabitants.
Somehow, he never found that paradox – that momentary agreement between black and white – confusing. The more he pondered it, the more it just made sense to him. How easy and comfortable it would be to just give up.
That was how he stumbled the first time. His mind tricks were not working as well as they used to. In the oppressive beauty of Eden, the Promises had lost some of their lustre. Oh how easy it was for the Children to be wretched. Ungrateful.
But they shouldn’t lose their lustre. It wasn’t supposed to work that way. How was he to make them regain it? How, now so very tired, feeling the warm wind blow against him, was he to continue? How many hills and mountains had he climbed, yet to see the Horizon?
Where was Inspiration? Where was Reubin?
The wagon was far down the hill now, passing down and over a stream.
It concerned him, to say the least. Stumbling was always a sign of the Sacrificial. Traditions and hunches were as close as anyone got to the scientific method on the Pilgrimage. Journey was faith. Knowledge was only experience, filtered through hope and expectation. And everyone who experienced a stumble expected a fall.
He hoped he was wrong.
Someone he met on the road once, driving a wagon, and said that she traveled with a Sacrifice before its fall (all sacrifices became an “it” after they were lost). That’s where she got the second horse. She told him that it was sort of like coming down with a cold. It starts with an unexpected symptom, a cough, immediately followed by personal denial. Like it wasn’t a sickness, just a tickle in the throat. Just an accident.
“It kept saying, in the beginning, that ‘I just tripped.’ But I know it didn’t. It was leading this horse, when I saw it lean on the reigns.”
Then, apparently, the symptoms get worse and the afflicted begin to accept that they’re sick. They begin to think that they could beat it. If they just walked a little slower, if they just took their time and their vitamins it would get cured before it got too bad.
Of course, it always got worse, she said. Once you’ve got a cold, you’ve got a cold. She’d never seen anyone get sick and not die. But, she said, it fought. And the symptoms got worse. Then, like everyone who gets sick, they eventually resign. Just give in and accept that that’s all life was. Pain and suffering. And then there was the wait for it to all be over.
“That’s when it gave me its horse. Said it didn’t need anything anymore. That’s when I knew it knew. I took the horse and gave it the Last Thanks.”
He hadn’t really asked her. He secretly wished she hadn’t. She just rode up and started talking. He figured she just needed to talk about it. A coping mechanism. It was always tough when someone went to the other side. Very little was more haunting than someone being food for the Dogs.
But it did give him a certain calm about the whole thing. Like someone else was looking him in the eye, even though she never – not once – actually looked him in the eye. No one did. He couldn’t remember the last time he saw the insides of real eyes. It was too dangerous.
He didn’t tell her that he had stumbled, but somewhere, he was pretty sure she knew. After she finished her story, she just moved right along. She was careful to move the wagon to one side, so that there was no dust kicked up into his face. They didn’t say goodbye. No one fare-welled here. To do so, when you knew better, was downright malicious. The Dogs were bad enough; no Children need do the Enemy’s work too.
He continued diligently, telling himself that one stumble needn’t define him. If he was careful, he’d never stumble or stagger again. He could just keep going, as he was supposed to. As he had always thought he would. No – as he always will.
He let his mind protect itself with all the usual tricks. He thought again to the Promises. The honeysuckle of a man-made heaven. Of finally inheriting the gifts for which he had already been damned for. There was a fuel that righteousness gave him that nothing else ever had. The rituals and old traditions gave him strength. The Promises. The Ladies. The Horizon.
They were the reason to answer the Call that Must Be Answered. No, they were the Call that Must Be Answered.
The Last Thanks. It was neither a goodbye, nor a vindication. The Sacrifice was stripped of its identity, its gender, and age. It was the ritual preformed when one of the Children had lost their way. Knowing it had become an object, a tool of the Dogs, it was removed of all that it possessed, materially or socially, within the eyes of the Children. It was not so much sacrilege as inherently detestable to leave those monsters beside the path anything. They had taken enough.
But, paradoxically, no Sacrifice had ever fought to keep who they were. They always gave it freely. And so, in a moment of uneasy clarity, The Last Thanks became a defining hesitation in the Journey of all the world’s inhabitants.
Somehow, he never found that paradox – that momentary agreement between black and white – confusing. The more he pondered it, the more it just made sense to him. How easy and comfortable it would be to just give up.
That was how he stumbled the first time. His mind tricks were not working as well as they used to. In the oppressive beauty of Eden, the Promises had lost some of their lustre. Oh how easy it was for the Children to be wretched. Ungrateful.
But they shouldn’t lose their lustre. It wasn’t supposed to work that way. How was he to make them regain it? How, now so very tired, feeling the warm wind blow against him, was he to continue? How many hills and mountains had he climbed, yet to see the Horizon?
Where was Inspiration? Where was Reubin?
The wagon was far down the hill now, passing down and over a stream.
Friday, May 7, 2010
The Pilgrimage
For as far as he could see, until the road curved up and over the mountain, people dotted the rocky path. Horses trotted along slowly, pulling wagons full of supplies, the sick and the elderly. At its widest, the caravan was 4 people across, though the line was neither a march nor was it unbroken. As the road winded up the rockiest spots, the climbers abandoned company for comfort and walked at their own pace. And no one in this line ever “caught back up.” The result was a broken mishmash of silent pilgrims, all walking to their own time, their own beat, and their own minds.
The whole world stayed quiet. Some thought it was the universe saying a silent prayer for their journey. Others thought it proof that they truly were damned. The few that walked alone didn’t think anything of it at all. The sound of horse hooves and rolling wagon wheels traveled down the mountainside. Shoes scraping against the endless pebbles of the road signalled someone passing or being passed.
Somewhere, several miles up, someone was heard giving up. Their collapse across the mountainside was acknowledged by a polite slide of a few dozen rocks. A few people stopped to look up. No one said anything. The road was too long to talk about every sacrifice.
He was so tired of walking.
It’s not that the world was bleak. The sky was blue, and the landscape was lush. The weather was warm, but the sun was not too hot. The mountain air had a slight chill to it, but only one blanket a piece was needed at night. Where the ridges were not too sharp, grass and greenery grew in spades. To look back on the way they had all come revealed a vibrant stretching hillside with fertile soil. If any of them bothered to look off the road on the way, they would have sworn they were walking through Eden itself.
But they were answering a Call. A Call that Must Be Answered.
He often occupied himself with the Promises. He knew that if he sat in Eden, he may never rise again. He would become a sacrifice, doomed to death in the grassy knolls. His every step was weighted with temptation. And so instead, he thought of what was awaiting him. The Promises.
There, the heavens would never again judge him. There, they would be free of judgement from above and would finally receive their turn to judge the skies. And he was ready and able to judge. No single ray of holy light would penetrate their ground – his ground - unless it was deemed worthy. There, nothing would grow without his guidance, his providence, and his will.
There, everything was permissible. Sights and sounds surreal and unimaginable could not only exist, but thrive. No being almighty would dare to intervene and tell them what to do. No one would be powerful enough. The gods and their demands would not welcome. There, all creation would grow unbounded.
There, five great towers heralding the supremacy of humanity rise as beacons so that no one would ever lose their way again. So that no one would ever have to make the aimless journey twice. There, under the shadows of certain structure, he could finally lay to rest his weary bones.
It was said that the City was built by their great, great ancestors, numberless years ago. The Ladies. Desiring for Themselves immortal life, the gods denied Them everything in jealous rage. And though Their very blood was torn from Them, They did not relent. And so, though lost forever, They built paradise eternal. “Those who have nothing, cannot be swayed. Those who are robbed of the sun need no sunlight.”
Now They sing ceaselessly in Their towers for the return of Their children. Though the road was long, no length or divine imposition was too much. They would welcome every one of Their sons and daughters with open arms, no matter how wretched, worthless or broken. “No matter how wretched,” he told himself over and over again. “No matter how wretched.”
For they were the Children of Reubin, and theirs were the Promises.
The nameless gods certainly did not make it easy on them. He had been on the road for longer than he cared to remember. He had a vague recollection of a place where he used to call home, but that thought replayed itself as if it were someone else’s memory. He had never had a home. Not yet. His home had spire after spire after spire pointing toward the sky.
There was always a mountain. He was always climbing up or climbing down. His shoes were worn down to dirty flaps of leather. All his belongings lay in a sack strapped across his shoulder. As the months went on, he slowly emptied it to lighten the burden. He was not the only one. The path was often littered by the abandoned paraphernalia of other walkers, or materials tossed from an overtaxed wagon. Things that, in the beginning, they thought worth the effort. Fragments of poetry books, pieces of stomped on jewellery, dirtied teddy bears.
He was so tired.
He had begun to notice that with every hill the air had a bit more chill. He remembered his childhood days with warmth. Running up and down the dirt path, meeting up with his fellow walkers, playing silent games. It seemed so simple then. So fresh and new. Even the ground seemed softer. Now, he wondered whether he would be able to walk against the inevitable wind. Currently, it was all he could do to raise his foot over the next rock. He did not even look up to the sky in despair any longer, so great was the effort to lift his head.
Somewhere above him, he heard the familiar slide of rocks giving way to a fallen body. Another sacrifice. “No matter how wretched.”
In truth, the nights were the worst. When a man fears his sleeping thoughts more than his waking ones, then he truly feels doomed. No amount of discipline or distraction can protect a prostrate mind. He thought that if he could just get a few hours of uninterrupted sleep a night, the walk would be more bearable. But he his dreams were filled of talks, the discussion that he and his fellow walkers never dared to have. What if they never found the Horizon – that sacred spot from which the great Spires could be seen to reaffirm their faith? What if it did not exist and all the Children that ever were, walked into their oblivion?
He’d noticed the thinning of the crowd as the years went on. The look in the faces of all the others told him that they’d noticed it too. What if this was all there was? In his dreams, he could not even utter the Promises silently to himself. In sleep, there was no salvation.
He longed for the dreams of his happiness. Of the primal joy that he was reminded of by the swing of a woman’s hips. Of the sardonic pleasure that he knew until the last drops of his olde liquor. Of the blissful refreshment that was encouraged by the lively music of forgotten instruments. Of meaning and substance. He longed to enjoy all those things in his sleep, that he was unable to enjoy on his journey.
And he hated the gods from denying him those dreams. They were a cruel and horrible lot, whose jealousy was unparalleled. In every waking moment, they teased him, making the way back and the way astray so much more convenient. The way forward they made so much more difficult. They hated his will and his birthright. They could not stand that he preferred to live by his own hand rather than on their whim. Anyone who sought the City was made the enemy of their omnipotent powers.
It was their fault he was so tired. Was it any wonder that they were hated? That they were referred to in legend as Dogs? Angry beasts, barking and begging for blood. Awaiting the surrender of the pilgrims, watching them, silently hounding them, until they give up and show throat. They were despicable.
But the Ladies existed, he believed it. There was a Horizon. And beyond that, there was a City, where the Ladies kept the Dogs out and judged the heavens above. There, they all would. The gods may make him wretched, but the Ladies wanted only the best. They wanted him.
He was beyond tired, but he was coming home. Their Children were coming home.
The whole world stayed quiet. Some thought it was the universe saying a silent prayer for their journey. Others thought it proof that they truly were damned. The few that walked alone didn’t think anything of it at all. The sound of horse hooves and rolling wagon wheels traveled down the mountainside. Shoes scraping against the endless pebbles of the road signalled someone passing or being passed.
Somewhere, several miles up, someone was heard giving up. Their collapse across the mountainside was acknowledged by a polite slide of a few dozen rocks. A few people stopped to look up. No one said anything. The road was too long to talk about every sacrifice.
He was so tired of walking.
It’s not that the world was bleak. The sky was blue, and the landscape was lush. The weather was warm, but the sun was not too hot. The mountain air had a slight chill to it, but only one blanket a piece was needed at night. Where the ridges were not too sharp, grass and greenery grew in spades. To look back on the way they had all come revealed a vibrant stretching hillside with fertile soil. If any of them bothered to look off the road on the way, they would have sworn they were walking through Eden itself.
But they were answering a Call. A Call that Must Be Answered.
He often occupied himself with the Promises. He knew that if he sat in Eden, he may never rise again. He would become a sacrifice, doomed to death in the grassy knolls. His every step was weighted with temptation. And so instead, he thought of what was awaiting him. The Promises.
There, the heavens would never again judge him. There, they would be free of judgement from above and would finally receive their turn to judge the skies. And he was ready and able to judge. No single ray of holy light would penetrate their ground – his ground - unless it was deemed worthy. There, nothing would grow without his guidance, his providence, and his will.
There, everything was permissible. Sights and sounds surreal and unimaginable could not only exist, but thrive. No being almighty would dare to intervene and tell them what to do. No one would be powerful enough. The gods and their demands would not welcome. There, all creation would grow unbounded.
There, five great towers heralding the supremacy of humanity rise as beacons so that no one would ever lose their way again. So that no one would ever have to make the aimless journey twice. There, under the shadows of certain structure, he could finally lay to rest his weary bones.
It was said that the City was built by their great, great ancestors, numberless years ago. The Ladies. Desiring for Themselves immortal life, the gods denied Them everything in jealous rage. And though Their very blood was torn from Them, They did not relent. And so, though lost forever, They built paradise eternal. “Those who have nothing, cannot be swayed. Those who are robbed of the sun need no sunlight.”
Now They sing ceaselessly in Their towers for the return of Their children. Though the road was long, no length or divine imposition was too much. They would welcome every one of Their sons and daughters with open arms, no matter how wretched, worthless or broken. “No matter how wretched,” he told himself over and over again. “No matter how wretched.”
For they were the Children of Reubin, and theirs were the Promises.
The nameless gods certainly did not make it easy on them. He had been on the road for longer than he cared to remember. He had a vague recollection of a place where he used to call home, but that thought replayed itself as if it were someone else’s memory. He had never had a home. Not yet. His home had spire after spire after spire pointing toward the sky.
There was always a mountain. He was always climbing up or climbing down. His shoes were worn down to dirty flaps of leather. All his belongings lay in a sack strapped across his shoulder. As the months went on, he slowly emptied it to lighten the burden. He was not the only one. The path was often littered by the abandoned paraphernalia of other walkers, or materials tossed from an overtaxed wagon. Things that, in the beginning, they thought worth the effort. Fragments of poetry books, pieces of stomped on jewellery, dirtied teddy bears.
He was so tired.
He had begun to notice that with every hill the air had a bit more chill. He remembered his childhood days with warmth. Running up and down the dirt path, meeting up with his fellow walkers, playing silent games. It seemed so simple then. So fresh and new. Even the ground seemed softer. Now, he wondered whether he would be able to walk against the inevitable wind. Currently, it was all he could do to raise his foot over the next rock. He did not even look up to the sky in despair any longer, so great was the effort to lift his head.
Somewhere above him, he heard the familiar slide of rocks giving way to a fallen body. Another sacrifice. “No matter how wretched.”
In truth, the nights were the worst. When a man fears his sleeping thoughts more than his waking ones, then he truly feels doomed. No amount of discipline or distraction can protect a prostrate mind. He thought that if he could just get a few hours of uninterrupted sleep a night, the walk would be more bearable. But he his dreams were filled of talks, the discussion that he and his fellow walkers never dared to have. What if they never found the Horizon – that sacred spot from which the great Spires could be seen to reaffirm their faith? What if it did not exist and all the Children that ever were, walked into their oblivion?
He’d noticed the thinning of the crowd as the years went on. The look in the faces of all the others told him that they’d noticed it too. What if this was all there was? In his dreams, he could not even utter the Promises silently to himself. In sleep, there was no salvation.
He longed for the dreams of his happiness. Of the primal joy that he was reminded of by the swing of a woman’s hips. Of the sardonic pleasure that he knew until the last drops of his olde liquor. Of the blissful refreshment that was encouraged by the lively music of forgotten instruments. Of meaning and substance. He longed to enjoy all those things in his sleep, that he was unable to enjoy on his journey.
And he hated the gods from denying him those dreams. They were a cruel and horrible lot, whose jealousy was unparalleled. In every waking moment, they teased him, making the way back and the way astray so much more convenient. The way forward they made so much more difficult. They hated his will and his birthright. They could not stand that he preferred to live by his own hand rather than on their whim. Anyone who sought the City was made the enemy of their omnipotent powers.
It was their fault he was so tired. Was it any wonder that they were hated? That they were referred to in legend as Dogs? Angry beasts, barking and begging for blood. Awaiting the surrender of the pilgrims, watching them, silently hounding them, until they give up and show throat. They were despicable.
But the Ladies existed, he believed it. There was a Horizon. And beyond that, there was a City, where the Ladies kept the Dogs out and judged the heavens above. There, they all would. The gods may make him wretched, but the Ladies wanted only the best. They wanted him.
He was beyond tired, but he was coming home. Their Children were coming home.
Friday, April 23, 2010
Unpublished Fragments From 'The City of Bones'
the City accuses the sky
of terrible things.
the fingers of five buildings
spire after
spire after
spire after
spire after
spire, point
at the sky,
the sky silent as a blue-faced baby,
the stillborn sky
and all the gods without names
stare down
at the spires, the skeletal fingers
now closing, joint
after joint
after joint
a fist closing, hardening
the fetal sky heaves
its last breath.
...
the Ladies are singing.
Listen.
‘Bring us the pathetic
the teeming diseased masses.
Bring us the filthy
The depraved, the worthless, the broken.
Only the best, only the best.
Forget the rest.
The wretched never refuse an invitation!
We welcome them, with rank
And trembling arms.’
Imagine three voices.
Imagine a cauldron.
(There’s always a cauldron.)
Imagine the King.
...
O Dogs!
This is my resignation
My repudiation
My life is yours
My City is yours
My body is meat, my body is yours
(bite a smile into my thigh)
My howl is yours, my throat is yours
(the throat of my wrist was always yours)
O Dogs!
This is my song, our song
This is the song of hallways and basements
Rooms in houses rich with whispers
This is the song of stories
This is
…
author and date of composition unknown
of terrible things.
the fingers of five buildings
spire after
spire after
spire after
spire after
spire, point
at the sky,
the sky silent as a blue-faced baby,
the stillborn sky
and all the gods without names
stare down
at the spires, the skeletal fingers
now closing, joint
after joint
after joint
a fist closing, hardening
the fetal sky heaves
its last breath.
...
the Ladies are singing.
Listen.
‘Bring us the pathetic
the teeming diseased masses.
Bring us the filthy
The depraved, the worthless, the broken.
Only the best, only the best.
Forget the rest.
The wretched never refuse an invitation!
We welcome them, with rank
And trembling arms.’
Imagine three voices.
Imagine a cauldron.
(There’s always a cauldron.)
Imagine the King.
...
O Dogs!
This is my resignation
My repudiation
My life is yours
My City is yours
My body is meat, my body is yours
(bite a smile into my thigh)
My howl is yours, my throat is yours
(the throat of my wrist was always yours)
O Dogs!
This is my song, our song
This is the song of hallways and basements
Rooms in houses rich with whispers
This is the song of stories
This is
…
author and date of composition unknown
Friday, April 16, 2010
Excerpt from “Being, Eternal: Prologue”
(continued from Canto 5)
...
So rest ye, your little and weary head,
for your troubles are many and trials unfair.
Feel Her blanket upon your bosom.
Nestled tight within the grip of whitened paws.
Give us this day – our daily bread,
not tomorrow’s nor the next.
Canto 6
A thought that dreamt a fantasy and a truth.
And sorry it could not know both, and be one dreamer
Long it thought, to peer into one as far as it possibly could.
Then knew the other, as just as fair.
But for both a hope that echoed; beyond difference,
beyond regret, beyond despair:
That though one was magic and the other love,
Neither would ever exist alone. All the world a
thought.
I do not sleep perchance to dream, dear friend:
That is why I wake.
A lake: that one of two could be.
Soft, not dreary, the placid that angels sleep on.
Its origin is a perfection unknown. The final resting place
of a flower most unique:
The petal of a rose that holds the ring of a lover.
It makes no ripples. But it floats. Adrift.
A single ring – commitment never more genuine.
Here it had always been, though never once wanted.
Eternity.
The dim sparkle that it reflects from the apathetic sky
is longing.
Beauty, regrettably, beyond compare. Not the earthly
home of heaven, but its inverse.
Eerily perverse. This forever dreams
of another place, where rocks rain from the sky:
Pebbles crashing cacophonously onto angel’s beds,
and petals sinking or flying amid meaningful
waves.
I do not dream of kings, so we needn’t ask.
Kings must dream of me.
She drives likes wildfire, madness, addicted to a bi-polar dream.
Though the road is long, she does not err:
not one moment upon dusty trails for her. No interest
toward places where nightmares are known to tread.
The sky clouded over long ago; a seeming sorrow.
Tragedy is the fantasy of this fiction, fuel to this fire.
The brazen blues of cement shadows hold her conviction,
driving her endless and onward and forever and ever.
Amen.
Secrets sit in the seat next to her, comfortable and unbuckled:
Unshackled and welcome, they do not boast the same bleak skies.
They simply do not boast.
They are invisible whispers, conditioning the air.
There are no passengers on her ride. Only drivers.
Static and music play in tandem with the road’s chorus
as cities and mountains pass by, each in their own time,
each with their own purpose, their own lofty, unknown climb.
Amen.
Any road that diverged will find its way.
Lines less than perfect must cross or run astray,
and so the drive finds resolve. Though she does not know where,
She knows why.
Unrelentingly is the quiet echo: what is hers and hers alone
is what is when all else retreats.
Her divine mystery.
A perfect coin tells its tales only half the time.
Amen.
Not a man.
I am Woman.
Canto 7
On the 7th day, God rested.
His creation complete. He had His chance.
And in the shadows of His slumber, devils danced.
Six wonders did He create in His ideal.
Six wonders to each other did He reveal.
Six wonders for whom stood no appeal.
Pulse and power, their open eyes,
Ne’er to have a reason why:
for He slept throughout their morning cry.
Without that gift, they’d surely die.
They cast to the depths of chaos, Subtle Care.
Rejected light and all its fare.
No more interlude, no more preface,
all the world to be defaced.
With Dad away, man and beast came to play.
They began to worship like Jekyll and Hyde,
the space between a woman’s thighs.
And of a man of mass and swift reply,
...
(continued)
...
So rest ye, your little and weary head,
for your troubles are many and trials unfair.
Feel Her blanket upon your bosom.
Nestled tight within the grip of whitened paws.
Give us this day – our daily bread,
not tomorrow’s nor the next.
Canto 6
A thought that dreamt a fantasy and a truth.
And sorry it could not know both, and be one dreamer
Long it thought, to peer into one as far as it possibly could.
Then knew the other, as just as fair.
But for both a hope that echoed; beyond difference,
beyond regret, beyond despair:
That though one was magic and the other love,
Neither would ever exist alone. All the world a
thought.
I do not sleep perchance to dream, dear friend:
That is why I wake.
A lake: that one of two could be.
Soft, not dreary, the placid that angels sleep on.
Its origin is a perfection unknown. The final resting place
of a flower most unique:
The petal of a rose that holds the ring of a lover.
It makes no ripples. But it floats. Adrift.
A single ring – commitment never more genuine.
Here it had always been, though never once wanted.
Eternity.
The dim sparkle that it reflects from the apathetic sky
is longing.
Beauty, regrettably, beyond compare. Not the earthly
home of heaven, but its inverse.
Eerily perverse. This forever dreams
of another place, where rocks rain from the sky:
Pebbles crashing cacophonously onto angel’s beds,
and petals sinking or flying amid meaningful
waves.
I do not dream of kings, so we needn’t ask.
Kings must dream of me.
She drives likes wildfire, madness, addicted to a bi-polar dream.
Though the road is long, she does not err:
not one moment upon dusty trails for her. No interest
toward places where nightmares are known to tread.
The sky clouded over long ago; a seeming sorrow.
Tragedy is the fantasy of this fiction, fuel to this fire.
The brazen blues of cement shadows hold her conviction,
driving her endless and onward and forever and ever.
Amen.
Secrets sit in the seat next to her, comfortable and unbuckled:
Unshackled and welcome, they do not boast the same bleak skies.
They simply do not boast.
They are invisible whispers, conditioning the air.
There are no passengers on her ride. Only drivers.
Static and music play in tandem with the road’s chorus
as cities and mountains pass by, each in their own time,
each with their own purpose, their own lofty, unknown climb.
Amen.
Any road that diverged will find its way.
Lines less than perfect must cross or run astray,
and so the drive finds resolve. Though she does not know where,
She knows why.
Unrelentingly is the quiet echo: what is hers and hers alone
is what is when all else retreats.
Her divine mystery.
A perfect coin tells its tales only half the time.
Amen.
Not a man.
I am Woman.
Canto 7
On the 7th day, God rested.
His creation complete. He had His chance.
And in the shadows of His slumber, devils danced.
Six wonders did He create in His ideal.
Six wonders to each other did He reveal.
Six wonders for whom stood no appeal.
Pulse and power, their open eyes,
Ne’er to have a reason why:
for He slept throughout their morning cry.
Without that gift, they’d surely die.
They cast to the depths of chaos, Subtle Care.
Rejected light and all its fare.
No more interlude, no more preface,
all the world to be defaced.
With Dad away, man and beast came to play.
They began to worship like Jekyll and Hyde,
the space between a woman’s thighs.
And of a man of mass and swift reply,
...
(continued)
Friday, April 9, 2010
Not A Eulogy
I am not writing your goddamn eulogy.
I don’t think that suicides deserve a eulogy.
A suicide’s eulogy is scraped into the bloody tracks on her arms. A suicide’s eulogy is written on the rope around his neck. A suicide’s eulogy is printed in the grooves of the pills she swallows.
It’s always the same, it’s the same story every time: I lived, I died. What happens in between is incidental. What happens in between is what kills us.
This isn’t an apology. I’ve been mourning you for two years now, did you know that? It’s you who should apologize.
This is not for you.
It’s for me, and it’s also for this blog I write with my friend. You never met this friend; he wasn’t part of our Inuvik group. I guess I’m exploiting your death to wring a few tears out of my readers, but I have a feeling that’s okay. When you leave, you really leave. Who cares if I get five hundred words out of your death? Another week’s duty done.
I didn’t know what else to write about this week. All I can think about is you. Goddamn you.
(This is nothing new.)
I think that you would have liked the blog. I think you’d be the one person I could always count on to read my posts.
(That hurts a bit, to think about.)
I think you’d want to meet my friend Zach. You both like to talk - a lot. That’s okay. I’m patient, I’m a listener. You and me, we would go for coffee and smoke a pack each. Remember those days? You could still smoke inside back then, at least in Inuvik. We would sit at the Caribou Café for hours, talking about politics and movies and gossip. We thought we were better than everyone else because we read the Globe and Mail every day.
Do you remember when we met? It was almost ten years ago, can you believe it? I worked in the kitchen at the Finto, washing dishing, making salads, preparing desserts. You were a waiter, and you wouldn’t even say hello to me for weeks. Then one evening I was having a smoke in the break room, and somehow we struck up a conversation about books. You decided I was suitable company and not a stupid kitchen-bitch; I decided that, while you were clearly arrogant and a bit shallow, you knew books and I could spare a smoke or two for a conversation. The rest, as they say, is fucking history.
I’m not interested in writing our history. It’s a story that is full of secrets (your and mine) and all the private jokes of a long friendship. I won’t share any of that.
Sometimes it hurts more than anything, so goddamn much, to carry around your secrets.
You loved Motown. I remember how surprised you were when I said I loved Motown too. I played you a CD I made, Aretha and the Temptations and Smokey Robinson, that time you visited me when I tore the tendons in my ankle and couldn’t work. You brought me food and money for take-out, I couldn’t leave my house because of the stairs. Remember our apartment buildings in Inuvik? You lived in Parkview, I lived across the street in Lakeview. There are no basements in Inuvik because of the permafrost, and both of our buildings were hoisted two stories above the ground, on stilts and up those awful, terrifying steps. How many times did we both stumble home drunk, up those stairs?
I’m listening to Motown right now.
I remember everything. I’ve packed away these memories, filed and stacked them, and left them to the dust, but I still remember everything. Everything goddamn thing.
(I can’t.)
You were funny as hell. You always made me laugh. You pissed me off a lot too. The best people do, I’ve found.
(I am still so mad at you.)
I keep going back to this, this one fucking wish – I wish you had lived long enough to read this blog. I’ve done my best writing here. I didn’t write much when we were friends, except for our daily emails. I think that you would be proud of me.
(Why did you leave me.)
I’m reading a book right now that I think you would have liked.
(That hurts.)
You’ve missed a lot of really great movies.
(I try not to think like this.)
I miss your emails.
I don’t use that email address anymore. I kept it for you, did you know that? I stopped using it well before you died, started up a Hotmail account, but I kept Yahoo open for you. That ways I always knew that if I had a new email, it was from you.
I still have your last email, saved. I haven’t read it in two years. It has no subject line, which was unusual.
(I should have seen the signs).
I have no idea what you wrote.
(I don’t want to know.)
I don’t think that I will ever read it.
(You said goodbye in a hotel room in Arizona, you didn't say a word.)
All I want to say is goodbye. All I want is for you to go away. You can go now.
I’m going to visit your grave some time this summer. I will give back all of your secrets when I’m there.
I feel so heavy these days. I cannot carry the burden of you.
(Jimmy, I am so, so sad without you.)
Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.
I don’t think that suicides deserve a eulogy.
A suicide’s eulogy is scraped into the bloody tracks on her arms. A suicide’s eulogy is written on the rope around his neck. A suicide’s eulogy is printed in the grooves of the pills she swallows.
It’s always the same, it’s the same story every time: I lived, I died. What happens in between is incidental. What happens in between is what kills us.
This isn’t an apology. I’ve been mourning you for two years now, did you know that? It’s you who should apologize.
This is not for you.
It’s for me, and it’s also for this blog I write with my friend. You never met this friend; he wasn’t part of our Inuvik group. I guess I’m exploiting your death to wring a few tears out of my readers, but I have a feeling that’s okay. When you leave, you really leave. Who cares if I get five hundred words out of your death? Another week’s duty done.
I didn’t know what else to write about this week. All I can think about is you. Goddamn you.
(This is nothing new.)
I think that you would have liked the blog. I think you’d be the one person I could always count on to read my posts.
(That hurts a bit, to think about.)
I think you’d want to meet my friend Zach. You both like to talk - a lot. That’s okay. I’m patient, I’m a listener. You and me, we would go for coffee and smoke a pack each. Remember those days? You could still smoke inside back then, at least in Inuvik. We would sit at the Caribou Café for hours, talking about politics and movies and gossip. We thought we were better than everyone else because we read the Globe and Mail every day.
Do you remember when we met? It was almost ten years ago, can you believe it? I worked in the kitchen at the Finto, washing dishing, making salads, preparing desserts. You were a waiter, and you wouldn’t even say hello to me for weeks. Then one evening I was having a smoke in the break room, and somehow we struck up a conversation about books. You decided I was suitable company and not a stupid kitchen-bitch; I decided that, while you were clearly arrogant and a bit shallow, you knew books and I could spare a smoke or two for a conversation. The rest, as they say, is fucking history.
I’m not interested in writing our history. It’s a story that is full of secrets (your and mine) and all the private jokes of a long friendship. I won’t share any of that.
Sometimes it hurts more than anything, so goddamn much, to carry around your secrets.
You loved Motown. I remember how surprised you were when I said I loved Motown too. I played you a CD I made, Aretha and the Temptations and Smokey Robinson, that time you visited me when I tore the tendons in my ankle and couldn’t work. You brought me food and money for take-out, I couldn’t leave my house because of the stairs. Remember our apartment buildings in Inuvik? You lived in Parkview, I lived across the street in Lakeview. There are no basements in Inuvik because of the permafrost, and both of our buildings were hoisted two stories above the ground, on stilts and up those awful, terrifying steps. How many times did we both stumble home drunk, up those stairs?
I’m listening to Motown right now.
I remember everything. I’ve packed away these memories, filed and stacked them, and left them to the dust, but I still remember everything. Everything goddamn thing.
(I can’t.)
You were funny as hell. You always made me laugh. You pissed me off a lot too. The best people do, I’ve found.
(I am still so mad at you.)
I keep going back to this, this one fucking wish – I wish you had lived long enough to read this blog. I’ve done my best writing here. I didn’t write much when we were friends, except for our daily emails. I think that you would be proud of me.
(Why did you leave me.)
I’m reading a book right now that I think you would have liked.
(That hurts.)
You’ve missed a lot of really great movies.
(I try not to think like this.)
I miss your emails.
I don’t use that email address anymore. I kept it for you, did you know that? I stopped using it well before you died, started up a Hotmail account, but I kept Yahoo open for you. That ways I always knew that if I had a new email, it was from you.
I still have your last email, saved. I haven’t read it in two years. It has no subject line, which was unusual.
(I should have seen the signs).
I have no idea what you wrote.
(I don’t want to know.)
I don’t think that I will ever read it.
(You said goodbye in a hotel room in Arizona, you didn't say a word.)
All I want to say is goodbye. All I want is for you to go away. You can go now.
I’m going to visit your grave some time this summer. I will give back all of your secrets when I’m there.
I feel so heavy these days. I cannot carry the burden of you.
(Jimmy, I am so, so sad without you.)
Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.
Friday, April 2, 2010
“Nietzsche Is Dead.” - God
No one knows what the Other Side looks like. No one. It’s not a question of capacity; there, everyone is blind. The abyss stares outwards because that is the only direction where there is something to see. But the few, the brave, march into the unknown diligently, seeing nothing.
Dearly Beloved,
We are gathered here today to celebrate the life and mourn the loss of our dear friend, Esau.
There’s a lot of things a person can say about Esau. And yet, now that I find myself up here, they all sound kind of silly. He was a man who would have been thrilled to have a funeral – to have such a huge turnout at something so ultimately insignificant to him.
Heh. You know, I can actually hear his voice in my head saying “I’m dead, it’s not like I would notice if no one showed up.” He was happy to imagine that people wanted to celebrate his life, but he never, not once, sounded interested in satisfying some bar or marker. There was no kind of turnout number or achievement in his mind that he was required to meet – not in life, and certainly not in his death. All in all, he was content.
But I never believed him. I still don’t. See, because the whole time I knew him, I saw in his eyes that he was looking for something. Something that he didn’t have, that he didn’t see, but that he knew. That’s because of what I saw in his eyes.
I’d known him since he was born and from the first moment that he learned about the world around him, the man was hoping. Some of his closer friends called it longing. Maybe they were right. But it seemed more positive than that, to me. To me, he wasn’t hoping longingly, he was hoping faithfully. Necessarily.
I think Esau saw what most of us never catch a glimpse of: Real Happiness. He didn’t have it – no, we would have all known it if he had had it – but he saw it. He saw how it was to be birthed.
I have a story that I want to share with you. It was just one of those little memories that we all have. But as I reflect on who this man was, and how he lived his life, I keep thinking about this time I had with him.
One day, when he was little, Esau called me over to see his dominos. He had had them all rigged up so that when you tipped over the first one, they would all fall in succession. He must have had more than 500 hundred dominos set up. I don’t know how long it had taken him, but I could see the pride beaming from his little form. And then, he asked me to push the first one.
I don’t know why he didn’t want to do it himself, I know he could have. He said he wanted me to do it, but I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to spoil all of his hard work. It must have taken him hours to put them all in the right place. I didn’t want to be the one to walk in and take that pleasure from him. He should do the honours.
But upon reflection, I know that he needed me to do it. Somehow, he knew he couldn’t. If he did, it would ruin everything. It would reduce hours of work into a disappointing, brief, fanfare. If I did, it would mean something.
I think Esau wanted to give us the key to the whole world. Not because it was something he didn’t want, or because he was afraid of it, or because he was selfless. I think because it was something he could only have when someone else took it.
Maybe I’m babbling. I probably am. Esau always let me blab, that’s for sure.
You know what he would see if he was standing here today? He would see millions of Almosts. He would hear every whimsical word, every under-your-breath dream, and he’d be certain that with one step, just one step, by any of you, the whole world would re-arrange itself into something beautiful. And no one can take that step for you. And he always hoped we would.
That’s what he knew. That’s what he trusted. I don’t know why, and I sure as hell don’t know what my step is, but I know that’s how he took every moment.
A wise man once wrote of a great threshold. This threshold was between life and death, between meaning and existence. The no-man’s land between Being and Nothingness. And everything about this threshold was neither here nor there. It was a dream. An intangible, dense, guardian and gateway.
To look upon it from the one side was to look upon a great endless pit and the tallest of insurmountable cliffs. Malevolence given form. All the while, the way and view of the Other Side is blocked; protected as a mystery, unfamiliar, uncertain.
But to look at it from that Other Side would be to see through a full and complete kaleidoscope. An array of coloured glasses and beautiful sounds. Like paintings. Art, inspired. From there you could see a million horizons and a million sunsets.
It was within this place that the Gods live.
I’m not a religious man, but the firm, unwavering content that Esau brought to us certainly challenged me to be a spiritual one. Perhaps that was the step that he had to take. Perhaps that was the step that he was taking all along.
Esau was pure, unrealized potential. Anyone who knew him knew his impotent but incredible charge. I like to imagine that he’s gone on to a better place. Somewhere where he has that happiness. I hope he can not only see it, but he can have it. He deserves it.
With his death, he will teach me to not only look forward but to act forward. To celebrate the past as the past. As something that is ungraspable and unmoldable and impotent against our futures.
...But when all our secrets are laid bare,
What is left for subtle Care?
Goodbye, my friend. You will be missed.
Close your eyes little bird:
Weary heads were never meant to fly.
Jacob, would you like to say a few words?
Dearly Beloved,
We are gathered here today to celebrate the life and mourn the loss of our dear friend, Esau.
There’s a lot of things a person can say about Esau. And yet, now that I find myself up here, they all sound kind of silly. He was a man who would have been thrilled to have a funeral – to have such a huge turnout at something so ultimately insignificant to him.
Heh. You know, I can actually hear his voice in my head saying “I’m dead, it’s not like I would notice if no one showed up.” He was happy to imagine that people wanted to celebrate his life, but he never, not once, sounded interested in satisfying some bar or marker. There was no kind of turnout number or achievement in his mind that he was required to meet – not in life, and certainly not in his death. All in all, he was content.
But I never believed him. I still don’t. See, because the whole time I knew him, I saw in his eyes that he was looking for something. Something that he didn’t have, that he didn’t see, but that he knew. That’s because of what I saw in his eyes.
I’d known him since he was born and from the first moment that he learned about the world around him, the man was hoping. Some of his closer friends called it longing. Maybe they were right. But it seemed more positive than that, to me. To me, he wasn’t hoping longingly, he was hoping faithfully. Necessarily.
I think Esau saw what most of us never catch a glimpse of: Real Happiness. He didn’t have it – no, we would have all known it if he had had it – but he saw it. He saw how it was to be birthed.
I have a story that I want to share with you. It was just one of those little memories that we all have. But as I reflect on who this man was, and how he lived his life, I keep thinking about this time I had with him.
One day, when he was little, Esau called me over to see his dominos. He had had them all rigged up so that when you tipped over the first one, they would all fall in succession. He must have had more than 500 hundred dominos set up. I don’t know how long it had taken him, but I could see the pride beaming from his little form. And then, he asked me to push the first one.
I don’t know why he didn’t want to do it himself, I know he could have. He said he wanted me to do it, but I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to spoil all of his hard work. It must have taken him hours to put them all in the right place. I didn’t want to be the one to walk in and take that pleasure from him. He should do the honours.
But upon reflection, I know that he needed me to do it. Somehow, he knew he couldn’t. If he did, it would ruin everything. It would reduce hours of work into a disappointing, brief, fanfare. If I did, it would mean something.
I think Esau wanted to give us the key to the whole world. Not because it was something he didn’t want, or because he was afraid of it, or because he was selfless. I think because it was something he could only have when someone else took it.
Maybe I’m babbling. I probably am. Esau always let me blab, that’s for sure.
You know what he would see if he was standing here today? He would see millions of Almosts. He would hear every whimsical word, every under-your-breath dream, and he’d be certain that with one step, just one step, by any of you, the whole world would re-arrange itself into something beautiful. And no one can take that step for you. And he always hoped we would.
That’s what he knew. That’s what he trusted. I don’t know why, and I sure as hell don’t know what my step is, but I know that’s how he took every moment.
A wise man once wrote of a great threshold. This threshold was between life and death, between meaning and existence. The no-man’s land between Being and Nothingness. And everything about this threshold was neither here nor there. It was a dream. An intangible, dense, guardian and gateway.
To look upon it from the one side was to look upon a great endless pit and the tallest of insurmountable cliffs. Malevolence given form. All the while, the way and view of the Other Side is blocked; protected as a mystery, unfamiliar, uncertain.
But to look at it from that Other Side would be to see through a full and complete kaleidoscope. An array of coloured glasses and beautiful sounds. Like paintings. Art, inspired. From there you could see a million horizons and a million sunsets.
It was within this place that the Gods live.
I’m not a religious man, but the firm, unwavering content that Esau brought to us certainly challenged me to be a spiritual one. Perhaps that was the step that he had to take. Perhaps that was the step that he was taking all along.
Esau was pure, unrealized potential. Anyone who knew him knew his impotent but incredible charge. I like to imagine that he’s gone on to a better place. Somewhere where he has that happiness. I hope he can not only see it, but he can have it. He deserves it.
With his death, he will teach me to not only look forward but to act forward. To celebrate the past as the past. As something that is ungraspable and unmoldable and impotent against our futures.
...But when all our secrets are laid bare,
What is left for subtle Care?
Goodbye, my friend. You will be missed.
Close your eyes little bird:
Weary heads were never meant to fly.
Jacob, would you like to say a few words?
Friday, March 26, 2010
What's Written on the Walls
Here in November in this house of leaves
We'll pray
Poe, 'Haunted'
***
The past is a lump in my throat.
The past is a story written on my arm in Braille. Close your eyes, slide your fingers over my skin, and that’s my life.
None of that means anything, now that I’m dead.
***
I wrote a poem, a long time ago. It went like this:
The halls rustle, tonight –
ghosts, meeting.
Their sheets whisper as they kiss –
whisper secrets as they kiss.
‘Scratch I’m ruined into your arm’
the ghosts whisper and taunt me.
Their gauze whispers haunt me
as I crawl down the hallway.
It’s not a great poem, not even close, but I like the irony of it. My entire life I was haunted – by shadows, by the past, by love – and now I’m the ghost, rattling the loose bones in this awful, bloody place.
***
There are so many of us here. We all died the same way, cut down on the dance floor, gutted like pigs. We all died in the name of something that I understand all too well. Nihilism, chaos, emptiness. Despair. I only got a glimpse of the ragged children, our murderers. They should have let me join them. I would have left with them.
I heard the howls. I still do. They’re trapped, just like us.
***
There is plenty of reading material here. It helps pass the time.
***
It’s always a mistake. It’s always a bad idea. It always ends like this. It always ends here. I am forever here. We are forever here.
Dear world. I have fallen in love again! And this time, it’s for real. He’s not a loser. He has a job. He bought me flowers yesterday! I won’t let him hit me. I’ve promised myself that. Signed, a new me.
She is a fucking Goddess. There is nothing I won’t do for her, in this moment.
My dad brought me here when I was a little girl. That was the first time I met his friend Elias. There were lots of friends after that, too many to count, but Elias was the first. Tonight he will be a different kind of first, when I find him. Goodbye.
Here I am. Where are you?
I just saw him with her, tonight. Stupid cunt. I fucking hate him. I am done. Never again. No one will ever hurt me again.
***
Sometimes we have visitors. First, it was the police. The detective in charge of the investigation was tall, thin as a barn cat. She moved like a cat, too. Every step taken with such deliberation. When she was still, the whole room went quiet. Even us, wild ghosts screaming as loud as we could, desperate to be heard, stilled the tremors in our useless throats when she stopped to examine a knife that had been left on the floor. I had already looked at it; it was covered in crude symbols, nothing that made sense to me. She looked at it closely, tilted her head closer and closer to the sticky blade. ‘Someone get me an evidence bag,’ she said, and the spell was broken. We ghosts went back to our frantic keening.
It was a comfort at first, to make noise. We learned, soon enough, that the living cannot hear our screams, so we stopped. A trick that we learned from the Dogs, when they came sniffing around, is that the living can, sometimes, hear our whispers.
I should have known that. I was taunted by whispering ghosts for years, after all.
I liked the detective. I tried to help her. I whispered things in her ear about the Dogs, everything I had learned. After death there was no division between Us and the Children. She brushed me away like I was a fly, so I stopped. She didn’t need to know the Truth of it, anyway. Truths are best left to the dead, I know that now.
After the police lost interest, the thrill-seekers came. The ones who heard the murmured rumours and some who were here when it happened. There is much to see here, and I don’t blame them. The walls are bloody. Redder than red. We ghosts have some powers, nothing extraordinary. But we do keep the walls red and sticky. Sometimes we make the broken lights bleed for visitors; it’s a good trick. The thrill-seekers bring the bones of strange animals and leave them for us. I am not sure why. We have no use for bones here. This is our City of Blood, now. But we appreciate the thought.
***
We first met, right here, leaning against this wall. An hour later we were fucking standing up in the alley, me pressed up against the cement wall. It was the best day of my life, which is sad.
I don’t have a love story to leave here.
once upon a time there was a handsome prince and he fell in love with a beautiful princess and they lived happily ever after the end until the princess got pregnant and had to have an abortion because there was no way she could support him herself and a baby on a stripper’s wages not to mention his new habit that was costing more and more every day when he found out he gave her a black eye and almost broke her arm but luckily it was only a sprain and she couldn’t leave because no one would ever love her the way he loved her and they lived happily ever after the end
She fucks my friends, and she knows I know it, and I love her anyway. I think ours is the purest love. No one else sees her the way I see her. She is the sun and I lift my face hungrily to hers.
He wears me. I have
stitched my body to his –
slid pins through his skin,
joined us limb to limb –
braided my hair into his –
left nothing unattached.
He wear me – a
crochet, I loosen daily –
deft hands tear my masterpiece.
My threads unravel.
He will soon be gone – my cold
statue, my beginning,
my zero.
There is no better truth-teller than a pitcher of beer. Ask me at the end of the night what I think about love.
***
No one has ever come looking for me. After the thrill-seekers and the blood-lusters came the Beloved. The ones who were left behind after we died. Some of us, if we had visitors, tried screaming, but gave up quickly, reminded that we cannot be heard. It’s better to whisper.
I would have liked a visitor. I came to the City to find something – happiness, love, something – and all I got was this. Trapped in the house of love, forever whispering.
***
A man came here, one day. By that time the police, the thrill-seekers, and the Beloved were long gone. It was only us ghosts, rattling the bones, reading the walls, whispering amongst ourselves. The man opened the door and walked in, trailing a cloud of cigarette smoke behind him. His long black coat was dusty. He was barefoot.
He walked to the back wall and stood there for awhile, reading.
I drifted, peered over his shoulder.
I am her prisoner, but I fastened the chains myself, it read.
Not my favorite, to be honest, but I’ve had months – maybe years, I can’t remember – to study the psalms (as some here have taken to calling them) and puzzle out their meanings.
The man looked right at me.
Prisoners do not write on walls.
I heard his voice inside me, inside the whorls and folds of my ghostly self. For the first time in so long, I felt warm.
You can leave now.
His voice was the sun. The sun is a brilliant egg, I remembered. A yellow thing, new every morning.
‘Thank you’, I whispered.
He left.
***
The past is a story that I am whispering. Soon, I think that I will be leaving.
We'll pray
Poe, 'Haunted'
***
The past is a lump in my throat.
The past is a story written on my arm in Braille. Close your eyes, slide your fingers over my skin, and that’s my life.
None of that means anything, now that I’m dead.
***
I wrote a poem, a long time ago. It went like this:
The halls rustle, tonight –
ghosts, meeting.
Their sheets whisper as they kiss –
whisper secrets as they kiss.
‘Scratch I’m ruined into your arm’
the ghosts whisper and taunt me.
Their gauze whispers haunt me
as I crawl down the hallway.
It’s not a great poem, not even close, but I like the irony of it. My entire life I was haunted – by shadows, by the past, by love – and now I’m the ghost, rattling the loose bones in this awful, bloody place.
***
There are so many of us here. We all died the same way, cut down on the dance floor, gutted like pigs. We all died in the name of something that I understand all too well. Nihilism, chaos, emptiness. Despair. I only got a glimpse of the ragged children, our murderers. They should have let me join them. I would have left with them.
I heard the howls. I still do. They’re trapped, just like us.
***
There is plenty of reading material here. It helps pass the time.
***
It’s always a mistake. It’s always a bad idea. It always ends like this. It always ends here. I am forever here. We are forever here.
Dear world. I have fallen in love again! And this time, it’s for real. He’s not a loser. He has a job. He bought me flowers yesterday! I won’t let him hit me. I’ve promised myself that. Signed, a new me.
She is a fucking Goddess. There is nothing I won’t do for her, in this moment.
My dad brought me here when I was a little girl. That was the first time I met his friend Elias. There were lots of friends after that, too many to count, but Elias was the first. Tonight he will be a different kind of first, when I find him. Goodbye.
Here I am. Where are you?
I just saw him with her, tonight. Stupid cunt. I fucking hate him. I am done. Never again. No one will ever hurt me again.
***
Sometimes we have visitors. First, it was the police. The detective in charge of the investigation was tall, thin as a barn cat. She moved like a cat, too. Every step taken with such deliberation. When she was still, the whole room went quiet. Even us, wild ghosts screaming as loud as we could, desperate to be heard, stilled the tremors in our useless throats when she stopped to examine a knife that had been left on the floor. I had already looked at it; it was covered in crude symbols, nothing that made sense to me. She looked at it closely, tilted her head closer and closer to the sticky blade. ‘Someone get me an evidence bag,’ she said, and the spell was broken. We ghosts went back to our frantic keening.
It was a comfort at first, to make noise. We learned, soon enough, that the living cannot hear our screams, so we stopped. A trick that we learned from the Dogs, when they came sniffing around, is that the living can, sometimes, hear our whispers.
I should have known that. I was taunted by whispering ghosts for years, after all.
I liked the detective. I tried to help her. I whispered things in her ear about the Dogs, everything I had learned. After death there was no division between Us and the Children. She brushed me away like I was a fly, so I stopped. She didn’t need to know the Truth of it, anyway. Truths are best left to the dead, I know that now.
After the police lost interest, the thrill-seekers came. The ones who heard the murmured rumours and some who were here when it happened. There is much to see here, and I don’t blame them. The walls are bloody. Redder than red. We ghosts have some powers, nothing extraordinary. But we do keep the walls red and sticky. Sometimes we make the broken lights bleed for visitors; it’s a good trick. The thrill-seekers bring the bones of strange animals and leave them for us. I am not sure why. We have no use for bones here. This is our City of Blood, now. But we appreciate the thought.
***
We first met, right here, leaning against this wall. An hour later we were fucking standing up in the alley, me pressed up against the cement wall. It was the best day of my life, which is sad.
I don’t have a love story to leave here.
once upon a time there was a handsome prince and he fell in love with a beautiful princess and they lived happily ever after the end until the princess got pregnant and had to have an abortion because there was no way she could support him herself and a baby on a stripper’s wages not to mention his new habit that was costing more and more every day when he found out he gave her a black eye and almost broke her arm but luckily it was only a sprain and she couldn’t leave because no one would ever love her the way he loved her and they lived happily ever after the end
She fucks my friends, and she knows I know it, and I love her anyway. I think ours is the purest love. No one else sees her the way I see her. She is the sun and I lift my face hungrily to hers.
He wears me. I have
stitched my body to his –
slid pins through his skin,
joined us limb to limb –
braided my hair into his –
left nothing unattached.
He wear me – a
crochet, I loosen daily –
deft hands tear my masterpiece.
My threads unravel.
He will soon be gone – my cold
statue, my beginning,
my zero.
There is no better truth-teller than a pitcher of beer. Ask me at the end of the night what I think about love.
***
No one has ever come looking for me. After the thrill-seekers and the blood-lusters came the Beloved. The ones who were left behind after we died. Some of us, if we had visitors, tried screaming, but gave up quickly, reminded that we cannot be heard. It’s better to whisper.
I would have liked a visitor. I came to the City to find something – happiness, love, something – and all I got was this. Trapped in the house of love, forever whispering.
***
A man came here, one day. By that time the police, the thrill-seekers, and the Beloved were long gone. It was only us ghosts, rattling the bones, reading the walls, whispering amongst ourselves. The man opened the door and walked in, trailing a cloud of cigarette smoke behind him. His long black coat was dusty. He was barefoot.
He walked to the back wall and stood there for awhile, reading.
I drifted, peered over his shoulder.
I am her prisoner, but I fastened the chains myself, it read.
Not my favorite, to be honest, but I’ve had months – maybe years, I can’t remember – to study the psalms (as some here have taken to calling them) and puzzle out their meanings.
The man looked right at me.
Prisoners do not write on walls.
I heard his voice inside me, inside the whorls and folds of my ghostly self. For the first time in so long, I felt warm.
You can leave now.
His voice was the sun. The sun is a brilliant egg, I remembered. A yellow thing, new every morning.
‘Thank you’, I whispered.
He left.
***
The past is a story that I am whispering. Soon, I think that I will be leaving.
Friday, March 12, 2010
The Love Letters I Never Wrote
(Alternatively titled: Dead Sea Scrolls)
There is a place far from the freedom of the City where the sun is always shining. Waves roll up a sandy beach with a crisp, full sound. Sitting right where the tide comes in, the cool water refreshes weary feet. It's always a striking blue. The horizon continues into a “yonder,” when the sky meets the sea for as far as the eye can see. This is where I live.
Behind that sacred seat, is the lush greenery that I think is called a jungle. Life here exists brilliantly, vibrantly.
Psalm 24
She makes me feel alive, in a new way. In a way that I don't even know how to explain... it's like... fuck, man – it's the reason curse words were invented. My religious friends always said that the gods fill a hole in your heart that you didn't know you had. She does that. Since the moment I fucking saw her, I became different. I became hungry. For the first time in my life, I didn't just understand it, I was it.
I don't know how to tell her, but I try every time she lets me. I want her. I want to fuck her, I want to provide for her, I want to make her smile, I want to know everything about her. She makes me want to live, to adventure, to be a better person. Life was black and white, meaningless and dull before her. Now, whenever I think of her, the whole world seems bright and alive. I feel real.
I suppose I was on a pilgrimage of my own, of sorts, when I saw him. It is not enough to say that he had a strange look to him, for the City is defined by its sense of strangeness. But he radiated a presence, standing on the street, that set him apart. The breeze seemed to blow by him, not against him. He was on the very edge of the curb and his coat flapped quickly every time a car sped past his person. His hands were by his side – open palmed in what seemed like reverence towards the endless traffic. As I moved closer to this sight, I saw that his eyes were closed – he was in a sort of reverence.
My curiosity got the better of me, but before I could ask “why are you here?” I heard his voice in my head.
Prisoners do not write on walls.
It's true, I thought: walls write on them. As my mind finished processing the response, I looked up to see the figure open his eyes and step off the curb. The car that hit him was going so fast that I don't think his foot reached the cement. Several meters away, his face did.
Psalm 68
I lost her. It was so sudden. My friends all think I'm ridiculous – I suppose I am. But I'm drunk and here, so I might as well put down my story. I was never really with her, but there was a chemistry there. I know there was. And now it's gone. She just isn't interested anymore. I feel it too – I'm just not as interesting. Where did it all go? Where's all that goddamn magic?
I'll never know whether the man was making an allusion to the Red Door or not. But when I first found it 7 months later, I thought of him. People didn't say it was the best club in town, at the time, because it was. They just went there. It was the kind of place that all the other, less desirable places called fake or cliché or cheesy. But the truth was, it was the only joint in town that was real.
I won't rehash what others have probably already told you about the place – you can discover plenty on your own. There must be enough people willing to talk about it.
I will tell you what it was like for me, though. I didn't go there with someone, I went there looking for someone. It was the Great Temple on my own personal quest for meaning. And I certainly found someone. Hundreds of someones, written all over the walls. Every one was unique, and yet it was the same. Thousands of stories, each with their own personal, private interest, and each full of universal importance.
Night after night I went to those walls. Night after night I read them like prayers. Night after night I memorized them like scripture.
Psalm 3
We may look like animals, but we fuck like gods.
I suppose you could say that there, I found Her. In the heat of the night, Sin itself seemed to make love to Truth, surrounded by voyeurs and disciples. The marriage was one of divine significance. Ugly, raw, real, polite, unintentional, direct, tempting, dirty, fantastic and blissful. Amidst it, one could not help but understand what prophets meant when they said they had “found” religion. One could barely help becoming a prophet themselves: the writing, as they say, was on the wall.
Psalm 40
I would move to the City for her. Many would. Some already have. But neither of those are the point.
All my life I have carefully disciplined my life to not need another person. I've told myself, over and over, that the right person has to fit. I cannot just uproot on some meager fancy. What's more, I have to be true to myself: I have to follow a path that I enjoy, work in work that I love, not that provides me money. I have to live where I am happy and comfortable, not where it is economically convenient. I have to be me.
But, if she said she wanted me, I'd move tomorrow. I'd be scared shitless, but I'd find a job, even if I hated it, that made oodles of money so that I could provide for her – so that she'd never have to worry about being in love with a “loser,” or worry about the financial comfort of her child/children. I'd take night classes so that I could move up in the world, and I'd certainly make her breakfast or make breakfast with her every day.
Because she's got it. I don't know how else to explain it. I know she's a regular person. I know that she has weaknesses and quirks and undesirables in her past. I know that there is so much about her that I don't know, and lots of things that might make me feel uncomfortable. I know that one day, she'll get wrinkles and get saggy and all of the other realities of age. But, including all of that, not ignoring it, she's perfect.
And she's got a charm that will knock your socks off.
I've never looked her in the eye and told her how serious I am. That would ruin it. I've told her how wonderful she is, including her inner and outer beauty. We've joked about her capacity for enchantment endlessly. Meaningfully, but playfully. But when it comes to that critical connection I know that “part of our magic is what's not said.” Sacred words from her. But she knows.
I don't expect it to “go anywhere” – I don't expect it to be anything other than what it is, and what it will be. That in and of itself, is perfect and wonderful. We are, uncompromisingly, who we are. But I wanted to tell someone: I needed to tell someone straight.
I want her.
I was there that day, when those Bastard children appeared. Don't ask me what happened. I don't really know. I know that I was in the middle of finally writing my own story. I know that one of the first ones to die was my Beloved.
I know that I didn't finish.
And then, I know that I blacked out.
Psalm 96
The best thing about the three of us, is that we never know what's going to come next....
Or who's cumming first!
When I awoke I was here on this beach. Ever since, I have been here with no knowledge of how it came to be, or how I am to return. No matter how far I walked down the beach, or into the trees, the place remained the same. The same beautiful horizon, and vibrant tree-line. Here, there is almost no semblance of the City that I once knew. Almost.
It was when I was uprooting in mourning that I first noticed the subtle similarity. I had finally allowed myself to admit what I had lost, and in a rage I began tearing at anything I had the strength to destroy. When I paused, plants in hand, I saw it. The plants here all had a majesty about them, but deep within the old roots something strange was gnarled. So much vitality combined with so much absence had caused the place to yearn. And aimless, nameless, unrecognized yearning has a way of twisting itself into an entirely different kind of villainy. Once I noticed it, everything here seemed... different.
I had to find things to pass the time – I could never starve nor overheat, nor lack for any other physical sustenance, but was otherwise left to my own devices. I refused to grow the same roots, to succumb to the saturation of insanity.
I will not bore you with my efforts – the summary was simple: nothing worked. Everything I did offered the same reflection.
Psalm 108
How can we be so perfect and yet so imperfect? We have all of the puzzle pieces, and they fit, but we just don't work. Everyone thinks we should be together. We understand each other and enjoy each other's company. So where is that spark? Are we scared? Are we broken? Or is this just the way things are supposed to be?
Why can't we be lovers?
Psalm 109
Me again. She's gone. The truth is, I'd just end up hurting her.
I had given up. As a passing irony I thought that a fitting commemoration to decent would be to finish my own long lost and uncompleted story. There, across the endless sand, and with only the waves to cheer me on, I drew out the whole tale – as it was supposed to have been.
It was a long process, rank of ritual that the place was otherwise devoid of. Each stick-stroke brought me closer to a sense of closure, so that when my final “i” had been dotted and my final “t” had been crossed, I was filled with a solitary contentment.
I would never write that tale again. As I watched the tides come in to wash it all away, I could rest assured that it was Ours, and Ours alone.
Epilogue:
Shortly after the tide had gone out I found myself considering the old walls. Silently I recited the familiar hymns of heartache and hope, slipping in and out of a trance. When I came to, it was evening, and the moonlight highlighted something down the beach from where I had come. My dazed search revealed that it was a large plant of some kind – itself a stark oasis against the horizon of granules. It was like an overgrown rose. The petals shimmered in the starlight.
Methodically, and without thought, I began to trace one of my favorite 6 word stories on the petal. It was the second story from the Red Door that I memorized, and to this day my favorite scripture. As I finished, the petal broke away suddenly and floated up. A sudden breeze carried it into the air and over the treeline.
I don't know where it went, but the roots of that plant were distinctly different.
Psalm 2
I will never regret it. Never.
Saturday, March 6, 2010
In Through the Red Door (Complete)
Yeah, there are a few clubs here, in the City. The usual mix, I guess; lots of filthy dives like this place; an exclusive trans-bar that’s almost im-fuckin-possible to get into, believe me; a rain-blow dance club for the queer kids – you know, the kids looking for cheap sex and even cheaper drugs; a couple of your classier S&M joints, where everyone wears Carnival masks and drooping feathers; and the Red Door.
Well, to be precise, the Red Door used to be here. Now, it’s no longer. I mean, the building is still standing, and the sign is still there, but that’s it. No more lights. No more music, unless the clanging of bones against bones against splintered table legs counts as music.
It was the place to be, the Red Door. Everyone went there, and I mean everyone. Kids from every scene imaginable (even the Vampire kids, who are way too fucking elitist to ever mix with City scum), every kind of trans-creature, even City men in suits and slicked-back hair.
I guess the big twist, and the reason we all went there, is that the Red Door was all about love. Yeah, the front door was red, but if you looked closely you’d see that it was actually a hundred different shades of red, made up of interlocking hearts, some of them the ‘O’ in love, some of them just perfect little hearts, like the ones you make when you’re a kid: fold a piece of paper in half, draw a wing, and cut. The walls inside were painted red too, and we used permanent markers to write on them. Management allowed one love story each; other than that, there weren’t really any rules. I guess there was a whole city’s-worth of love stories written on the walls.
I mean, it’s no fucking wonder the place went insane.
Can I remember what I wrote? Jesus. I actually wrote a lot of things on those walls, to be honest. I don’t remember them all. They were probably mostly long strings of drunken expletives, anyway. I mean, that’s what I do. You’ve figured that out by now, I bet.
I think it was around the time when I first met Fresia that I wrote something coherent. I don’t know. Ask her if she remembers.
Personally, I remember a lot of stupid fucking poems.
Have I ever been in love? Wrong question. Moving the fuck on.
It was a nice place, the Red Door. Not like this place, just another goddamn dive in a city full of goddamn dives. The drinks were good and strong. They had names like ‘The Beatrice’ and ‘Temporary Madness’ and ‘Ophelia’s Cunt’ (yeah, that was my favorite). No black lights to pick out the lint and semen on your dress; they wouldn’t have worked with the red walls. Just dim lamps on each table, and a few rippling spotlights on the dance floor.
I remember one of the songs that was playing that night:
I can't forget I am the sole architect
I built the shadows here
I built the growl in the voice I fear
‘The growl in the voice I fear’. That’s good shit, right? Something about those lines always gets me, I don’t know what it is.
Hey pretty, don’t you wanna take a ride with me,
Through my world?
I was there with all the regulars that night, I guess. Fresia (we were on a downward slope, me and her, but we were still fucking, of course, and drinking even more), Gabe, Vito. Vito and I danced all night. Fresia was tired and heavy because of the pills, and I think maybe another surgery. Honestly, I wasn’t very attentive at that point. Fresia was…boring me, I guess.
I hate it.
I hate that I hurt her, that I let myself get bored. Fuck. I wasn’t at my best.
Anyway. Moving the fuck on. Things are better now, and that’s a story for another time. Yeah, there’s always another story.
Gabe doesn’t dance, so he sat at the table with Fresia, drinking and smoking, while Vito and I writhed on the dance floor. Funny that Gabe doesn’t dance; I don’t know many fags who don’t, especially fags who are on as much E as Gabe was that night. Gabe’s weird for a gay boy, though. He doesn’t fit the mold. But fuck was he high that night. I don’t even know how much he remembers. When Fresia brings it up he just glares at her. Which isn’t all that unusual for Gabe, actually. Ornery fucker.
Anyway, Vito and I were on the dance floor, dancing as if our lives depended on it. That’s what we do, me and Vito; we whirl like the Allah freaks you see in Edenwood. Except we aren’t lost in some bullshit religious revelry; we dance because it’s pure sex, and we like how our bodies feel, sliding against the slippery skin of strangers, thrusting our hips, grinding along the hipbones of those same strangers. It feels pretty fucking good.
A trans-boy with silky cat-ears and a tail that whipped sinuously around my waist felt me up with hands that were more paws than fingers. His claws dug into my thighs. Delicious. A Vampire kid was crawling on the floor, trawling for blood. It nipped at my ankle and I kicked it in the ribs. It scuttled away, crab-walking between boots and fuck-me pumps. Excuse the hippy bullshit talk, but there was a good vibe in the air.
I ain’t happy, feeling glad
I got sunshine in a bag
I’m useless, but not for long
The future is coming on
Is coming on
Is coming on
I didn’t hear anything coming.
Is coming on
Is coming on
Cat-boy’s paws were all over me, and damn it if I didn’t care. Fresia could have been watching, I didn’t give a fuck, and I bet she was watching; I got a sick thrill out of it, her watching me grinding against a man, all cock and tail and teeth (yeah, I know how fucking bad it sounds, but I was a bitch back then, and I’m a bitch now, and fuck it; I tell the truth, I remember things as they were, and I tell a goddamn good story). Vito danced next to me, his tight little ass rubbing against my hip, and I saw him meet Gabe’s eyes and smile, like a fucking coy little schoolgirl. The heat between those two, the friction; it always made me sick, and still does.
The spotlights were swirling pink and purple and red; red lights against red walls, it was like dancing inside the pulsating fleshy walls of a womb, all heat and the stink of blood and pussy.
See these eyes so green
I can stare for a thousand years
There was something underneath the music, then, and the floor bucked.
A low growl, different from the thumping bass in the song. I mean really different. The Vampire kids hissed, and cat-boy did too.
I backed away from cat-boy, and there was another growl.
It's been so long
And I've been putting out fire
With gasoline
‘Enough!’
The growl was like a goddamn earthquake, I mean it shook the floor in that place, and tables toppled right the fuck over. The music ended when the voice shouted, and all that was left, now, was the crash of falling glasses and the rumbling growl. I don’t even know where it was coming from. It sounded like it was coming from the walls and the floor and the fucking tectonic plates of the goddamn earth.
Fresia looked at me. I could tell she was terrified. I didn’t go to her. Yeah, I know. I bloody well know what I am, thanks. Vito had run to Gabe, and they were holding each other. Fucking love. I stayed where I was.
Another growl and the floor buckled in a few places. People were scrambling for the door, rushing past me towards the exits, Vampires and trans-folk and City men alike. I guess we were united once in Love and once again in Fear, and not much else.
Fuck profundity.
Cat-boy was on all fours; I hadn’t realized how feral he was, more cat than boy. From the Borderlands, I guessed. They haven’t evolved too much out there. He was poised like a housecat eyeing a mouse; back rippled, lips pulled back, tale twitching. Sexy as hell.
‘Enough!’ the voice said again. I couldn’t see where it was coming from, not over the bodies rushing past, but when it spoke again it bellowed, and it sounded like there were a thousand goddamn growls rippling through every letter. Fuck. What a sound. I can’t explain it. I can still hear it, but I can’t explain it.
‘Enough! We consecrate this place in the name of all the forgotten Gods. They are angry, people. They haven’t forgotten about you, and they’ve been watching.’
Finally I could see the speaker, and you won’t believe me, but it was a fucking child, striding out of the crowd, a goddamn prepubescent boy with oily black hair covering his eyes, barefoot, wearing dirty fucking jeans and a ripped t-shirt, just a child, but that voice.
I can still hear it, but I can’t explain it.
‘They’ve been watching, and they see you for what you are. Filthy.’
The crowd was quiet and still now – I mean, who would want to fuck with that voice? – and I could tell he liked it, the attention, although the way he spit out the word ‘filthy’, I think he really meant it. I think he fucking hated us. I could taste it.
Another growl. I swear it was coming from the walls. Coming from the air.
Cat-boy was poised, swaying slightly. Fucking predators. So goddamn predictable.
‘We’ve come to show you what nihilism is. We’ve come to show you the depths,’ the boy said, and now more kids in rags were advancing from the corners of the Red Door, and spilling through the main door, their filthy forearms and foreheads marked with symbols I couldn’t understand – triangles and upside-down crosses, some of them fresh, bloody.
The kids had knives and razor blades, the ragged lids of discarded soup cans, any goddamn weapons they could scrounge, I guess. Still the fucking growls that seemed to be coming from the walls.
I was hooked; I mean, I couldn’t move. I have a pretty damn sharp instinct for self-fucking-preservation, but this was something I’d never seen before. An army of street kids with prison shivs looking to take on a club-full of misfits? Sick, I know, but I wanted to watch the war.
I wasn’t even looking for Fresia.
The kids were scattered around the crowd now, and fuck it if I couldn’t smell the blood already.
‘Are you fucking ready?’ the leader cried, and cat-boy hissed; he leaped onto the speaker’s back, tearing into the boy’s neck with his claws. I’ve never heard anything like the roar that came next, and to be honest, I hope to fucking god I never do. It was all fury and noise after that; Vampires laughed their weird laughs and sunk their teeth into their neighbour's throats; they can’t help themselves, not when they smell blood. City men, who don’t belong in our world and should never visit, made their way towards the exits, and trampled other City men and their trans-escorts on the way; the walls were dappled black with the shadows of impossible claws, claws and paws like I’d never seen before. It was all cacophony, but I could still hear the growls.
I can still hear them, but I can’t explain them.
Of course Fresia saved my life; that’s just the kind of girl she is. She grabbed my arm and pulled me through the awful dying crowd, along with Gabe and Vito. Fresia is at least a head taller than anyone in any given room, and she’s strong. We got out, and didn’t stop running until we were blocks away from the Red Door, although we could still hear the growls; I think the whole City could hear them. The growling, and the screaming.
I don’t know how anyone got any fucking sleep that night. I mean, how could you? If you heard that noise, how could you ever sleep again?
We stood there and listened to the war, and the wail of the sirens. Cop car after cop car after ambulance after fire truck. They didn’t do much; they only saved a few people, and the wrong people at that. I remember the straights were in a fucking tizzy that Vampire kids had been saved. Scourge of the earth, and all that.
We came out of it okay, though. Me and Fresia and Gabe and Vito, we were fine. Obviously. We’re all still here. I don’t think any of us knows exactly what happened that night, or why; although I got a second taste of something, something touched and off, later, when I visited the Edge. I know all about the symbols now.
Yeah. That’s another story.
This one’s almost done, I think. Not much more to tell.
Fresia and I broke up, for good, pretty soon after. Sometimes we talk about what happened that night; sometimes we don’t. I prefer it when we don’t, to be honest. Like I said, the Red Door is still standing, or at least the building is. If you want to see it for yourself, hey, it’s your choice. Two blocks down, turn left, you can’t miss it.
Check out the scratches on the walls, but only if you’re looking for a new nightmare.
Enough. I’m done now.
Well, to be precise, the Red Door used to be here. Now, it’s no longer. I mean, the building is still standing, and the sign is still there, but that’s it. No more lights. No more music, unless the clanging of bones against bones against splintered table legs counts as music.
It was the place to be, the Red Door. Everyone went there, and I mean everyone. Kids from every scene imaginable (even the Vampire kids, who are way too fucking elitist to ever mix with City scum), every kind of trans-creature, even City men in suits and slicked-back hair.
I guess the big twist, and the reason we all went there, is that the Red Door was all about love. Yeah, the front door was red, but if you looked closely you’d see that it was actually a hundred different shades of red, made up of interlocking hearts, some of them the ‘O’ in love, some of them just perfect little hearts, like the ones you make when you’re a kid: fold a piece of paper in half, draw a wing, and cut. The walls inside were painted red too, and we used permanent markers to write on them. Management allowed one love story each; other than that, there weren’t really any rules. I guess there was a whole city’s-worth of love stories written on the walls.
I mean, it’s no fucking wonder the place went insane.
Can I remember what I wrote? Jesus. I actually wrote a lot of things on those walls, to be honest. I don’t remember them all. They were probably mostly long strings of drunken expletives, anyway. I mean, that’s what I do. You’ve figured that out by now, I bet.
I think it was around the time when I first met Fresia that I wrote something coherent. I don’t know. Ask her if she remembers.
Personally, I remember a lot of stupid fucking poems.
Have I ever been in love? Wrong question. Moving the fuck on.
It was a nice place, the Red Door. Not like this place, just another goddamn dive in a city full of goddamn dives. The drinks were good and strong. They had names like ‘The Beatrice’ and ‘Temporary Madness’ and ‘Ophelia’s Cunt’ (yeah, that was my favorite). No black lights to pick out the lint and semen on your dress; they wouldn’t have worked with the red walls. Just dim lamps on each table, and a few rippling spotlights on the dance floor.
I remember one of the songs that was playing that night:
I can't forget I am the sole architect
I built the shadows here
I built the growl in the voice I fear
‘The growl in the voice I fear’. That’s good shit, right? Something about those lines always gets me, I don’t know what it is.
Hey pretty, don’t you wanna take a ride with me,
Through my world?
I was there with all the regulars that night, I guess. Fresia (we were on a downward slope, me and her, but we were still fucking, of course, and drinking even more), Gabe, Vito. Vito and I danced all night. Fresia was tired and heavy because of the pills, and I think maybe another surgery. Honestly, I wasn’t very attentive at that point. Fresia was…boring me, I guess.
I hate it.
I hate that I hurt her, that I let myself get bored. Fuck. I wasn’t at my best.
Anyway. Moving the fuck on. Things are better now, and that’s a story for another time. Yeah, there’s always another story.
Gabe doesn’t dance, so he sat at the table with Fresia, drinking and smoking, while Vito and I writhed on the dance floor. Funny that Gabe doesn’t dance; I don’t know many fags who don’t, especially fags who are on as much E as Gabe was that night. Gabe’s weird for a gay boy, though. He doesn’t fit the mold. But fuck was he high that night. I don’t even know how much he remembers. When Fresia brings it up he just glares at her. Which isn’t all that unusual for Gabe, actually. Ornery fucker.
Anyway, Vito and I were on the dance floor, dancing as if our lives depended on it. That’s what we do, me and Vito; we whirl like the Allah freaks you see in Edenwood. Except we aren’t lost in some bullshit religious revelry; we dance because it’s pure sex, and we like how our bodies feel, sliding against the slippery skin of strangers, thrusting our hips, grinding along the hipbones of those same strangers. It feels pretty fucking good.
A trans-boy with silky cat-ears and a tail that whipped sinuously around my waist felt me up with hands that were more paws than fingers. His claws dug into my thighs. Delicious. A Vampire kid was crawling on the floor, trawling for blood. It nipped at my ankle and I kicked it in the ribs. It scuttled away, crab-walking between boots and fuck-me pumps. Excuse the hippy bullshit talk, but there was a good vibe in the air.
I ain’t happy, feeling glad
I got sunshine in a bag
I’m useless, but not for long
The future is coming on
Is coming on
Is coming on
I didn’t hear anything coming.
Is coming on
Is coming on
Cat-boy’s paws were all over me, and damn it if I didn’t care. Fresia could have been watching, I didn’t give a fuck, and I bet she was watching; I got a sick thrill out of it, her watching me grinding against a man, all cock and tail and teeth (yeah, I know how fucking bad it sounds, but I was a bitch back then, and I’m a bitch now, and fuck it; I tell the truth, I remember things as they were, and I tell a goddamn good story). Vito danced next to me, his tight little ass rubbing against my hip, and I saw him meet Gabe’s eyes and smile, like a fucking coy little schoolgirl. The heat between those two, the friction; it always made me sick, and still does.
The spotlights were swirling pink and purple and red; red lights against red walls, it was like dancing inside the pulsating fleshy walls of a womb, all heat and the stink of blood and pussy.
See these eyes so green
I can stare for a thousand years
There was something underneath the music, then, and the floor bucked.
A low growl, different from the thumping bass in the song. I mean really different. The Vampire kids hissed, and cat-boy did too.
I backed away from cat-boy, and there was another growl.
It's been so long
And I've been putting out fire
With gasoline
‘Enough!’
The growl was like a goddamn earthquake, I mean it shook the floor in that place, and tables toppled right the fuck over. The music ended when the voice shouted, and all that was left, now, was the crash of falling glasses and the rumbling growl. I don’t even know where it was coming from. It sounded like it was coming from the walls and the floor and the fucking tectonic plates of the goddamn earth.
Fresia looked at me. I could tell she was terrified. I didn’t go to her. Yeah, I know. I bloody well know what I am, thanks. Vito had run to Gabe, and they were holding each other. Fucking love. I stayed where I was.
Another growl and the floor buckled in a few places. People were scrambling for the door, rushing past me towards the exits, Vampires and trans-folk and City men alike. I guess we were united once in Love and once again in Fear, and not much else.
Fuck profundity.
Cat-boy was on all fours; I hadn’t realized how feral he was, more cat than boy. From the Borderlands, I guessed. They haven’t evolved too much out there. He was poised like a housecat eyeing a mouse; back rippled, lips pulled back, tale twitching. Sexy as hell.
‘Enough!’ the voice said again. I couldn’t see where it was coming from, not over the bodies rushing past, but when it spoke again it bellowed, and it sounded like there were a thousand goddamn growls rippling through every letter. Fuck. What a sound. I can’t explain it. I can still hear it, but I can’t explain it.
‘Enough! We consecrate this place in the name of all the forgotten Gods. They are angry, people. They haven’t forgotten about you, and they’ve been watching.’
Finally I could see the speaker, and you won’t believe me, but it was a fucking child, striding out of the crowd, a goddamn prepubescent boy with oily black hair covering his eyes, barefoot, wearing dirty fucking jeans and a ripped t-shirt, just a child, but that voice.
I can still hear it, but I can’t explain it.
‘They’ve been watching, and they see you for what you are. Filthy.’
The crowd was quiet and still now – I mean, who would want to fuck with that voice? – and I could tell he liked it, the attention, although the way he spit out the word ‘filthy’, I think he really meant it. I think he fucking hated us. I could taste it.
Another growl. I swear it was coming from the walls. Coming from the air.
Cat-boy was poised, swaying slightly. Fucking predators. So goddamn predictable.
‘We’ve come to show you what nihilism is. We’ve come to show you the depths,’ the boy said, and now more kids in rags were advancing from the corners of the Red Door, and spilling through the main door, their filthy forearms and foreheads marked with symbols I couldn’t understand – triangles and upside-down crosses, some of them fresh, bloody.
The kids had knives and razor blades, the ragged lids of discarded soup cans, any goddamn weapons they could scrounge, I guess. Still the fucking growls that seemed to be coming from the walls.
I was hooked; I mean, I couldn’t move. I have a pretty damn sharp instinct for self-fucking-preservation, but this was something I’d never seen before. An army of street kids with prison shivs looking to take on a club-full of misfits? Sick, I know, but I wanted to watch the war.
I wasn’t even looking for Fresia.
The kids were scattered around the crowd now, and fuck it if I couldn’t smell the blood already.
‘Are you fucking ready?’ the leader cried, and cat-boy hissed; he leaped onto the speaker’s back, tearing into the boy’s neck with his claws. I’ve never heard anything like the roar that came next, and to be honest, I hope to fucking god I never do. It was all fury and noise after that; Vampires laughed their weird laughs and sunk their teeth into their neighbour's throats; they can’t help themselves, not when they smell blood. City men, who don’t belong in our world and should never visit, made their way towards the exits, and trampled other City men and their trans-escorts on the way; the walls were dappled black with the shadows of impossible claws, claws and paws like I’d never seen before. It was all cacophony, but I could still hear the growls.
I can still hear them, but I can’t explain them.
Of course Fresia saved my life; that’s just the kind of girl she is. She grabbed my arm and pulled me through the awful dying crowd, along with Gabe and Vito. Fresia is at least a head taller than anyone in any given room, and she’s strong. We got out, and didn’t stop running until we were blocks away from the Red Door, although we could still hear the growls; I think the whole City could hear them. The growling, and the screaming.
I don’t know how anyone got any fucking sleep that night. I mean, how could you? If you heard that noise, how could you ever sleep again?
We stood there and listened to the war, and the wail of the sirens. Cop car after cop car after ambulance after fire truck. They didn’t do much; they only saved a few people, and the wrong people at that. I remember the straights were in a fucking tizzy that Vampire kids had been saved. Scourge of the earth, and all that.
We came out of it okay, though. Me and Fresia and Gabe and Vito, we were fine. Obviously. We’re all still here. I don’t think any of us knows exactly what happened that night, or why; although I got a second taste of something, something touched and off, later, when I visited the Edge. I know all about the symbols now.
Yeah. That’s another story.
This one’s almost done, I think. Not much more to tell.
Fresia and I broke up, for good, pretty soon after. Sometimes we talk about what happened that night; sometimes we don’t. I prefer it when we don’t, to be honest. Like I said, the Red Door is still standing, or at least the building is. If you want to see it for yourself, hey, it’s your choice. Two blocks down, turn left, you can’t miss it.
Check out the scratches on the walls, but only if you’re looking for a new nightmare.
Enough. I’m done now.
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