Dear Meier,
I should have left Virginia sooner than I did but there something keeping me here. I don’t know what it was. It could have been fate or God or my own inadequate to move on in my life, to let things go and just start over. The past is a dark tree wrapping it's blackened roots around me, and I can’t break free.
I don’t want to break free.
There is something comforting in the past, the pain, the joy, the familiarity? Yes, all of it. I don’t have to find new hurts or new people if I live in my little tree house on the branch of the black tree cursing down at all of you. I can be alone with my thoughts.
I should have left Virginia sooner.
After Aphrodite l had left me I was lost for a while; I needed to be alone because my past pushed someone great from my life, again. I needed to clear my head, so I did the best thing for me and went to town every night. I sat in the bar with all the guys until they kicked us out. I spend hours with my friends at their house and never went back to the studio.
It is a product of our time to be alone among people. I’ve seen it for a while now. We created this fake persona about ourselves and blasted our vulnerabilities online to lie to everyone who read our little posts or tweets or whatever. It’s a lie all of it. A game we play with the world letting people believe they are getting to see the real us, but in all reality, it’s just making us feel more alone. We watch the pictures of lives we long for pop on own screens, and we see the woman we want, but they are not real because they are as fake as our persons being broadcast to the world. It’s a lie we love telling ourselves.
The best part of it all or the worst part of it; that scares me is if it gets much worst, I’m going to need a way off this rock. If we get to make these little fantasies online, create these characters we can play, dance on the stage of the web and never have to face ourselves in the mirror, then I’m not sure I can handle it. The more people who we surround ourselves with the last we have to be alone with our thoughts. And yet, the cosmic irony of it all is we feel even more alone than any other generation before.
I’m not saying the net is all bad or social media is the bane of our time. I don’t think it is a cancer of modern life, I just think for people like me, it’s the next drug to overcome. I’m someone who loves his loneliness and dwells his room so much that I deeply want someone in my life. I fear to be alone because it is easy, the neutral state of the very person I am. I want to be in love for all the reason anyone does but I know, I can and will be satisfied with a locked door and no one around.
Not like it’s fair to have someone in my life right now anyways. I would need someone who could fix perfectly into the hole and wouldn’t mind being a lockout when I needed it. When I want to be alone, I want it. I’ll shut the door, cut the phone off and crawl under my bed to be away from people so I can create and think. I’ll open the door when I’m ready, not when they need it and I would only use them to shut my brain off for a while. I’m not talking about sex here. I know it is an easy place for our minds to go, no I’m talking about being around them.
When I’m around people, I don’t have to worry about my work or what is going on in my head. My skull hissed at the thoughts, and I go brain dead for a bit. The human companion is the drug which dulls the pain or the muse for a while. I don’t have to or can think when I’m hanging around people. It is why I stay for so long at the bars for a few weeks. If I were to be by myself for a while, then I would think.
I think about the monster and why I keep ever lover away from me. I would run over the moments I messed everything up with my past lovers, knowing I was doing it on purpose, so they could never see the monster. I would do again to the next one and the one after that. Maybe, I’m punishing myself with this loneliness, but maybe, I deserve it.
God, are we not just a bundle of little paradoxes or is it just me? I want to be in love and yet, be alone to create. I feel the most alone around people, and I’m using my love for something to punish myself. Maybe, the punishment isn’t the loneliness but the hope it will die away? Maybe, I’m beating myself up with the dream and idea of falling in love? Maybe, I’m just one big paradox no one should have to deal with … mostly me.
I got low one night. I was weak, and the weight of my actions was too much for me to deal with anymore. I got low, very low, one night. I couldn’t take dreaming of your face wrap tears any longer. I couldn’t take the burning in my bones like someone was boiling them anymore. The creak in my heart was from missing all the people who pass on, and I was left to deal with their ghost. I couldn’t. I didn’t want too.
I say again, I got low and fell into a dark hole that night.
I climb out into the storm, the pouring rain, the dancing lightning, and the wrath of God. I went looking for him, the Lord. I want to toss my fists at him. I want to scream at him for creating this world, for me, for everything I did. I want to beg him to let me see all the dead again. Why couldn’t I sit with them one more time? Why couldn’t I whispered all the words I never got to say to them once more?
I spoke the dead, so many time during the night the hear nothing back from them. I spoke to the Lord during those dark nights only to feel lost and alone under my bed. I hear Him knocking at my door wanting to come into my room but the pain in my chest kept me at bay.
No longer did the pain keep me at bay. I went looking for the Lord in the storm, in the hill, and the hopes I would find my Death instead. I walked into that storm for hours and found neither. I walked until my legs fell heavy and the last rains drop kissed me goodbye. Once the last drum in the sky rung out through the valley, I let the sound pushed me to the ground.
I waited for the sun to rise.
I planned on never going back home. I planned one dying out in those hills. I was done. It was over, and I could no longer take this life anymore. I needed to be free of it. I passed out sometime before morning.
Morpheus blessed me with a sweet dream of flight. I felt as if the Lord’s hand reached down picking me off the ground and carrying me through the air. I was in a blanket of light and heading home to see all the lost ones. I was going to sit in Heaven with all the angels and marvel at the world beneath us.
I woke back in the Lost Lands and back at my house. I had been set gently at the door like a child. I rub my eyes thinking maybe Morpheus’s dream lead to me back to safety, but the large footprint in front of my told a different story. The footprint was the size of a small car, and I wasn’t sure how to react to the sight of it.
My eyes darted from one side of the house to the next and found nothing. I walked to the middle of the footprint and looked around and again found nothing. I sighed deeply and stepped out heading for the door when I heard the thundering voice behind me.
Not only was the voice the strength of thunder but it sounds the same as well. I turn around to see a tall white face, white like clouds against the blue sky. The kind of white which was unnatural, to say the least. His eyes had the firing of lightening jump around in the iris, and his hair flowed like the gray thunderheads from the night before. He smiled showing no teeth and said, softly, “Ah, you are alive.”
Softly for a giant and not to my ears. The voice sounded like a man who turns his bass up too high in his car and everything around him bounce with his music. It hurt my face to listen to him.
“I am,” I said back, “but not for much longer if you keep talking so loud.”
He whispered as softly as he could, “I’m sorry little one.”
Little one, how odd to be called that now in my life, but I was nothing more than an ant to him.
“May I ask what you were doing out in the storm last night?”
“You may,” I told him, “but I may not answer.”
“Fair enough.” He nodded at me. He sat down in front of me with the world shaking a little.
We talked for a while, and I found out he was a giant who was the smallest of his people and so, he left in search of something new. He was traveling through these hills riding the storm when he spotted me walking in it. Once I passed out, he came down to carry me home and to make sure I survived.
“How did you know where I lived?”
He smiled back with his pointed chin and long lips to tell me, “Aphrodite sends her love.”
He asked again why I was in the storm and I told him … “Looking for God.”
“Did you find him?”
“Not yet,” I said hearing the distance knocking of someone at the door.
“I didn’t think you would,” he said. “Because you are not looking for him. You are lying to yourself if you think that is what is going on.”
“I am not,” said I.
“But you are,” he told me. “You know where God is. You know how to find him and yet you run from him, why?”
Why…What an easy thing to ask, what an impossible thing to answer.
How does one answer this question? It is not like I could walk up to some tree pull the answer off the branch and tossed it to him as if it was an apple. Here. Here is what you are looking for and all I had to do was find this tree. A tree which is not real.
Why… I sat against my door half listening to the giant tell me about his land and his people. The question was being drilled into my mind blocking out everything else in my ears. Why? Why? Why?
Near the edge of the day the giant rose and told me he must be moving on. I must have been in a daze because I didn’t notice him leaving until the earth moved a little from his feet. “Wait…”
“Yes?”
“He saved me,” I yelled at the giant. “He saved my life so many times from dying. He gave me a purpose and yet, I have fucked it up. I let the demons get a whole of my mind and for what? I just go back to him with all these scars, all these messes I have in me and tell Him what I did. He didn’t save me to hurt people. He didn’t save me to mess all these up, to waste my life chasing after lust, pain, and all the other shit of the world. He saved me for something more, and I am sitting in the hills wasting it away because I can’t bear to face Him for what I did. So, you are right; I’m not looking for Him. I‘m looking for a way to go back to Him, to clean myself off, to step back in His house.”
This was about the time I suspected the giant to speak to me about forgiveness. I was such the words were about to come out of his mouth, and he was going to tell me how the Lord doesn’t care about all the things I did wrong, he would forgive me anyways. The giant should have told me how if I just open the door the Lord would heal my wounds and I would be free from all of this, but he didn’t. It wasn’t the Lord I was looking to find forgiveness from. It wasn’t you either. It was me. I was trying to forgive myself. Maybe, the thunder in the giant’s eyes saw that in me.
He smiled and winked, and all he said was, “Well, good luck then.” He left me standing there trying to understand what the words I yelled out into the world meant now. The words which left my mouth only to become real in the air. I sat back down watching the giant catch another storm to ride away and knew it was time to move on. Virginia was no longer home for me, but I wasn’t sure where to head next. I guess I’ll just let the wind carry me away.
With a Handshake,
Zack Amor
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