Life is a holiday from oblivion and we go back to work too soon.

Horror is beautiful when it glitters in the dark.

The angels compulsively sing "Holy, Holy, Holy". This is their curse, for within the Song of Holy, they are trapped, forever in stasis. And so they ask: "What is it you want of Heaven, for it will not give you wings. Nor will it give you more of God than what you have already grasped." The girl answers: "I want a blessing."

"Aah," they say. "Has wisdom never taught you its lessons? Are you blind to the reality of your world? For the wicked are not cursed, they are blessed. And the righteous are not blessed, they are cursed."

"What should I do, then, if it's all reversed?"

"Do what is right. But be true to yourself. Love that which is within, whether it be a blessing or a curse. For only from within can you find truth."

There are things not worth wishing for. Wish too hard and you never get it. It's like watching the tea kettle, waiting for the water to boil. Maybe I'm crazy. I'm still emotionally attached to the little girl I used to be, praying every night for the unattainable. If you gain it and it's a gypsy in the internal sense, wandering always, know that it's already lost before it's gained. Anyway, bridges are for burning and wishes are a waste of breath.

How many times will it take for me to learn the lesson? Ad infinitum. I'll never learn. Foolishness is congenital. Incurable. I am yet another victim of the great lottery: a born fool, destined to be dealt out the lessons of consequences-for-actions and to never learn. I learn the theory but not the reality. Hope clings to me like North to South. The magnetic field falls into pretty pictures on the slide. Something within me halts, finds the pattern, stands on the pieces, mimics the image, becomes the pattern of field on the slide. Only there are no opposites attracting. It is only me, myself, and I.

My essence splits down the middle. Call it a soul. I unzip towards the ground and pool there but am still lost. In the background, music plays. Turning up the volume doesn't work anymore. I need something stronger. Wind, rain, a storm. A chance to get hit by lightning. To increase my chances, I climb up a tree. I remember buckets of warm rain, drops the size of fists, bigger. When it begins, I act against protocol; I step out barefoot. I run through the charged air.

Everything is quiet. What is left of me reaches down, connects the zipper, zips me back up. Soul is back together with a hole through the middle. No--it's more serious than that. No overt blemish. Millions of pinholes adding up all over the place. No defined spot. If I were a dress and a tailor looked over me, the holes would declare me unsalvageable. I am rootless. But this gives me the chance to plant myself anywhere....I can't. I'm unable. The roots won't stick. The ground's not right. The road is the only comfortable constant and there is only one reliable thing I've ever found.

Do you want to know me? I'll ask. How can you know the way I felt on a mountain at sunset with a gypsy knowing and not knowing, pleading with his eyes, trying to say what couldn't be said, so he said it anyway and then took it back? How can you know what it is to stare into the sun and not see a thing? To know without a doubt, with absolutely certainty more than you've ever known anything and to be enlightened--it's all wrong. Trust nothing. The greatest truth is a lie up on the mountain with a gypsy claiming soulmates and me reaching out with one hand on a midnight road, doubting, but trusting anyway because I'm the one with the blindfold on and sometimes there's no choice. How can you know my Loneliness? The years of emotion that you can't feel? How can you know how I converted darkness into light just to survive because the congenital foolishness compels me to hope against chance so I hope and I keep on going despite everything? How can you know?

So I say "Take me with you" and it's foolish. I've gone half way around the world and gotten nowhere. I'm stuck in stone. My soul unzips and zips back, always in place. If there's anything I'm not, it's not a wanderer. Forget the physical movement. I go everywhere, rip through roads and airspace. Not once, not once have I moved an inch.

Today is Eve's Day. At least that's how I think of it. It passes like any other day. It passed two years ago, except for Eve, and here we are two years later.

?והלילה אני לבד. חבל. מה עוד חדש

But Eve is alone, too, in that nothingness of death. Today is a day I feel more than usual the world that bleeds. The world bleeds everyday, but on March 5, it bleeds madness and despair all over me. I'm covered in it. At the same time, it's also bleeding laughter and ecstasy. I just can't feel those on March 5. I can't see past Eve on March 5.

So the night grows around me. I speak out loud to no one. My lungs expel poison and my life exudes loneliness. The loneliness pulses and I stand still.

Yesterday I walked for a long time. Where others complain, I celebrate, like I always celebrate gales. There is nothing like a strong wind to walk against. It reminds me of how fragile I am, how lucky I am that somehow in all this Chaos, Chance chose me to be born. It's worth all of it just to stand in a gale, to feel the wind so strong, it almost feels like it pushes all the way through me. My cells separate, the matter out of which I am made disperses momentarily and for one brief moment, I can catch eternity; I become a part of the elusive wind that usually can do nothing more than push me one way or another, or slip slyly through my fingers.

Next to me, an angel waits. Next to me an angel always waits. Tonight, it is silent, but we have become so intimate, I already know what it would say if I asked a question. Sometimes I wonder if I ever had a choice about the angels, if I had a choice of remaining human enough in Mind to fit with my own species, or if I was born already once removed. And I wonder also, if I would have chosen humanity or the Seraphim if given a conscious choice. Memory answers me:

"We dream of each other, Little Girl. Neither of us can cease to be until we both stop dreaming. We are a mutual dream, intertwined thoughts created by and perpetuated by Thought."

The presence of angels prompted another question in me. I will provide the answer: "You want to know what God is, Little Girl? Look in the mirror. Look at the world around you. Look at the nature of our existence. Like you and I, God is a Thought, for we do dream of ourselves, after all."

So I guess Eve isn't so bad off. Someone just stopped dreaming. Maybe an angel is happier now. It went somewhere instead of eternal stagnation. But that still leaves the world empty of her. And I still feel the world bleed on March 5.

January 2, 2010

A friend of mine once told me that miracles work in both directions, so be careful what you wish for.

I grew up in a drought. Well...half. For the first half, I grew up in a swamp. No need to worry about water. If you're not careful enough there, you step outside and walk without looking and all of a sudden, you're knee-deep in mud, marsh grass up to your elbows. American alligators swim around on the bottom, so it's best if you watch your ankles.

It was so wet there the whole goddamned place was a sink hole. What do you expect when you build a city on a swamp? Fill up the swamp all you want with dirt, but nature finds a way, always, and two years later or less you realize God never keeps his promises. The whole God forsaken city gets flooded out, sink holes and all, with water up to the second story windows and the ocean doesn't give a damn. Comes right up to your door, knocking: 'Just came for tea'. If you're lucky enough to survive, you learn about the people it claimed. You watch children rowing boats to school because no one can tell how long the wait will be for the water to recede.

When it's dry again, the house you live in, if you were lucky enough for it to survive, still sits on a swamp. So the cement foundations split down the middle and they're not worth the trouble of repairing. you can tell, because we all played marbles. Put the marble down on one side of the house and its rolls east. Put it down on the other and it rolls west. Don't even think about living in a level world. The second you make the measurements for that kind of dream and try to lay even the cheapest of cement slab foundations, it'll either be split down the middle or drowned.

But maybe the floods and the sink holes and the alligators were worth risking your life on because when you walked outside the air may have been so thick with humidity you could hardly breathe, but what you could breathe in, if you didn't know better, smelled like lemons. If you did know better, you knew that Magnolia trees smell almost like lemons and there were Magnolia trees everywhere. And they were lucky enough not to be Live Oaks strangled by Spanish Moss which kills the trees by suffocation but which is prohibited by l aw to remove.

In my front yard, there was the Magnolia tree of every childhood's dream. The tree was a shelter. From the sun, from the rain. Branches from the ground up to the top. I swear, you could build a city in there, a thousand fortresses. You could build a childhood kingdom in that tree, with a thousand different cultures that could cultivate a million childhood fantasies. With the lemony scent of those fantastic Magnolias permeating every inch of it.

Thing was, the tree was owned by my landlord, who lived next door and kept his eye on that tree like a hound's nose on a fox. Any kid caught thinking of climbing it would topple from that fantasy kingdom of dreams and forts and lemons in a second. They guy would come running out like a rabid hound in his boxer shorts, screaming all the way to Kingdom Come, brandishing a shotgun that he had no qualms with using to blow our heads off.

It's funny how reality can be stranger than fiction, huh? But what else is new?

I went from the swamp, where, seriously , you were cursing water except for maybe when you went out into the maze of the saltwater marshes--which were beautiful. Otters would swim right next to you. And if you were really lucky, maybe a dolphin or two.

But anyway, we moved. At first, the rain was just as bad, but we were inland, so there was no ocean to come in. Raindrops as big as my face. No joke, But then, it stopped. The lake went dry, the trees started falling down, splintered by dryness. We started praying for rain. But it didn't come. It didn't come for fifteen years.

When it finally did come, we didn't need the ocean to come flooding in from the coast. The storms brought he ocean with them. It rained twenty--one inches in two days. For the record, that's almost two feet. But it was raining before that and it rained after. There was a body count again, all the way up there in the mountains. So that's what I mean. Miracles work in two directions. When you wish for rain, someone's going to drown, and if you curse the water, someone else will die of thirst. Inertia doesn't give a damn. What goes around comes around, and then it comes back again.

Some songs break the surface of the soul like knives break skin. I'm the kind of person who listens to songs on repeat because I'm not satisfied with a mere break, but with a stab and a twist. Music digs me and I dig it. I need it to keep breathing. The whole world can flow by, a maelstrom around me, apt to drown me and everyone else along with me in pain and chaos and questions devoid of answers. But music takes me away from all of that. Turn up the music and let the world float away. Let the world rage. Let the world go on and I will walk safely through it, armed with nothing but two headphones and a music player with the volume turned all the way up.

Usually, I'm trapped in time. The past takes over, the present is too all-consuming with empty promises and the future never comes until it's too late. Music takes me away from all that. Music is timeless. I become super-human, a universal being swimming in the universal language. No more worries. No more necessities. No more desires. Everything fulfilled. Just in some notes. Just in some vibrations that come together perfectly in their imperfection like the innocent dreams of a child. I get lost there, more than I ever did in people. More than I ever did in broken hearts or wishes never granted. If I could, I would keep it playing constantly. I would keep it playing so everything disappears. But, I suppose, beauty cannot be fully appreciated without its opposite. So I welcome the sadness, too. I welcome the chaos. Where would I be without it?

True, I am torn between loathing these two polar opposites for what they do to me and my race, and loving them...for what they do to me and my race. They are both inherent within us, and they tear us apart and bring us together. So I escape to music, where chaos and beauty can be one and I can transcend the Human while being uplifted by one of our greatest feats. This is the mystery I have been long wanting to solve: what keeps me going in the face of hopelessness? The yin-yang nature of the beauty-chaos. I exist on the line in between and I bleed into both and they both bleed into me. We share a mutual existence, like the angel Uriel tried to explain to me once a long, long time ago: we exist because we dream of each other and neither can stop until the other ceases. It is an endless battle. But it is only a battle if we look at it as such. Really, it's an endless gift, but gifts are worth prices, and as always, I am willing to pay the price. The price is worth it. The price is worth it.

A Story

"To get to the point," he said, sprawled naked across the bed sheets, "nobody plans on being born." He sat up on his elbow for a second and tapped his cigarette in the ashtray on the bedside table before taking another drag. "In fact," he continued, "no one plans on getting conceived, either, do they?" He laughed and threw his head back. "But I suppose all life is between those two points--life and death--is what the departure and the terminus are, as well: one big series of fucks. Look at us, after all." He stroked her cheek and she turned away from him.

"Aww, baby, don't be a snub," he said and the smoke swirled around them.
"Do you think we're arriving at the terminus now?" she asked and smiled.
"Aren't we always? Fucks can be prolonged."
"Or cut short."
She tipped her head to the side but kept her back to him.
"Oh, don't be cliche, dear. Half, empty, half full, prolonged, cut short. Either way, we're here now."
"And there's that whole big world out there just waiting..." She turned her head slightly towards him. He sat up.
"Do me a favor," he said.
"What?"
"Whatever comes after this, we go outside, t he world stands still, it starts turning, we fall off--write me down in those autobiographies of yours. Sprinkle a little fantasy on it. Just make me larger than life."
She laughed and stood up, casting a shadow across the bed and onto the wall behind.
"You're already larger than life."
He put his cigarette out, got out of bed, and slipped his arms around her from behind.
"How?" he said.
"If life is just a cup and half empty or half full, well, we're both bigger than a glass."
The two of them stood in silence in the half-light that came in through the curtains and swayed in unison.
"Then let's say it this way: make sure I'm the water."
"Why not air?"
"Air's old hat. Water means resistance. You have to work in it. More true to what all this," he waved his arm around, "what all this really is."
"What is it, do you think?"
"A struggle not to drown, of course," he said and circled around to face her. "But I have you."
"One man survives a shipwreck easier alone than with another," she answered.
He smiled and held her closer.
"But remember? I'm the water. I just decide who to spare and who to swallow."
"Would you swallow me?"
"No, dear. I become you. You are my great river and I meet you right here, at the estuary."
"So we're safe until the water dries up?"
"Perhaps. Otherwise, we're just back to the beginning again, not planning on dying and not planning on getting born."
"But living anyway."
"Yes, dear. Such is life."