"Well, it comes down to this, Candace."
"What's that?"
"What do you want more than anything in the world?"
Candace stared off into the horizon for a few moments and a smile spread across her lips. The answer to that was easy.
"I want my boys," she said. "And I want to take them with me on the road. Their lives will be amazing. We'll have the freedom of the road and make it...somehow."
"Then do what you have to do."
Candace nodded and slapped her hands against her knees, then got up and brushed the dust off her jeans.

My mother meant it. And her life makes a good story, all the way up until the end. She told me and my brother our lives were special. Not just because we were two of a kind and one of a kind in the pair, but because we were hers. We were hers and lucky, too, because she made us American down to the bone. There wasn't an inch of this country we didn't run through. And there wasn't a good moment or a bad circumstance we never saw.

It was hard, I guess. Especially in the beginning. But I couldn't settle for it. Not ever. And by the time I grew up, I guess you could say I was glad for it. I didn't want to settle and couldn't see eye to eye with anyone who could.

Arcadia Run

I think there's something more than memory inside everyone. It's more than imagination, too. I think it's a mixture of both. For the past few years, since my little project about chasing after wind, I've been in a drought almost as bad as the Southeast when it comes to writing anything worth more than week old stale shit. Yeah, you'll disagree. I know you. But trust me. Stale shit.

But a few weeks ago I found the key to a door that's been being beaten on for a while now and the story finally came out. I found it inside me as a mixture of memory and fiction and when both of those combine with the correct proportions, the result is something resembling truth and truth is only a feeling. Truth is never definite except in the moment because it's only an emotion. We know those are fickle and fleeting, but remain in memory and in the back of our minds like dreams.

So, for better or worse, I wrote this story called Arcadia Run. If you really look hard into that title (or if you're really smart) you'll find that it's an allusion to Paradise Lost. Which it is. But it's also a play on that. Because it's the first real piece of writing I've come up with since In Pursuit of Wind. So, really, it's Paradise regained. I'm really lame on the puns here, but I'm enjoying it. And for the story's sake, it really is Arcadia Run because somewhere in the course of a night, a little boy turned to stone against a house while his mother died for freedom and in the morning, the boy was gone, replaced by an adult. I edited it a little. He couldn't move in the end, either. So he's in a stasis like all of us whose daemons have settled.

But is that good or bad? I don't know. And since everything over the past eleven months, since I shut the door to the angels (for the most part), I've been wondering if I really should. They're always knocking anyway. And every time I pass the gypsy like just under an hour ago, I feel the loss pounding at my door and slam it shut before it breaks me down all the way again. I've turned into stone, a bitchy, evil stone because I can't deal with that hurt. How do I deal with that? Go on the run. Run, on the road, but inside I'm grounded. I'm not a gypsy like that. I know myself. The door's ajar to prospects and hope.

Arcadia done run from me. And I saw myself hangin' in that tree with the fog and the smoke all around and I knew that I died on the edge of the cliff that night and I'm alone.

It's all an illusion. But illusions be sweet, don't they? I'm conflicted. I'd rather be disillusioned than the subject of a lie, but the dream is beautiful and someone once told me that love wasn't for trusting, it was for getting lost in. But the moment you're out of that maze, all the walls come crashing down.

Is the risk worth it?

I'm ready for the road again, the kind where I'm alone and all I feel is motion.

A year ago, I believe, was the happiest time of my entire life. Only I was terrified of it, so I lost it. I guess most of us lose most things, especially the good ones. That's all right, I suppose. It teaches a lesson...or however you want to interpret it.

On the music scene: Martin Sexton (again) "Freedom of the Road". He's had enough of that "freedom of the road" but I'm the opposite. I've had enough of stagnation. Lately, there's no time for that, because I've filled it up with things. I finally got some dirt on Melusine. The mermaid/snake fairy tale I became a little obsessed with in Luxembourg. Lucky me, though, my Classics professor is letting me research her, so I went up to the haunted third floor of the library, making my way through the secret staircases through the middle and picking out a couple of books. Half of them are in German and I have no clue how I'm going to get through that.

Otherwise, though, I'm busy with other things. Puritan poetry that really makes me want to gag most of the time with its utmost sappiness and extremism: love, love, love or hell. I'm the kind who likes a happy medium, no extremes.

I don't know if I mentioned this, but I ditched anatomy. So I'm down to four classes and two jobs and no labs. Best decision I ever made. I had dreams three nights in a row saying "You dropped anatomy. Look how happy you are." I figured it was a divine message. So I took the advice, and lo and behold, I felt amazing afterwards.

SciFi is incredible, as expected. The War of the Worlds is the reading for this week. I'm almost done with it. Last week was Frankenstein, again, and it just gets better every time.

In Creative Writing, I finally pushed out a story (after fifteen drafts or so in fourteen days) that I'm proud. If any of you want to look at it, it's not even six pages, so you're welcome. It's completely different from my usual experimental literary junk, and more pulp, more readable, and more enjoyable in general. The bad thing is, I have to write a new one for next Tuesday and workshop it for the whole class. I guess I'll come up with something.

But Rosh Hashanah starts tomorrow night and I'm leaving campus for that until Friday. It'll be good to have a break.

Overall: life is amazing. And when I compare it with a year ago, maybe it's better. Because this year, my happiness is genuine, it's real, and not based on an illusion and a lie. No, complete bliss doesn't shoot through me, but there's that baseline of happiness that's always there, no matter what. That water is rising, too, and it's about time this island submerged.

Speaking of islands, John Donne came up recently and like I've said since I read his essay, I still say I disagree: all men are islands. It just depends whether you count the dots on the horizon and if you really take the water in between seriously. I'd rather be an island than not, though, because "a rock feels no pain and an island never cries."

"Alison!"
"No, Mac. Not anymore."
"What do you think this is, huh? You think you're alone in this, Al? You're not. And I've been in this longer."
"Not harder."
"I lost my sister. I lost everything."
"You don't get it, Mac! You never got it because you never knew the truth. You were always running after the wrong one! You still are."
"You're still blaming yourself on Margaret. It was the Knight. Not you. You know Zeus. He doesn't take place holders."
"God damn it, Mac! There's no such thing as the god damned Black Knight. You chopped off her leg that night and I know it. She watched Athena jump and she could've saved her but she didn't. She shot the fucking Minister even though she knew the history behind it. It was a ploy. And I was a part of it."
"How? How were you a part of it, Alison? The Knight is a rival."
"No, Mac. Zeus made all of us. There are no rivals. Just us and NOCs that no one knows about. We play double. That's what he did with the Second Generation. And this'll be our whole life. And mine. Caught up in it because even though we hate it we can't live without it. We don't know anything else."
"You're going crazy like Margaret."
"It was me, James!" she screamed. "It was me!"
"What was you? What!"
"The Black Knight is your little Alison. I worked against you my whole life. My right leg from the knee down is bionic. And the Black Knight is as much a legend as Sarah Hughes. A multitude of names for one person, all conjuring up a difference sense in the scattered subjects. You're out to kill me and I'm telling you now there's no way you'll succeed unless I let you. But the moment I pull that mask off and you believe me, that knife will be in your chest, not mine. Only you're the one who'll have to live with it, while you turn me into ashes and go on in Olympus. It's all lie. And you might've been in longer. But I think faster. And I only speak the truth."

"Sarah Hughes?"
"Yes?"
The young man looked at her, an undefinable look in his eyes.
"You're called Sarah Hughes?"
"That's my name. Yes."
He gave a curt nod and a scrutinizing stare.
Sarah looked back at him with her arms crossed across her chest, her right foot tapping impatiently on the cement.
"Look, buddy, I don't know who you are or what you want from me but I know you've been following me for three months. And now is not a very good time to be stalking me because everything's already so bloody fucked up in the first place."
The man laughed.
"What the hell are you laughing at?" she said.
His face grew somber again and he swallowed.
"Sarah?"
"How do you know my name?"
He held her eyes and said, "I knew Susan."
Sarah gasped. "Susan?"
"Susan Leight. Yes."
"How?"
"It's a long story."
"Longer than the last year?"
He looked around and Sarah noticed the left corner of his moth curl up in a semi-grin.
"Much."
"Ok. Who are you? And how do you know who I am?"
He took her arm just above the elbow and started leading her down the street.
"I'll tell you but we have to get out of the open. Just walk with me, A--Sarah."
"Ok...I'm starting to get used to strange occurances and I'll just follow you because for some reason I trust you."
"Oh, really? You trust me, aah, Sarah?"
"Well, now you're making me doubt a little."
He led them around a corner and crossed a street Sarah had never been on before.
"I'm called Louis Alan. I know who you are because Jill--I mean, Susan...Susan told me about you and what she told you."
"What the hell do you mean, what she told me? And why did you call her Jill?"
Louis jerked her arm and pulled her down an alley.
"Jesus! Don't say that so loud. Pretend I didn't say it and don't mention it again until we're inside. All right?"
She looked at him wide-eyed and began to doubt having let him lead her away into this unknown section of town.
"Are we almost there?"
"Yeah. Just a few more minutes. Don't speak until then."
"How long is this going to take? My boyfriend is expecting me."
Louis kept walking quickly, pulling her along but she noticed an ever so slight change in his gait when she spoke her last sentence.
"Ok. We're here."
He pulled out a key and opened a black door that was hardly noticeable from the street and pulled her inside.
"It's not much but I've ended up better than the rest of them," he said as if she knew what he was referencing.
"What?"
"Sarah?" he said quietly. "Tell me what she told you. I want to hear it from you."
"She didn't tell me anything. All I know is that there was some crazy bullshit going on with nutcases having heart attacks over my stories and Susan knew about it and told me I was my fucking main character. And then next time I heard from her, it was the police department calling me to identify her body. She didn't tell me anything."
"But she did. You just told me. Jesus Christ!" he hissed and ran his hands through his straight, dirty-blonde hair. "She told you."
"What are you talking about? I'm so confused. What the hell is going on? I publish that goddamned story and the whole work collapses. And Susan...Susan tells me the craziest thing in the world. I get abducted by nut cases in suits interrogating me for hours about how I know about something called New Co or something..."
"NOUCO," he cut in.
"Whatever."
"It's an acronym, but keep going."
"Fine. I don't know anything about New Co or whatever it's called and then I don't remember what happened. I woke up in my bed and maybe I dreamed it all but then Susan went crazy when I told her about it. I mean, I told her I had a crazy nightmare and she looked like she'd seen a ghost."
"Jesus. The inhibitor is malfunctioning."
"What inhibitor? They kept saying that in my dream...or whatever it was."
"It's still malfunctioning. That's why you remembered it at all. Even as a dream."
"Can you explain your rambling here, please, because I think I've had enough perplexion to last the rest of my life."
The man called Louis snorted and turned around quickly, then without warning flipped over and landed across the room and smashed the wall with his fist.
Sarah backed away and calculated the distance between her position, the man's and the door.
Suddenly, he whirled around, panting hard, a distraught expression on his face, ran up to her and grabbed her shoulders.
"Alison! Don't you remember?"

Dreams alone won't get you far. I guess that's the way things work out. I wrote a whole stinking novel about it. "All is futile and pursuit of wind." All is windall is windall is wind.

I took my own advice and decided not to be Sibyl Freid. I walked in a door and closed it; I blocked out the wind. I held onto what was tangible and took is as far as I could, farther. I tried to prove myself, not to anyone, but to myself. But I fail. Still, I'm doubted, and still, that gives the people who should have the most faith the reason to screw me over. Usually, I'm not one to give up, but it's too tiring now. The plan has changed. I'll get a job and work and instead of making it a reality, I'll remember the vigor of academia and the ecstasy that enraptures me when I learn anything. I'll remember it and leave it behind.

No, I don't blame anyone. The buck still stops here, Harry. Still. And always will. I'll just never understand why it wasn't ever enough, no matter what. Maybe it's stupid, but I can't swallow my pride here. I tried and I'm changing my mind. I can't. I'm sorry. I just can't swallow it and more blows come and the dominos fall.

It wouldn't have made any difference. I wonder how some people can keep on putting faith and love or whatever it is into something or someone who only goes through the motions, who pretends to care and sympathize but doesn't give a damn at all. Not to say that I'm not selfish, but I take others into account. My last intention in the world is to hurt someone. But some people don't care and that's all right. I've always moved myself, taken care of myself, and have been by far happier for it.

If this doesn't work out, though, the path will change. It's back to the heat, back to the South, back to the only focus I ever should have had: words and what they say. No more people. I tried there, too. And no more trying to regain what might have been.

I should have stayed in Europe.

"Angel, cover me."
And he does.
"Angel..."
"Do not speak, my dear." It is not Uriel, but Micha'el. I turn my head under the weight of Uriel's wings. "Do not speak."

I nod and look at the angel. He reads my mind, so I don't have to speak.
"No, do not give up. There is time, yet. And there is life. You have said yourself that it is more imaginative in itself than any make-believe. Here is your living proof. And do not listen to a foolish Seraph filled with human notions of hearts and death. Listen to me. Listen to the message a true angel has to convey to you, a message not from his own mind, but from the Heavens."
"I will, Micha'el. But I'll still love the other."
"Certainly. You find his time will be most like yours."
"What do you mean?"
"Your time will tell you."
He calls Uriel away and I am released and there is nothing but my own reality surrounding me. I shut my eyes to it and press my face into the bed.
Suddenly, my own words whisper in my ears, a reminder: "There will always be blank pages and full pens. And if there aren't, there's always dust."

When I was fifteen I started gaining this little thing called confidence...not just the sappy self kind but confidence in everything, myself and the world around me. Yes, I'm still a cynic, but that takes confidence, too, to trust the world to be a stone cold bitch to you and itself and everything involved in it or around it. But when I was fifteen, I still didn't really believe it. I had that notion, the little itching voice in the back of my head saying "Hey, this is real, believe it. You want to believe it." Yeah, yeah. I pretended to but never really got there until recently.

So now power isn't a dream, it's a reality and I know it. There's a huge difference between knowing and believing and I have learned that believing is only the first step. Move beyond belief. See it realized and touch it, and know it.

This is why I don't believe in God. And why I don't take anyone seriously who does. I know one thing, and I won't say either way here. But only a few people know one way or the other, and both ends of the spectrum are true.

I never got to Paris, but I did make it back to America. That's a feat, I think, when everything in me was working against it. Like the last time, I felt more free where the paper didn't say it, but life actually gave it. We can have a law suit all we want over here, but it won't give us more liberty.

The last time I was in Italy. I didn't make it there this time, just like I never made it to Paris, but the effect on me was the same. The air was freer and I was alone but not lonely. That makes all the difference. I always love the idea of something but face the facts (I'm a realist after all) that sometimes wishes can never come true. Or if they do, it's always a different interpretation, because this wasn't just my wish and it wasn't just my life, but a wish logically thought out and presented to the world in a miracle in Philadelphia in 1789. Here we are, 218 years later, and that wish has been battered and twisted and misconstrued.
Has it ever been granted? Yes. But not in full.

But when it comes to wishes, although I believe them unfulfillable, I never cease to hope that I may just be wrong. It's not only the wish of a country, but of millions of individuals. It's funny because we all work for the same dream, and that dream means something different to each and every one of us. That makes us a miracle and a tragedy, it makes us tolerant and bigoted and lovely and grotesque all at once.

So I work to fulfill what I interpret that dream of the Founding Fathers to be for myself. I work for an ideal. Call me a fool, but nothing great was ever achieved by anyone less. I keep myself in check like this, playing the fool against myself as well as the logician. I see from a wider perspective if I am farther away. In this way I become closer. I can't stand being around the places I love, because I'm closer to them in my head. I fight for them from a distance. And so I would like to return to Europe, to be far from the Land of the Free, so that I can see it from every angle, so that I can work to keep it alive and to mold it and to hold it and to live it as I have always dreamed.

I cannot be a demagogue. But I can be the force behind one.

"Did you find him?" he asked.
"Who?" I said.
"The boy."
"Oh," I laughed. "No. He doesn't exist."
He smiled.
I smiled back.
"Take me home," I said.
"Sure."
I learned something today. There is only one kiss in Belgium. But I learned it French, so I went for two. But going for two while he's going for one makes for a different kind of formula.
I like that.

"Whachoo runnin from, boy?"
William quit running and bent over, his sweaty hair dripping, and his hands on his knees.
"Aaah..." he panted and pointed behind his shoulder.
The man craned his neck to see over the boy and laughed dryly.
"You's runnin from life, boy? Ain't nothin' back yonder."
William turned his head up to look at the man, still bent over with his hands on his knees, and grimaced.
Finally, he caught his breath.
"Boys. Boys are coming."
The old man squinted at him.
"You ain't from roun' here, is you?"
William wiped the sweat from his upper lip and looked behind him nervously.
"Hide me," he whispered desperately.
The old man looked around, then swung open the screen door.
"Git in. Quick now."
William ducked under the man's arm and ran inside.
The hut smelled of moss and damp wood, was bare but for a chair, table, and cot in the corner with layers of blankets strewn across it that seemed to be about fifty years old.
He backed up into a far corner of the room and slid to the floor, pulling himself into the smallest bundle possible.
Outside, the sound of pounding footsteps echoed into the hut.
He heard voices but couldn't decipher the words.
"Go on now," he heard the old man saying as the screen door was pushed open. "Git!"
The voices rose up angrily and soon faded into the distance along with the footsteps.
William breathed a sigh of relief.
"Whatchoo doin, boy, trine to git yo'self killed?"
William shook his head and looked up at the man.
"No," he said.
"Then what? White boy from up north trumpin roun' these parts. Sho 'nuff you's gonna git yo' ass kicked."
"That's all it's about here, isn't it?"
"What's what 'bout?"
"White. Black. Whatever."
"Well, whatchoo expect, boy? Whey you from?"
"Above the Mason-Dixon line, that's for sure."
The old man chuckled.
"You'sa gittin use ta that, now? They's not payin' 'tention ta that one up they, is they?"
"It's all one country...At least I thought so."
"All's one country but you's got them states here."
"And race. You let me in, though."
"You a yankee. You free me."
"I didn't do anything. That was a million years ago."
"No more'n one-hundred-fiffy."
"Whatever. Forever ago."
"Not here, boy."
"I'm realizing. Only on paper. Nobody really won, did they?"
The old man laughed again, exposing a nearly toothless mouth.
"What's your name?" William asked.
"They call me Lamar Coal. Like them rocks put soot all ovuh you."
"William."
They shook hands.
"Thanks," William said.
"You git on now. An' I don' wan' hear 'bout no hangin' o' you, boy."
"Yeah. I'll stay clear."

Michael

She met him under the most spectacular fireworks she'd ever dreamed of, where they were so close it was raining ash.

"Do you think it'll be good?" he asked.
"I don't know...You know how when you first see something, when you're like three years old and it's so magical and so new nothing can ever beat it in your mind?"
"Yeah, I know what you mean," he said.
"So I think it might be good. But I'm not three anymore."
He laughed. "Neither am I."
She turned her head up to the sky and smiled as it exploded in color and looked back at him when the smoke started pouring out of the sky and crawling the ground.
"I've never been this close before," she said.
"It's a grand celebration. How else could they do it?"
And then it began to pour. She got soaked and they huddled in the crowd under the few umbrellas there were to be found, but soon she split off and walked through the rain anyway. A little rain wouldn't kill her. And she saw him walk off in the other direction.
She wasn't accustomed to putting faith in anything, so she walked along with the crowd, moving where it took her.
And then he was there.
"Hey."
"I thought you left."
"No. I'm supposed to meet up with a colleague but it's crazy here. We can't find anyone in this."
"You found me."
He smiled and took her arm. And they were two in a crowd instead of one and one.
But somewhere between the shots and the street and midnight and one, the crowd swept them in opposite directions.
To the left and to the right, forward and backward she turned and then the current grabbed her and left her in her room until the morning.
"Are you there?" she asked him even though he wasn't there.
"I'm supposed to find you in this crowd?" he asked.
"You found me once, didn't you?"
"Yes."
"And it's raining ash all the time even though it's not staining our clothes like that night."
But an ocean is far and she thought that nothing could beat that memory of when she was three, but the sky did that night and rained on her.
Anything can be overtaken and even a stone can be weathered away by water.

"Uriel, how do angels fight?"
"We do not."
"You fight for me."
"You are the Living."
"So are you. Only not human."
"There you are."
"You fight for humans?"
"Yes. Now answer the question yourself."
"I still don't know. You make me fight for myself. And I do."
"You know a truth now but there's more to it. Say it aloud."
"I'm too intrigued by you. And since I'm human, I don't really believe yet that there's existence once this life is over. I only want to. So I hope. I keep my eyes open to you."
"Yes, Little Girl. But here I am. Now tell me how we fight."
"You bore into our minds. Right? You show us another way. And when the others are angry with you they lament and they pierce into yours. Your fighting is all inside. They show you another way for the world to be. Or you to be, I guess. Like they fight when they pull you away from me. That's fighting, right?"
"An angelic fight cannot be explained to a human for Heaven is outside of your grasp. If you ask me to show an angel fighting with a fellow of his own, your status of being among the Living will have gone. People have always wondered as we have pierced their minds in more ways than fighting. They explain it in the words they can, in the images. They explain it with swords and metal and fire. But the closest thing I can give to you is this: from every act destruction something is made. The Greater the beings, the greater the destruction, and thus--"
"The greater the creation?"
"Yes, Little Girl. The greater the creation. Imagine the fight for you."
I laughed. "You flatter me to much. Stop it. You know I don't take that from anybody."
"Tell me an act of creation. The greatest kind. The most glorious," he says.
"I was thinking the birth of a star. An end and a beginning all in one. But it takes millions of years."
"In your terms. In mine it takes but a moment. Now. Tell me something greater, I've already given you a clue."
"Than the birth of star? The birth of the universe?"
"No. You are thinking too big now. Imagine the fight for you."
"Aah. I get it."
"Yes, Little Girl. Do you see that fight?"
"Ares and Aphrodite."
The angel smiles. "You let your studies get away with you. But that is the answer."
"It's a shorter one," I laugh at him.
"You are growing up."
"But to make an angelic fight...look...glorious...for people...in...modern day society. How would you do that without really showing it?"
"You couldn't. So, as I have told you, humanity leaves it up to their own imaginations. Use an explosion of two forms, hardly visible. It is neither dark nor light, but the forms disturb the vision just enough to make one doubt as you rub your eyes and think again. They collide and for a moment, merge into one. Then there is a stillness such as you have never seen. Such as you could never imagine. And after that moment, a brilliant light and a sound so loud any mortal there would never hear again. Yet if a mortal were present, he would be gone, not among the Living, and not among the Dead. He would have merged with that creation."
"What happens to you?"
"The fighters?"
"Yes."
"We separate and as it has been more than minds piercing one another, but our forms, we both lost and both won. When we separate, we are somewhat new, and we begin again, our consciousnesses free of opinion."
"And when you start all over, does the same opinion form again and cause the fight again?"
"No. The fight is settled by what you would call the Scattering. There is a mutual understanding, and in warring with each other, we have melded and fall in love with our creation."
"But what if it's more than two of you? What if it's a war, with many ranks all fighting against one another?"
"Then many creations, from a blade of grass to a storm, to a star, to a glaxaxy and on and on. Remember, do not take the world so literally, Little Girl. The greatest of all fights, originate within a human mind. But you are not angelic. Your race is not angelic. Your destruction does not create in this manner. You destroy yourselves. We step in and fight for you, the opinions clash between those of the Living and those of the Higher Beings. Your instict disagrees with us. So what we create is madness."
"Madness causes love and hate."
"Madness causes everything in your world, Little Girl. What would you call our conversations?"

"Are you dying, Little Girl?"
"Aren't we all?"
"Not all."
"I've been dying for a long time. And remember when I was the living dead? I'm back there."
"You will save yourself."
"No. No, I won't."
"Then who will?"
"Nobody. I don't want them to. I'm ready to go on. I can't take this anymore. I can't bear it. I've always tried. I've always tried so hard. And what's it for, Uriel? What's it for? Nothing! It's for nothing! Even if it's extraordinary, that's forgotten in the end. And it hurts too much. It hurts too much. Take me to the World to Come. Take me away from this place. I can't stand the emptiness. I can't stand the prospect of so many years waiting and waiting. What am I waiting for, Uriel? I'm waiting for a retribution that will never come. I'm not waiting anymore. Hope fades eventually. Doesn't it?"
"Aah, Little Girl, you will never grow up."
"I was never a little girl."
"As you wish."
"I was always a hypocrisy, a dichotomy. I was always more than one thing. And it never made sense. It scared everyone away. I don't blame them."
"What shall I do with you?"
"Make me disappear. Make my love count for something. Don't send me one of those faux friends and don't you dare haunt my dreams with the imposters of a soul who doesn't exist."

In Memoriam

I spent the last two days standing over General George S. Patton's grave. Originally, he was buried like everyone else, among the soldiers, undistinguished from all the other crosses and stars. It was a Luxembourger who was walking among the graves one day and stumbled upon his.

She thought it was wrong that he wasn't given a more, let's say, "elevated" position in the cemetery. I suppose the government agreed, and so his body was moved to a large memorial just in front of plot B, the first one you're confronted with upon walking into the graveyard. It's chained off and on top of it is a quote from General, and later President, Dwight D. Eisenhower: "All who shall hereafter live in freedom will be here reminded that to these men and their comrades we owe a debt to be paid with grateful remembrance of their sacrifice and with the high resolve that the cause for which they died shall live eternally."

But I like the idea of him resting among his men better. After all, a soldier is a soldier and they're all in it together. I find it ironic that he didn't die the way I think he would've liked, and also, just a day before he was meant to go home to America. A truck took him out on a leisure trip, shooting pheasants and not men.

Surprisingly, this memorial service moved me to tears. I guess it's because I was standing on liberated ground, something Americans don't get to do if we don't leave our little bubble of the New World.

The Battle of the Bulge was fought here in Luxembourg and there are 5,000 American graves to show for it, veterans to remember it, millions of grateful Europeans who lived through it, and millions more who were born afterwards who somehow take their freedom much less for granted than the kin of those who allowed that freedom to be.

Thinking about it, I know why I was so moved. It's because we do take it for granted despite our rhetoric. 'Freedom' has become a word so overused in the American lexicon that we have become desensitized to its true meaning. In doing so we have lost sight of creating a reality of that freedom.

Sadly, I feel, we are letting freedom slip away under the false pretense of itself. It is a victim of our apathy and our unparalleled ability to pretend our world is such a wonderful world when, indeed, it is anything but.

We must wake up as a nation because the world does not love us.

We're juveniles. We're young, not even 231 years old. In the face of nations, we're infants, and the maturity expected of us is unwonted. We're still in the blissful fantasy of childhood, missing the forest for the trees. But the world, as always, comes upon us quickly. I fear we have ignored reality for too long. Perhaps, we will learn from our mistakes. Judging by our arrogance and egocentricity, I fear we won't.

That graveyard is one not only of soldiers but of a dying American Dream. The dream may be revived if we realize we are not separate from the world but a part of it and that the oceans on either side of us are not as wide as they used to be.

I love that Dream and dream it, too. I want to see it realized again and again and again. I want to run my fingers over the embroidered stars of our flag and I want that flag to stand for a country I love in all ways, in both idea and in reality.

I want people to understand that support of soldiers need not be support of a war, and that love of country need not be love of its current state.

I stood in the sun amongst the graves too long but it was worth it. For the honor of those fallen soldiers, of ones not fallen, and of ones to come, I am willing to give up a little skin while they have given up so much more for me and you.

Another year's over. They slip by but this one was really hard. Mainly because I fell so hard from the highest altitude yet. (Figuratively speaking.) I think my goal for next year is to actually climb a tree. And get down.

I guess it all makes sense once you put it all together. Trust instinct...and that says never trust. But always love. So I do. I never trust but I always love and I guess is a time when people start fessing up. About who they love and who they are incapable of loving in certain ways. Not everyone, of course, but one person in particular.

It's funny when you love someone your whole life and the whole time everything's a mixed message. You wonder what really is their desire and when you finally find out, it's something you felt the whole time but didn't want to admit. Then you understand them because they didn't want to admit it either. So it's all out now and I'm in.

Soon, I'll be back in the Old World. The last time I was there, I fell in love with it and couldn't ever really drag my heart back across the Atlantic. We'll see if the feeling still remains.

My parents were pestering me about those fucking Jews in Luxembourg. How I would probably like the whole "European" kind of person better. Of course, that only means Jews. People are people and they still don't get that I don't give a shit about Jews. Jews ruined me and I can't stand them. They're lucky I stuck with them. But like I said, I can't run away from my blood. I just don't want to be lonely anymore but I know it'll always be that way. So I brace myself for empty rooms and nights and days alone, not waiting, but having given up.

There are some things I'll never understand. They come back to me every once in a while and I feel like crying over them again, over the perplexion. Everything's still the same, though, the bond, the connection. We are tangent to each other, most of ourselves gone in separate directions with one piece unable to let go, thus linking us forever. At least until one of us is gone. But maybe it'll continue on after that, too, because who knows how long souls really last?

Life goes on and we have our fun and our misfortune. We pretend some of it doesn't exist. We pretend some it is more than it ever has been or will be. It's a distraction, and I understand. Take what is easy and simple because that's comprehensible. Put off what runs deeper, what takes work, what you can't let go of despite how hard you try because it's not as easy to understand and it's scary because it's real.

I don't have time for this, so I take what I can get. I take what I am left with and the gypsy knows. He's right, he will wander until he accepts a place. But he saw that recently and didn't know how to live with it, so he ran away while staying stationary. So we play the mind game with each other, the look game, soul game. Others look in and don't understand, or they only understand that they'll never be there with us. That's when I remember again and that's when I start to lament because that's the only thing I don't understand. I felt the same way, scared shitless and out of this world. But I was willing to give it a try.

There's nowhere else to go from here. I guess I look on the bright side because there's always someone more worse off, like the body they dragged out of the room next to me. I asked a girl if she was ok and she nodded, with tears in her eyes and sort of choked out while gestering towards the loaded stretcher "It's my mom."

She said "thank you" because I asked her how she was.

And the man I watched on the other side of the hall twitching in agony in his own world from what was probably a drug overdose. They're worse off.

Those were quick killers, the car accident; the shooting up. You didn't see the other car coming and you ignored the warnings for the drugs. Nine times out of ten, I bet you, he'll go back to them.

My killer's silent, too, but not so much anymore, and I wonder why it takes its precious time. It catches me around the corners when I'm pretending it doesn't exist. It reminds me: "Hello. There's a limit on your time. You can't run like the others. Or walk uphill."

But the X-ray came back fine, as always. And the EKG, as always. And the pressure was slightly elevated, the pulse was fine, the oxygen count was fine. But I wasn't fine. And there's still no clue of a reason but for the symptom: high pressure and a knife in the middle of my chest running up and down my arm from my finger tips, to my elbow, to my shoulder, to my neck and into my chest.

They told me I was too young. That's always what it's been. I fucking hate hospitals. They don't tell me the answer. Silence is worse than a verdict at this point because it leaves me sinkning in the timeline. Fuck it. This life is all I have. Won't you just let me live it?

I want my rainstorm at 3:00 pm. You know what I'm talking about.

At home, we have a little ravine below my house. If you follow it long enough, there's a little stream that overflows in the summer because there's too much water. Only last summer it was dry because we were in a drought again. And under water restriction. Anyway, when we do get our 1-3pm storms everyday on time, I walk out into them and hide under the roots of this tree on the bank until the water gets too high. No one knows about it.

But it's wonderful because the amount of water falling from the sky is just about the same as the water in the stream and all the energy charges together because there's always lightning and thunder. It's as if the entire world is charged with life. But I know that energy could kill me in a second since I'm sitting in water...in a tree.

If it does hit me, Time will flow away. I'm open to that. But remember, everything is the present moment. I have never really had a sense of linear Time. I just don't care. Tomorrow is just as good as yesterday and the rest is up for grabs.

Transfixion

It's amazing, the things that transfix you, that bring you in with the crowd, that shoot awe through you like a lightning bolt made by Hephaestus. There was a god that shot through all of us today and it was over the most commonplace of all things.

Hawks in trees eat pigeons. The thing is, we hardly ever get to see it. The bird was unafraid, uncaring of the crowd. He didn't know that what he brought to us was the wonder we had continuously when we were children. He didn't know that he brought all those children back.

Death is what captured our gazes, and life at its finest. The two grow on each other, feed each other, allow the other to exist.

Feathers sprayed everywhere, and cracks echoed off the trees and the walls. Blood was swallowed and the bird was satisfied.

It's the same story every time. I know it but don't like to voice it aloud. Jason did, though. "The people you love the most are incapable of loving you." It's true. I'll never get it back because they have nothing to give. Somehow, I think if I pour enough of myself into them, they'll give it back one day in return but vaccuums only consume and nothing ever comes back out.

Today was one of those days, when I wondered why I cared about sustaining the lie of existence. It doesn't really get you anything. Everyone dies in the end, don't we?

I got a message this morning. It said "I'm awful. But I'm alive." Unfortunately, I know what it's like to be there. Being alive but not knowing what it means, and being so curious about life's opposite that you try to answer that question too early.

Also, it came after a prescient moment. I haven't had one this strong in a long time but it was exactly as I saw it. That he was home, that he was messaging me, that he was awful, and that he wanted to sleep merely so that he didn't have to be awake. I wish I could be there with him, but that'll be a long time coming.

I think over and over again hoping that he'll hear my thoughts, "I love you. And life is more precious than you think." But nothing can change your mind other than that one day when it all clicks and you convince yourself. With Jason, I stop myself from missing the boy I used to know because this has always been him and his mind is worthier than any. But if you see the world more clearly than the masses, insanity is what you're labeled and that isolates you, so you see no point. There a few paths. I once took his. Then I decided to live for myself because that's really the only way you can. At least in full.

Life is beautiful. Sure, there's a lot pointlessness but there's a lot of that in everything. People ask "Why are we here?" I used to ask that, too. But that's a pointless question. The point is finding the point. And we probably never will but that's ok. I live for the little things and I smile at the simple things. I let myself get captured in the sky at night and the vision of stars visible, of stars too far away to see, and of stars invisible for the light pollution caused by Man. I let myself get captured by sunrises and sunsets and clouds painted on the sky; in rain; in the patterns running around the cement; in the currents of wind.

I let myself get captured in all the little things that add up to make one sweet, big world.

I wish I could share this with him in a way that would make life beautiful for him, too. I wish I could share it with you, too, whoever you are. We could get lost in sweet dreams together, and maybe it won't be a lie. Maybe my words and my love will be enough for you. Maybe you won't need or want anything else out of me to be satisfied. Maybe you'll be real instead of fantasy or the truth instead of a lie. But I think that's even a longer time coming than seeing Jason.

We're all alone by ourselves but lonely together. But that doesn't make it easier.

They say that time seems to move more quickly as you grow older, that you blink and a year's gone by, twenty years, fifty years and then you're outside of Time. But what happens if you don't blink? What happens inf your eyes are open and it all went by anyway? It registered somwhere in your head, but not really, because you were too busy living to notice.

I guess you can say I'm trapped in my head, and that I like it that way because there, Time doesn't have to exist on human terms, or on any terms. It's not even a matter of rewinding and speeding up. It's a matter of essence.

Essentially...I'm swaying back and forth, moving up and back like the ocean trapped in its rhythmic tide. I am Everywhere in many forms, like the overwhelming ocean; like the water that grows too heavy to remain in the sky and falls between the sky and the ground. I am that veil of rain.

I get lost in myself; sometimes I feel like a drowning victim. Then I remember that water cannot drown in itself. But another voice in me says "Anything can drown in itself. We are born drowning. So give your water away but never let yourself dry out."

I'll take you with me, if you'd let me, on a ride down my stream of consciousness. That stream is deep, more like a river, and to share it with another mind who can not just look but comprehend would be a relief. But the question resounds and I remain hopeful despite the outlook: "Is there anyone out there?" I've said that all I am is words. And I've asked if I am only words, can I ever truly escape the page? Do I want to? Should I want to? There's ink on the air and I trace it. But there's more of it on the inside, behind my eyes than I can ever let out. Will it all be left to waste?

When it comes to living, I suppose, everyone has a birth date and an end date. Everyone is given a timeline. But they don't know the end date, and so they live as if there is always a tomorrow. I try living like there isn't one, but I'm shy and I'm scared like everyone else. But I do know my end date, roughly speaking. And when you're fifteen and they tell you ten years...that's forever. But when you're nineteen going on twenty and the ten years is half-way up, five years and a couple of months isn't very long at all. So I can't understand why you waste your life and try to end it when you don't have a timeline like that. Wouldn't you want to suck it all up just because you could, because you can?

I tell myself that I'll beat that timeline. I don't think about it much. I try not to because the one wish that really came true was the one I really didn't want. "Send me my Friend or kill me." I guess I did get both but not to the heights that I was really thinking but who really knows what clarifying would have done when it comes to wishes?

Like I always say, I have hope that that date is just a rough estimate that I'll prove wrong. But deep down inside me, I'm beginning to get worried, worried that I won't really live. I'll never know what it's like to have your whole life ahead of you. I'll never know what it's like to be in love or to be loved back. I'll never know what it's like to have a book bound and printed.

So I go out and run in the rain until I have to stop because my heart starts giving out. Then I walk and enjoy the rain slowly. I remember the day I turned sixteen and the way I played guitar under the awning outside in that downpour. Then, when it stopped, the sky opened up and gave me two incredible arches of color sprawled across the itself, one on top of the other. It was the rainbow birthday. And there were nine years left. (Still forever.)

That was the summer the angels fell on me. I aceepted them and wrote the best I'd ever experienced. It was a constant frenzy of inspiration. I was feeling it. There's one reason I create: preservation. There's no time to leave an indelible mark to brand this world with of me. So I write that my being, or a piece of it, may live on after me for as long as Man exists.

I'm done with this day but look forward to a new one. I hope you'll be there, too, when I wake up. And I hope it'll be without regrets because life is for living and it's nice to be able to live like there is no tomorrow while knowing almost full well that there are countless ones ahead.

For now, I'm happy. I feel like maybe I'm getting my best friend back. If I am, I feel like we needed this terrible period. And we'll need some more. But this proves we're strong. We can bend without cracking.

As long as I have this, I don't need anything else. And maybe I'll want to try some things with other people, people who'll make me happy, people who will drop me, people who will make my heart grow, and people who will shatter it. But I hope he's there to pick those pieces up--no. Not pick them up. Force me to. Because that's what a best friend is for.

On the other side of things, for the first time, I feel like maybe I can actually love, or at least have the beginning of that feeling. Of course I don't trust it. But someone told me that falling in love isn't for trusting. It's for getting lost in. I've never been lost in it, but I think I'd love to be. If only for a little while.

And then when I find myself again, or when I find the world again, I can fall back into the pattern and the best friend I've ever had might just be there waiting, like I will be.

I think there'll be a lot of getting-losts. I'm ready for that now, I think. Maybe I'm growing up.

Like I said, I never have faith but I always have hope.

But today there was a whisper in my ear that told me to have faith in us. It was really telling me to get any, it was just letting me know that I already had it.

Not that I feel much better, but I have faith. And you know I have hope. But hope is for the future and faith is for the present.

I'm sorry for making you feel inadequate. But it's not the things that you're not. It's the things that you are that make me cry. But it's also those things that make me laugh, and it's those things that make me happier than anything else in the world.

You know me very well. I do feel like you stopped loving me. I feel like you traded me in for something better. And I don't blame you. But you are too worried about being seen as a liar and because you're so preoccupied with trying not to lie, you end up lying anyway, only it's to yourself.

I'm not the only one who said things in New Orleans. And the things you said are the ones that upset me most, that make me cry the most, because I don't know what they mean and I don't know what to do with them. They make me cry because I can't ask you what they mean because you don't know. So now I feel like I'm lying and it's not just to you or me.

But I know you love me. And I know that's not a lie. Even though I say I love a lot of things all the time, there are only a few things that I'm really serious about. Not that I know what love is. But I know what it's not, and that might count for something.

Well, you know me. And you know that my best friend is the person I love the most. And you know who you are in that equation. I've lost the others but they weren't real. The thing that hurts the most is that you are and I hope you always are. For once, I have faith in the fact that you always will be.

It's just been annoying lately because some people don't understand that my priorities are different than most. They don't understand that there are really different kinds of love and that sometimes they can be just as intense and mean just as much or more than another.

You talk about people hearing "love" and hearing what they feel it means and not what you feel it means. So here's what I mean when I say it to you:

Who you are, as a person, makes my world that much brighter. Even the things that I can't stand about you, because I love all of you. I hate using a word in the definition of itself, but this is going to be one of those times.

I love the way we work together, the way we understand each other, and the way you run after me and have made me stop running for once in my life. I love the way, most of all, I can put as much into something and get it all back in return and it's not a chore and it's not a favor. It's just gratitude and enjoyment. I love the way we're opposite ends of the same spectrum and how, through all of it, I never once got the feeling that it was over.

But what I felt like was that you felt that, too, or your equivalent and that it still wasn't enough. You know that all I ever wanted and all I ever needed was a Friend. And I finally found it in you and I didn't measure up. I never understood and I don't think I will. But you don't need anyone or want anyone. At least not in the same way as I do.

It doesn't matter as long as we're there for each other. Through all of it. "All of it" being whatever life throws at us. Most of all, though, I love the way you taught me that I could be happy standing all by myself. No one else taught me that. No one else dragged me there. And that's precisely why I don't want to lose you, because even though I can (like you said), why should I have to and why should I make myself?

So I'll be there for you after all the other friends come and go, and after all the lovers, too. I hope. I hope I'll be there. And I hope you're there for me to go to each time I get my heart broken and each time it gets rebuilt. And I hope the distance between is never very far, spiritually or otherwise. Like you said, I don't think we could be. Because the connection is indestructable. And it can bend like I feel it bending now, but it won't break.

At least not for good.

Sometimes I wonder where it all went. That's a lie, actually. It's not sometimes. It's always. I always wonder where it all went, why he woke up one day and decided that he wanted something else.

No warning. No anything. A sudden cut.

It was stupid of me because I believed him. And I kept telling myself not to but up until the last fucking day he was telling me not to resist.

"Why force yourself to be alone when you don't have to be?" he said.
"Because it'll end one day and then I'll have to build my walls and my foundation all over again."
"No you won't."
"Why?"
"Because you should get used to it. Somebody will be there. Here. You don't have to stand alone."

So that night I decided that he was right. He was there and I trusted him. Three days later he ran out from under me and I couldn't even catch myself.

Friendship is not the golden possession, after all. No matter how hard I want to believe it. For me it is and that's my tragic flaw. People don't want friends. They want fuckers. And I won't ever be one of those. I don't want to be.

"The body is the vehicle and not the point"- Toni Morrison. But not for most people.

For me, I am the point and you are the point. I happen to have a body and so do you. I ask myself continuously:
"What is it you lost?"
The answer comes back:
"It's just a dream."
I ask myself again:
"What is it you lost?"
The answer comes back again:
"It's everything."

There is nothing here for me. Everything is a lie and all I can do is attempt to survive this maelstrom. But I think most of me wishes I didn't and the slight tapping in my heart right now that reminds me of the timer I'm on makes me wish it all ended sooner. Less than five-and-a-half years to go. According to the records.

And in the end I'll never find it. I'll never find that friend because even if I think I have, like I did, I'll know that not so deep under it, the connection is just an illusion. I just want to know why he wasted his time. Why he continues to lie and tell me that he cares when he doesn't give one fly's shit.

I hope he's happy. And I hope one day that happiness will make him miserable.

Refugee

He found his story in an addiction that melted him down and a lesson in the substitute for love when he was running so fast his feet stood still: horizontal on the floorboards, painful pleasures that jaded the Grand Design.

But fucking never taught him how to feel.

He knew that but proposed anyway because the city never let him sleep and on the inside the season never changes.

In the back of his mind there's another girl, a girl that turned him from the inside, out, a person that melted him down and welted him up and jerked his eyes from in to out from up to down but he would never venture there. Too real when everything was real to him because the force of her make-believe encased him and he couldn't accept change like that. (He grew up a long time ago, the kind of growing and going where you can't go back. And there's no use in glancing in the latter direction.)

So he looked the other way. She was tall, and pale, and no-bull-shit, like him. An excellent chef. There was always a good dish to come home to, and his pillar, the girl who let him forget a little while that he couldn't do poetry anymore--so much that it all came back and poetry wasn't it. It was a course load, a new path, physiology and cosmotology somehow mixing together in his mind until it went blank again.

The other girl showed up sometimes at night and he woke up sweating, listening to the plumbing dripping loudly on the porcelain sink because the landlord didn't give a damn.

Mornings were all like Easter Sunday--lazy until the bells rang around 10 a.m. Breezy. Then cut to the chase. Jesus resurrected. It wasn't a big deal to him: he resurrected people all the time and prevented them from needing it. Religion didn't float his boat if it wasn't the Kama Sutra.

It was the mantra tattooed in blood-red across the inside of his forehead.

God didn't do that to him and he knew He never would. The boy did that shit to himself.

He might've believed it until the floor above him caved in from a minor radiator leak and asphyxiated his mattress out of commission, and his faith in what little he had left of it all.

The girl screamed bloody murder when the cat bit the dust too soon from the poison laced with the thrown-out tuna that was really meant for the rats.

This city is a farce, he thought. And the ring is too big on her finger.

Those are the times the other one slips in and he punches the wall to release that unidentifiable monster that rises up like a wave in him. He pushes the identity down beneath him because he knows its name and the truth about what he is.

That addiction's a distraction and he knows it.

Because he's resurrected millions and prevented them from needing it. His saving was his desensitization and if he could only get it back, he'd take all of it in any form, if only just for a moment. But he couldn't, so he took the next best thing. It erased him from himself for a little while, erased the other girl, too, and the inferiority complex that made him shy away.

But fucking never taught him how to feel.

I think people like to make things into complications when it's the simplest thing in the world. I think people would prefer the lie (which is a complication) to the truth because sometimes simplicity is incomprehensible.

Like I've always said, there was only one thing I ever wanted and that was a friend. It took me a few to get there but I finally found it. I found more than I wished for and it was well worth the wait. But some people can't understand that friendship can exist without "wanting more." The more I tell the truth, the more they believe it's a lie. But I refuse to lie in order to give them an answer they would prefer. What really gets me is the fact that it wouldn't matter even if the lie was the truth.

I suppose I'm an anomaly in this world. I put everything into a friendship where almost everyone else puts it into romance. As soon as "romance" enters the equation, the relationship and my idea of it is automatically demoted to something trivial and inconsequential.

Yet I love just as intensely, just as much. Maybe more, because I never stop loving where anyone can get over a romance. At least most of the time. Unfortunately, friendship isn't enough for people. They want more. They want bodies, and that is something I do not want of someone I value. Trust me, plenty of opportunity I had to go in that direction if I had wanted. But I value friendship much more than that.

Nevertheless, I have been slighted. I have been tossed away because friendship is worthless in his eyes, or at least not nearly as wonderful as the flippant and ephemeral kind of love.

My love is not ephemeral, despite what may have ended and what may come back. My love is of a greater height, an ethereal height, a lasting height. It hurts so much it kills me while making me more alive. Even though I lose the friends, I don't ever lose the love.

Unfortunately, this time, I lost more than one. And this time, I am done. There's nothing to really think about now. We weren't enough. We weren't ever enough.

I remember a time when Saturday was Shabbat, when I would not think of lifting a pen to paper, or of switching a button to turn a computer on. I remember when that day was the day of rest, truly, because I could not worry about anything.

Part of me misses it and still feels it tugging at me, just like I miss being a part of something called friendship when I know that both of these things are lies forever misconstrued as truth.

"If you believe in no Truth," the angel asks, "what then does the Lie force itself from? What is its counterpart? A soul is the fulcrum between a delicate balance. There is no other way. Are you telling me then, Little Girl, that you are alone with the Lie, and therefore, stand in the place of Truth?"

"I don't know, Uriel," I answer. "Perhaps there is neither the Truth nor the Lie. Maybe everything is just Chance."

"A worthy speculation, but not very wise."

"What would you suggest, then?"

"Another look into yourself. There are doors yet that have not been opened. There are curtains behind which they lie wearing the guise of walls. Remember, dear, even walls are penetrable, and not all warrant a door to pass through."

It's on nights like these that the loneliness gets to me most. When I need someone but no one is there, my two pillars holding up each other with no room for anyone else.

I go back to my own foundations then. Although I hold myself up, I wonder if they understand that they hurt me more than anyone else. I feel the knife twisting through me and scream in my head over and over again "You make me want to die!"

They make me want to die.

"What is the lesson learned?" the angel asks.

"That I am alone. And will always be...except in brief respites of illusion. Never trust a thing."

I was sitting in a Quaker Meeting when I lost it. It was as if God had sent an angel to tell me that everything I'd tried to hold onto for so long was lost, was not worth the agony of fighting for, that contrary to popular belief, blood means nothing to the shaping of faith.

But I waver back and forth because my blood says that I am a Jew and blood doesn't lie. Blood is your nature and although I may rebel against my own and try to claw myself out of my own skin, my blood has shaped my soul. Despite how much and how far and how fast I run, my skin runs with me. And when I leave this earth, my soul will run with me, too.

The screams of history are what beseech me, and they are the screams of Past, Present, and Future. I cannot escape that wind.

A woman stood up in the Meeting and pierced me all the way through, back to my ancestors, and forward, to my descendants. She reminded me that it was the second day of Rosh Hashanah, the second day of the New Year. I heard no Shofar blow, no Torah read. I cried silently in the midst of the silence. My best friend held my hand and I hid my tears but he sensed them anyway.

It doesn't matter what I believe, or what I have faith in, or what I don't. It matters what others believe: that I have horns, that I worship the devil, that I kill Christian children and drink their blood, that the world can never sleep as long as there is the faintest trace of a Jew.

I wonder how we survive. I marvel at the fact that we survive. For all their killing, for all their slaughter, we survive--and it is not a sword of man that kills the others, merely Time, just as it is not a miracle that preserves us, merely memory and persistence, and hope.

When I was fifteen years old a clarity came to me and I understood what the moshiach was. The moshiach is all of us and we will never embrace it because the world waits for something great while staring at its own reflection and misses the point.

A moment in time:

A girl runs back and forth, up and down the hallway.
The clock ticks one second farther around.
A boy throws a chair against a wall for nothing but pure angst at life.
The snow begins to flurry outside the window.
A poet comes up with the words he's been looking for for years.
A heart is broken.
A heart is sewn.
A bomb explodes, killing 14 people and injuring 60 more.

A moment in time:
That was nothing.
Where will it end?
Do we want it to?
Better question:
Where will it begin?

Well, I finally decided that there's no point in being shy. The biggest part of that is realizing that you really have nothing to lose, except, of course, that little bit of excitement. So the first time was a failure. Not interested. A recluse in a way.

Mainly, it's that I'm starving for conversation, for someone, anyone, to understand the Madness. That's a little difficult, I suppose. And even if they're willing to try, as he said he was, they're a little weary when it comes to actually being able to understand. "Unqualified." It's all right, though. I understand. I wouldn't want to deal with it either.

Someone's blowing the snow all over the place right now outside my window. It's beautiful and reminds me of fairy dust. I admit, I still entertain the possibility that that entire magical world really does exist.

It distracts me from the loneliness.

Once a year, starting when they were eight years old, midway between both their birthdays, Billy and Candice would share each other.

Billy came over one night to escape his grandmother's sheltering. He climbed in through the window to the second story, like he always did.

Her room was empty, the light off, but the bathroom door off to the side of the room was ajar and a pale beam of white light spread from it across the wooden floor.

He walked over to it quietly and put an eye to the crack.

Candice was leaning on the side of the tub, her palms pressed the ledge, staring down at the water. Billy watched her breathing and felt content just to know that she was alive.

She turned around suddenly and stood there staring at him, stark naked.

"Hi, Billy," she said.
"Hi," he whispered.
"You can come in." She walked across the tile floor to him. "I'm taking a bath."
"I know."
They stood there, staring each other in the eye for a moment.
"Mom's downstairs. You want something?"
"No."
"You wanna take a bath, too?"
He shrugged.
"I guess."
She shrugged. "Ok. I'll get you a towel."
She walked out of the bathroom into the unlit bedroom, returning in a moment with a towel and a wash cloth.
"If you want, you put your clothes by the radiator. It makes them warm for when you get out. That's what I do."
"Ok."
While he stripped off his clothes Candice turned back to the water and occupied herself with the surface film, fascinated by the resilience of it until she plunged her hands beneath the surface.
"I'm ready," he said.
She turned to him.
They stood there observing each other for a minute, their pre-pubescent bodies growing cold in the air.
She held out a hand to him.
"We're different," he said, staring down at himself, then looking back at her.
"I know."
"Why?"
"Because I'm a girl...And...you're a boy."
"I never thought you were different before."
"It doesn't really matter, Billy," she replied glancing down at herself.
"Well...we're not that different, right?"
She shrugged.
"I just have this," he said, fingering his penis. "And you don't."
"No, Billy. I'm a girl," she replied.
"What does it mean?"
"It doesn't mean anything right now," she said.
"I don't understand."
"It'll mean something later. Don't worry about it."
"When will it mean something later?"
"I don't know."
"But everything else is the same," he said again.
With his index finger, he traced the lines of her body from her pinky finger and up her arm.
She turned around in a circle and he followed suit. Then she traced him, too, in the same way.
"Let's take a bath now, ok?" she said. "I'm cold."
"Ok," he said. "Me, too."
They stepped in the water and bathed themselves. Afterwards, they dried off.
Wrapped in their towels, standing close to the radiator, they stood there smiling at each other.
After they were warm enough, Candice put on her pajamas and got Billy a pair of sweatpants and a shirt from her wardrobe.
In the morning, Candice's mother wasn't surprised to find them both asleep in Candice's bed. It was a common practice. Since it was Saturday, she only poked her head in before closing the door again, softly behind her.
The next year, Billy asked Candice if he could see her again.
"Yeah," she answered.
They stripped again and inspected each other.
"We're still the same," he said.
"I know."
"You said this would matter one day," he said, pointing down at himself.
"It will one day," she said again.
"Why?"
"Because that's how nature works."
They put their clothes back on. When they were eleven, Candice told him that the next year they would be different.
"How?" Billy asked.
"We'll start to change," she said.
"How?"
She shrugged. "We'll grow up."
"You're already like that."
"I know," she said. "But maybe I'll grow up more."

There's been a block for a while lately. Maybe because I lack that divine inspiration. Or maybe it's because I deliberately shut it off. But now I've begun to revive that story I started seven years ago. Candice and Billy are an interesting pair. They're similar to Ithaca and Erasmus but Candice and Billy are more real-world and I want to keep things tangible. Ithaca and Erasmus are more of Heaven and the metaphysical and that's too dangerous for me right now.

Do you understand? I guess you do, but someone else doesn't and says I should shut all of it off. Damn that. Can't he understand ever that words and I are inseparable? He thinks we should be like oil and water. But we're similar to each other in that way anyway. We're two separate things but joined somehow. Maybe one day we'll be separated but you know it won't be like that with the Art. That's too engrained. There was no joining there. Only birth. Like siamese twins joined at the heart. You kill one and the other dies. But if you had a choice, which one would you give up? I almost gave up the words but realized that that's impossible.

Madness brings sanity occasionally, and sanity Madness. I'll take the sanity of Madness and not its counterpart. At least then there's something to show for it.

A New Rendition: Watching Candice Fly

"Why isn't he with you?" Anna asked.
"Isn't he?" Candice replied.
"What?"
"Isn't he?"
"What do you mean?"
"Well...emotionally. Emotionally, who is he with?"
Anna stared intently at Candice and let it sink in.
"That's the thing about Billy. He can't really connect." She shrugged. "He's been like that since his mother died. All he can connect with is the nightmare. And the person who nightmares with him."
"You?"
Candice smiled out of the corner of her mouth.
"Yeah. He couldn't ever get past it. Think about it. An eight-year-old finding his mother hanging from the ceiling fan in her bedroom when he was looking for her to ask permission to go to the candy store. All he can see is her feet swinging back and forth. And all he can feel is my hand holding his and saying that I felt it run through me like it was running through him."
"Felt what?"
"Her soul. It was hovering above us. Since that moment every thought of his is mine, too. He tries to ignore it. But he knows the truth."
"What should I do?" Anna asked.
"What should you do? You take him or leave him. Wholesale. What do you think?"
Anna stood up and walking to the window, her hands on the back of her hips. She tapped her foot rhythmically in time with her thoughts.
Candice leaned on her elbow, reclining on the bed, watching Anna's inner debate.
Finally, Anna turned around and dropped her hands. She sighed and Candice smiled back at the uncanny smile Anna was giving her.
"Wholesale, you say?" Anna said.
"Yep."
"You can take him."
"I never gave him away."
"No...I guess you haven't, have you?"
"No. He's never cheated on me once. Because he can't."
"Is that love?"
"Somehow. It's attachment. It's incomprehensible."
Anna laughed.
"I'll see you around, Candice, huh?"
"Yeah."
"Good luck with the rocket."
"Thanks. Good luck with the botany."
"It's funny. Opposites."
"Yeah. It's often how things work."
"He'll watch you fly, won't he?"
"Yeah. Through my eyes. That's how it always is."

I'm not very good at explaining these things, I guess, because it would have gotten through already. Or maybe the connection's lost. But this is one thing most people can never understand about me.

To begin, though, I am a dichotomy. I am made up of contradictions. But you already know that. And I know this is in writing, but I spoke it out loud as I wrote it, as I'm writing it, because I know that you don't trust anything I write. For this one time, I assure you, it is completely me talking to you. So pretend that I'm in front of you saying all of this out loud. Sometimes it's easier to write it down. I can think more clearly this way and try to make the message more precise.

So what I mean by wanting it back is this: I want to be able to feel the rush and to come out the other end with a creation. That's it. I don't want a lapse in time, or a drain on my consciousness, or on anyone else's. I just want that creation because without it, I feel like I'm suffocating. In a way I am, because this is the air of my soul. I hate it and I love it because I'm reliant on it but at the same time, I love what it gives me because it's beautiful. No, I'm not counting the Madness part of it. I'm not counting the possession. I'm saying that creation is beautiful because it means new life, the perpetuation of life, and most importantly, the verification of my own.

No matter what I do, it is a part of me. I can't separate it out. It's not something I do. It's something I am. What I do is a result of what I am. For me, words, the Art, is as much a part of my soul, or my consciousness, or my mind, whatever you want to call it, as my skin is to my body. But like skin, it can shed and renew itself. The only thing is, if I did what you suggest, which is getting rid of it entirely, it would be like pulling all the layers off at once. They wouldn't grow back.

It makes me happy at the same time it causes me the greatest grief. I guess it's because I'm in love with it. It's an expression, it's how I release everything. I release myself. I release the collective consciousness of humanity. I release something else, too. If I shut it off, it wouldn't be fixing the problem. It would be ignoring it, bottling it up so that one day it will all come bursting out and everyone will regret it. Especially me. I can bottle it up like I pretend that everything's fine when it's anything but. There will an explosion of it and it'll kill me. Maybe that'll be a good thing, because I'll have died have died happy. I'll have an Artist. You won't be there for that, I don't think. Because you don't want to be. Because you don't understand it and no matter what I say and no matter how hard I try, you never will.

It is coming back, little by little. I'm not letting it take me over. I'm letting it pass over me and through me, like Fear. And when it has gone past me, I will turn to see its path. Where it has gone, there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

I guess this is the story, huh? It's my life. And that's all I've ever really been writing down. Because I love it. And yeah, I've thought of suicide, and death was all I ever prayed for for years, mainly because I've understood that I can never escape from my own mind, no matter what I do. But that thought of ending myself doesn't even cross my mind anymore because life is beautiful and I see that now. You're a part of that. Everything's a part of that. But things come and go and I think that things are going now. It'll only be a matter of time until they're replaced by new ones. Each time there's something new, it's even more beautiful than the last.

Lately I've just been feeling that something is lost. I've been pretending that it's not, but I'm not going to do that anymore. I should just accept it even though I'll never understand. So I turn back to my words to fill the space. That's always what they were: they were beauty to fill the empty space, but really, it's an overactive imagination. The words, the Art, all of that, it's just my overactive imagination. That's why I can't separate it from myself. It's my mind. It's my mind. If you really knew me, you'd know that. And you'd know that my mind is what's me, what people love about me, what people hate about me. And your mind is the same thing, only for you. You can't escape from yours, either. I just wonder, is it lonely in your head, too? Is that where we meet? Because I don't know where our common ground is otherwise. And if it's not there, can you explain it?

It doesn't matter now. That connection's lost. It's gone. I miss you. I miss you so much. I hope you're happy, or that you find it, because you said you're not. Overall, I finally am. I don't know what to do with it.

But I wish you can find all your wonders. I wish you can wind around the time so it holds you tight and treats you nicely. I hope you can find somebody who's true, someone who's new to you for every day you open your eyes; she'll grow your love for you and lie with you in the moonlight.

And if it were all up to me I'd wish for you to keep your childhood wonders. Even though you knew that it couldn't last I know you never quite believed it before, that life's too fast. So take your time. Don't rush it, even though you see the years stretched on a line that's too hard to master sometimes.

Bishop's Karma

Ash makes the water muddy in this crescent of a town,
The blood of memory pooling around the edges and the rubble.
It's the memory that feeds the dilemma as the ghosts of notes float around while
The water takes over like you wouldn't believe--
And this is a dry heat, too, for here, the air thick as molasses, lungs unable to breathe.
On the rooftops there's writing in tape calling out for Jesus, professing faith;
It's something of which I can't conceive--
Nature's the God of this town, choking and breeding.
I say the Holy Spirits are all woven together and they are they and you--and I, a consecrated meeting.
We're all drowned out and the crescent crumbles under the burden of times yet unperceived.
Here, the marshes dream achingly of regeneration,
They're in synch with the people, praying for Amazing Grace—

A futile inclination because
The prayer's shut out—

I hear them screaming, instead,
"I seen the Devil come down like he own the place."

New Orleans is a place of contradiction. It is a place of despair in the most raw of forms alongside hope. Though the hope is fragile, it pervades every inch of air in every person left out of fortune. They seek their fortune in the form of Chance, a simple Chance, and that stirs in me more hope upon looking and more grief, because the need for that simple Chance persists.

I don't want this to be a sob tale, because the storm sobbed enough on that city and caused more sobbing afterward. Besides, this is a tale for myself, and it's for figuring out what it is I'm feeling. The land is shrinking rapidly but no one seems to care, at least no one who has the power to act on fixing the problem. Two-thirds of the people are ghosts in the form of memory, alive but unable to come back because the color of their skin and the number behind the dollar sign belonging to their name isn't big enough for the ones who claim authority. I wonder if what I feel is sadness or pity or happiness that (though it be few and far between) at least a handful put in their Time instead of writing off "help" in the signing of a check that makes it into some bureaucrat's pocket instead of the people's. I wonder if the feeling is frustration at the fact that 90% of those people giving Time really understand the gravity of the situation at all.

The feeling is confusion, at least at the moment. I don't know what to make of it, or of myself. It brings me back to my childhood and the things I hate--segregation, the War, the allowance of prejudice, the fact it exists and not exists, but is innate within the consciousness of every single one of them. I hate the fact that they force me to notice, too. I hate the fact that it's a factor because all I ever saw was the human race until my innocence got me in trouble and I had to learn that the shade of brown makes all the difference in this society of ours, that the belief system you're born into is a right of passage for other people's hate.

I remember children throwing stones in a moment when they forgot their separate races and united in their senseless hatred of mine. I remember running away from them but the stones had already hit me and in many ways I'm still bleeding just as this Crescent City's still drowning.
I've seen war zones before. The media does not desensitize me to them. Reality makes me more apalled than ever before each time I face it again. Unfortunately, I face it everyday, whether it be my physical surroundings or an image in my head from a memory. Then I understand why fantasy has always been so seductive.

Don't you?