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?