People wonder what it is that comes off of me like a repellent scent when they look at me. Trust me. All my life I’ve wondered, too. I imagine too much, I think, and imagination leads me down paths where reality is merged with legend and legend becomes the truth. But, I suppose, what’s true in the mind is what’s true, and where legend is concerned, it works on the emotion and emotion is what really moves people even when they don’t have a reason. Instinct is guidance. Legend is what you become when nothing else makes sense.

Someone once told me that if souls were rivers, we could walk into almost all of them and get our feet wet but if someone walked into mine, they'd drown. I can't help what I am, though, no matter how much I fight against it. But I can prevent people from walking into the river. Of course, it comes at my own expense because unless I dry up, which I hardly believe could ever happen, I am left alone with myself. If I am nothing but a river and if I let no one in, who will throw me a life-float when I begin to drown? And what difference would it make anyway since it would only be water trying escape from itself?

Last year I heard a legend and I tried to chase after it for a grade. It turned out that some legends aren't written about. They're only spoken. I lost myself in that legend, the one of a half-fish (or half-snake) half-woman. It's a European myth. It's a myth that I might have once been a part of if I hadn't been made in America. But mythologies parallel themselves across the human race. Part of me is still standing there, on the banks of the River Alzette in Luxembourg City, in the Grund, staring up at the cliff that really is nothing more than the overrun ruins of an old tenth-century castle.

Luxembourg is a place where you can lose yourself and recreate yourself from nothing again. That's how beautiful it is. Part of me is still standing on the banks, waiting for Melusine the mermaid to pop her head up out of the water and start stitching one more link on the chain-mail vest. I want to catch her so that the city won't fall into the hole and die. I want to be her, so I can escape myself and refuse to be a river.

Imagine that! An American sitting on the banks of the River Alzette waiting for a mermaid to show up. I know. I'm a joke. But I want to know where that legend came from. I want to escape this and stop worrying, stop drowning in myself, stop missing the people I never had but thought I did. So put myself into fantasy and study it like an academic...Is that a remedy? Or a cop out?

Maybe a little bit of both.

Meditation on an Erev

I share my emotion like a windmill
Turning, turning, brushing the ephemeral on.
Mourners gather:
Life is taken and I cry for a substitute
corpse
On a substitute day,

Lean my head against the window-cross
As the bagpipes play and the players march.
The breeze must be pleasant under their kilts
but even agony is pleasant these days
because its absence is the numb-
oblivion-destiny.

I wonder to define myself but
Selves are
indefinite like the shape of wind and the
direction of water.
Is Eve a beginning or an end? a joy ride?
Or electric shock treatment from a distance
that burrows deeper than a a coffin maggot?

Eve is the mythical worm that settles
inquiry too early.
Eve is the ipso facto that stops the
question and evades the answer.

The world isn't pretty but it's beautiful. Really beautiful. It's full of surprises, both good and bad; full of ascents and descents and deaths and births. All at once. All for something and all for nothing. And I think of Eve over and over again. On the way and on the way back. When I'm sitting. And I keep walking.

Don't stop living because you're afraid of death. Life's too short for that. Death will meet you no matter what, so take the risk. I guess I'm glad that the gypsy left me and that the flower let itself be uprooted by that wanderer. I wouldn't be living like I am now if they hadn't. I wouldn't really be living for myself and only myself. Tough lesson, I guess. But life isn't pretty. Well, I've known that. The angels are merely companions. They aren't tyrants anymore. Mainly because I don't allow them to be. I'm in charge. Art is an animal but I hold the reigns. Life is beautiful.

All my life I've seen angels. They talk to me in words and in images and in pure telepathic idea. I've never understood them. I've never understood why they choose me. Many times I have asked "Why do you speak to me? And do you ever speak to anyone else like this?"

The answer is always convoluted. "We speak to everyone," they say. "But most of your kind lack the capacity to take us in pure form." "Do I?" "Not as much."

I'm paraphrasing.

So I've learned, from their presence and their absence that they come in many forms and that everyone does see them and hears them whether they believe or not and whether they notice or not. They have left for now, at least in the form I am used to. Angels are not purely messengers carrying a note. They have led me to understand that we are our own messengers. The message delivered is not carried; it is revealed as something the receiver, ourselves, have carried within us all our lives. Angels show us a path. They nudge us in a direction. We choose to follow a path or to another. Either way, the message is delivered.

This message was in a book and it released a message I have been waiting for for over a year. Because it is necessary to know completely something about the world in order to heal. Although I have known it, or been aware, I have not owned it. I am not completely in possession of this truth, for the message is being granted and sold to me in the form of a payment plan that I have not yet carried to fulfillment. The debt will be paid soon, though, and I will once again thank the world for giving me so much grief in order to grant me that much more wisdom. In the end, I always end up thinking desolation a fair price.

"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."