The Changing Of Matter

It was a place very different and distant from any place I had ever known. The buildings were all gray and dark blue and a very faint green hue that almost looked like gray. They were all drawn in sharp narrow angles that made them seem both stretched and squashed down at the same time, like reflections in a fun house mirror. All the curtains were closed and the few lights that I could see were all a very pallid shade of yellow. The walls were all thick and heavy and old, structures meant to outlive their inhabitants by centuries, burdened by the years, laden with unspoken stories. The streets were quiet and made of little white stones, and there were long tall barriers that delineated where the city ended and the green country began.
I sat behind a tall window in a nearly empty room. My own curtains were only half open. Inside the room, there was only a narrow bed and an old desk marked by years of usage. I sat on a little chair staring at the strange world outside. It all smelled of cold moisture and crackling cold air. I could feel some of the cold air that made it through the slim gaps in the windowsill. A few people came and went, moving slowly with their eyes always fixed upon the ground. I wondered what they were hiding, but I didn’t know enough about them to even begin to ask what they would want to hide.
I looked up at the empty gray sky and I saw the vast green and blue mountains in the distance, crowned by solemn peaks of white ice. I took a deep breath when I gazed upon their magnificence, and soon I had to look towards the street again, where a man slowly pulled on a cart that made a recurring wooden rhythm on the clear white stones.
I knew I had something here, somewhere else within this place that was now our home, something that I valued intensely even if I couldn’t remember what it was. I felt that I was in great risk of losing it, I felt that it could disappear just like our old home had disappeared, just like the street I remembered and the people I had known, it had all vanished like the morning mist fading under the hot sun. We were in a strange land where we didn’t know the rules and we didn’t know the dangers. Whatever we had could be taken away and we would never know why it had happened, we would never even have a chance to ask.
“Back where we came from, there was much more danger than there could ever be here, there was violence and war and hatred…and yet I wasn’t afraid… I never spent a single afternoon, maybe not even a single hour, full of fear…why am I afraid now?”
I turned away from the window and I saw my two possessions on the surface of the dark brown desk: a bluish palm sized river stone and an old thick book that explained what to do with the stone that was laying next to it. As I looked at them, I remembered what the book said and I remembered why I felt that these things could be taken and I remembered why, once taken, they would never again be found.
The book explained what to do to the stone, it spoke in a language that I somehow found legible and yet utterly foreign at the same time. It spoke of strange purposes that made no sense to my everyday mind and yet they pulled at something deep within my chest that was eager to come out, eager to emerge into the daylight. The book explained that there were certain actions to be taken, certain things to be done to the stone. These things were strange and forbidden, they came from beyond the thick barriers of the known quiet world. Once these actions were taken, once these things were done, then the matter inside of the stone would change in some very intrinsic manner. That was all I knew at the moment. That was enough.
I looked at the stone which rested quietly on the brown surface of the old desk, and I looked at the thick book which was closed and locked and covered in ancient heaviness. I then lifted my head and looked at Mother who was sitting in the middle of the room looking back at me. She was silent and her face had a kind of gravity that I recognized as delicate but guarded. Still I felt an urge to speak and I did.
I pointed to the book that sat on the desk and I spoke of the things that were written within its pages. I tried to let her know what we had and what it was meant for, even if the purposes were hidden in a murky fog that my words could not penetrate. I spoke for a long time, making long circles of interlocking sentences. When I was finished, Mother shook her head. All my efforts had been useless. I couldn’t make her understand.
I reached under my bed and pulled out another rock from a hiding place I had not known about just a few moments before.
“Look Mother, this one has already been open, this will make it all clear, this will let you understand all that I have been trying to say.”
The new rock was like an open box with a tunnel inside, a tunnel that led into complete darkness deep within the tiny walls of stone. There were two small wheels on either side of the opening, keeping the jagged wound from healing and closing up. With my index finger, I pointed straight into the darkness, feeling the icy cold on my skin.
“Look Mother, that is where the matter is, that is where it has always been hiding…”
But Mother just shook her head and looked straight at me. She was as quiet as the streets outside, as the thick heavy walls, as the closed curtains, as the distant mountains crowned with white.

Challenges and Rewards

I flew through clear fresh air and the landscape fell before me like a great bed sheet full of lumps and dunes, light brown touched here and there by green and blue. I could see flocks of birds in the distance and the tops of all the little trees that were so far below me as to seem unreal. The land went on like this for as far as I could see. There were no cities or towns or even roads, so sign of any kind of civilization. It was all clear and empty and raw, and the freshness was so strong that it was nearly overwhelming.
Somewhere back there, back where I had come from, was Mother. She waited patiently, knowing that I would not travel beyond the rivers which were my boundary. These were twisting thick currents of watery force that cut the land into sections. I would never know their origin and I would never know their end. I only knew that I couldn’t go past them.
I flew for a time, enjoying the pure pleasure of travelling freely on the soft winds of this endless afternoon. The breeze touched me like the most sensitive of lovers and my cape stretched out behind me like a comet’s tail. I moved freely in all directions, doing summersaults in the air, diving recklessly towards the hard ground, rising slowly so my heart would open like a bleeding flower, but I never crossed the river borders and I never saw another living being. Nobody came out to greet me, nobody waved from the distance with eyes of friendship or distrust, nobody called out to me from behind trees or rocks. There was simply the broad waves of brown grass, and the green trees and the rivers and nothing else, no one else. And the sheer purity of it could never be exhausted.
I returned to Mother and I said:
“If I am by myself, there’s not much beauty in being what I am…if I am to have power, I must have a reason, I must have a purpose, I must have a challenge.”
She nodded with her kind of understanding that scattered through my fingers like sand and was soon lost in the same winds through which I had just been travelling. She said nothing but her eyes spoke to me in ways that words couldn’t define. I nodded and my eyes also spoke with silent sadness.
I left through paths that I couldn’t trace back in my memory, knowing that I would never walk this way again. After a time that was impossible to measure, I found myself with Father.
We were hunting in a dark and dense jungle. We moved slowly in between the tall bamboo shoots, under the thick and heavy leaves of old forgotten trees. Our feet would sink in mud and the mosquitoes would fly in and out of our ears like fighter airplanes.
“I will give you many rewards, if you only learn how to do a few things, single thing in fact.” He said it in a kind but serious voice, a voice that evoked both hope and fear within me. I couldn’t fly anymore because my body was heavier and my eyes were not as open as they once had been.
“I will give you a book…” he said, and when he said the word, I saw the book he meant with secret eyes I couldn’t place within my body. It was the book of the jungle itself, the jungle on which we stood, the book that told the stories of its creatures, its crowning entities, its rebellious angels, its growing heroes, its hidden chambers. I knew that book well and I wanted to have it.
“I will give you the yellow powder…” he said, and when he said these words, I could see the yellow powder with my secret eyes, and it blew in circles around my head like a tornado of yellowness and it drew complex interlocking spiral lines that were bright like gold under the sun. As long as this swirling mass of yellow was there, nobody could touch me. I knew the yellow powder well and I wanted to have it.
“I will give you the silver weapon…” he said, and I could see the silver weapon with my secret eyes, and it was heavy and solid and final in its menace. It was shaped like perfection and it contained the dreams of a lost people within it. It glowed in the misty darkness of its secret alcove and it was shining in the heart of my own private night. I knew the silver weapon and I wanted to have it.
“All you need to do, in order to get all these things, is to learn how to swim, it is as simple as that, learn to swim and you will have everything…”
We immediately traveled to where two pools were waiting, one much smaller than the other. Both were surrounded by palm trees, both were caressed by the ocean breeze, both were touched by the warmth of the bright yellow sun that was shining high above us, both were gentle and lonely and full of blue peace.
I jumped into the largest of the two and quickly found that if I flowed gently with the water, the resistance was greatly diminished and I was able to rise above the surface. As I rose, my smile was pure and simple, beyond my desire for the things that waited for me, this was a gift in itself, to be here in the pool and to feel my body change its shape under pressure. I dived deep under the surface to feel the entire weight of the pool on my shoulders. The feeling of the water over my head and of the sun over the water, was enough to last me forever, and it was only deep in a time beyond forever that I would ask again for the things that Father had promised.
I stepped out of the large pool and ran to where Father was swimming in the smaller one. Without having to say it, Father knew that I had succeeded.
“Jump in, in one single movement…” he said, and before he was finished saying it, I had jumped into the water and I was tracing circles on the blue surface that rolled its little waves against my face. I looked at Father, who was leaning against the hard edge of the little pool and I saw that his face was marked by transparent happiness. Seeing him like this, seeing him glowing like the sun itself and unashamed of his own simplicity, I was happy as well.
After a time of circling in the little pool, I pulled myself up and ran back to the larger one. The shadows of the palm trees fell over the little puddles of water that my feet left behind me. I jumped into the larger pool as I had done before, in one single swift movement that left no room for doubt. As I did this, I heard Father asking:
“Why don’t you stay over here, in the little pool with me?”
“Over here there is much more space. I want to roam and discover things I haven’t seen. I want to reach beyond the edges of my knowledge.”
Just then, I noticed that the water in the larger pool was covered in dead leaves and dead branches. It was a place forgotten by time itself, and that made it a realm to explore, a landscape to conquer. I roamed among the dead things, and I saw the traces of lost lives in the bark of the branches, and the faded markings of past legends in the leaves, and the hopeful poems lightly painted on the sides of light blue concrete.
“You should get out. You are staying too long in there. You may get used to it. Then you won’t ever be able to leave.” My Father said and I felt that what he said was true, and yet I wanted to stay a little longer.
I took one more journey through the water that by now seemed like home. It was a home that seemed to grow larger and larger each time I traveled through it. Soon the pool would be the world itself and by then Father would become a distant memory, much like Mother now was.
I looked up at the sun that was still shining over the gentle surface and little drops of blue water were sliding down my forehead, some of them reaching all the way to my mouth. Maybe soon I would be flying, maybe soon my questions would once again begin to grow out of the nothingness that came with forgetting.

Questions of Blame

I traveled with my second family, all of us crowded into a small white car, on our way an unknown destination. Older Brother was there and Younger Brother as well, and Wise Father and Kind Mother, all of us together in the twilight of the small compartment. I sat between the two brothers in the back seat, alternating my attention between them, trying to make them look at each other, trying to make it so we would all truly talk together, but it was rare for their eyes to ever meet, even rarer for them talk directly to each other. The road outside was surrounded by long lines of thin trees that swayed lightly in the wind, and the night had a kind of gray quality that seemed somehow familiar.
I turned to Older Brother and addressed him, and since I could only think of serious subjects when I was near him, I spoke to him of destiny and of choice. He immediately responded and we mulled over the abstract qualities of these concepts while the road kept on going straight as an imaginary line and Wise Father listened carefully as he drove. I hoped he would say something but he only chuckled once in a while and leaned back his head to acknowledge a particular point. Older Brother looked under the covering of our mutual assumptions and I pushed when I felt that I had to, and I relented when I felt it was best.
When it seemed that I had talked to Older Brother for too long and I felt Younger Brother growing restless on my left, I turned to him and asked him about his own terrible experiences. He talked to me in measured words, and he had no concepts to summarize what he was saying, no abstract figurations to examine, so he simply told me what had happened, and how it happened, and, to some degree, how he felt as it was happening. He spoke of violent encounters and threats of death and painful marks that would never be erased and sudden moments of conversion when the world turned upside down and the heavy bars of the prison didn’t seem so heavy any more. I listened and asked questions when it seemed that he had skipped over an important moment, and when I asked a question, he would answer in as much detail as he could muster and then he would go on, and he would smile sideways, blowing air out of his nose in a kind of soundless laughter.
Suddenly, Kind Mother turned around from her post at the passenger’s seat and looked at me in the twilight. Her eyes were as sweet and gentle as ever, but there seemed to be a kind of heaviness in demeanor her as well, a heaviness that had never been there or, at the very least, I had never noticed it.
“I feel that you blame me for all that has happened. I feel, in the final accounting, you think that I was the one that caused it all. I hear it in your words. I hear it in the way you speak of thing.”
My own eyes opened wide in surprise since I had never thought these things, I had never blamed her for anything at all. But as soon as she had spoken, my mind started to form shapes around the words that were still hanging in the air between us, and the shapes reorganized my memories at breakneck speeds that I couldn’t follow, and suddenly my memories were no longer the same as they had been and Older Brother had changed form and Younger Brother had also changed form and Wise Father nodded as he usually did and the road kept on going straight through the gray darkness.
“I have never blamed you, not at all. I simply want to look at all the causes, at all the events, everything fits together and to place the cause in only one spot would be to make a great mistake. Causes are like roots, they extend from one event in all directions. Only fanatics grab on to one of the many roots and decide that that is the only one that matters.”
Her eyes closed and opened, and I might have seen a tiny tear rolling down her cheek but it was too dark inside the car for me to be sure. Younger Brother shifted around by my side. He wanted the ride to be over soon. Wise Father chuckled in that way that implied hidden knowledge and Older Brother shook his head. There was something that I had said that he was not pleased with, he might have even heard an insult in my words. It was through him that I had come to understand that insults are unavoidable once distrust has set in like a slowly growing cancer.
I tried to retrace my words, I tried to think of where it was that Kind Mother had found the evidence of blame, the implication that I was specifically blaming her. I couldn’t find the right spot, as much as I looked, as much as I examined. And then I remembered that our language was different, and that more than once someone had said that they couldn’t understand what Older Brother was saying to me, that they couldn’t understand what I was saying to Older Brother, that the words escaped them as if they were all being spoken in a strange unknown language. So maybe she just heard what she was afraid of hearing, and maybe because she was afraid of it, there was a kernel of truth in it. Not the entire truth, for the entire truth was too large to be held in any one thought, in any one sentence. But maybe a sliver of truth, enough of it to make her cry, enough of it to make my past into a different story from the one I had always framed as my experience. Maybe she had maintained a certain structure too long, maybe she had allowed certain imbalances to fester, to grow past the point when anything could be done about it.
Their faces were different now, but the road remained the same. Kind Mother had turned towards the windshield and was staring at the place where the road disappeared in the horizon. There always seemed to be a white cloud there, a bright white cloud that we never quite reached, and yet it always seemed so close.
Older Brother, with his new face and his new clothes, turned towards me once again and he said: “Each of us has to respond for our own actions. We can’t blame others for what we do.”
I nodded and agreed. There was no use asking who we would be responding to or why we were all so concerned with the placement of blame, why when I spoke of causes everyone thought I spoke of judgements and faults. Maybe we didn’t care so much where the blame rested as long as it wasn’t on us.
Younger Brother, with his new face and his new clothes, turned towards me and said: “You used to be my friend. You were my friend first before anything else.”
I nodded and agreed. There was no use asking how he had faded away from me or how I had faded away from him, how he had turned into a living memory that only danced in the distance. He was no longer the Younger Brother I knew and so I couldn’t touch on such delicate subjects. I could only listen and take in what he wanted to give me.
Kind Mother inhaled deeply and then released a deep sob. It was only then that I was certain she was crying. Wise Father turned to her and said: “Don’t worry, mama, we’ll be there very soon. Very soon this will all be a memory. “
I leaned back on the backseat and exhaled softly. It would certainly all be a memory and I now knew what ultimately happened with memories. In the horizon, the white cloud was shining bright, as distant as it ever was. Inside the car, there was only the very faint sound of crying and of soft, careful breathing. Soon this would all be a memory. And then everything would change. Just like it always did. Just like it always had.

The Tower

Wren with her stupid camera. That was always how the trouble got started. She’d take a photo of someone that didn’t want to be photographed and it would start a fight, or she’s want to take pictures of some bank or a hotel and the security would hassle them and then Wren would take out this paper she’d printed from a web site stating her rights and get into an argument with someone with a gun or a night stick. It had even gone wrong in the other direction; a couple of guys at Baker beach and Wren takes their pictures and pretty soon she wants a shot with them and Natasha, and it’s a nude beach, so what the hell, everybody take it off, and a month later Natasha’s looking at this disgusting photo of herself with Sven and Pauly (the guys from the beach) hanging from the wall of some makeshift co-op gallery and it’s made even more painful by the fact that she’d ended up dating Pauly for a week until she discovered that he was unemployed and living with another girlfriend. Wren with her stupid camera. Now here they were, trespassing, way beyond the danger signs posted on the sagging and compromised chain link fence, making their way into the charred out ruins of some weird tower in the middle of nowhere. Their car was a hopeless hike behind them, parked on a turnout along highway one. They had been driving along when Wren said suddenly,
“Look at that weird fence.” And before Natasha could look Wren was already pulling over and climbing out with her Camera. Natasha climbed out to stretch her legs while Wren took a few pictures of the eight foot fence.
“Why is it here, do you think?” Wren was asking. “To keep us out, or to keep something in?”
“Maybe to prevent a landslide.” Natasha suggested studying the tips of her chestnut brown hair. It was time for a trim.
“No, this is like a little ravine, there wouldn’t be a landslide coming from here.”
“Well, like you said, maybe it’s just to keep us out. We should get going, I’m getting hungry.” Natasha released her locks and gave her head a flick to send them back over her shoulders.
“I wonder why.” Wren had said, and that was that. After throwing a stick at it to see if it was an electrified fence, Wren was making her way up and over, and Natasha, looking over her shoulder for angry park rangers or mountain people, had scrambled over behind her, protesting in vain. From there they had followed the babbling brook, Wren snapping away and speculating that the fence was meant to keep deer off the highway. Then it was up an embankment and through some trees and into this clearing where the weird charred out remains of a tower stood shadowed by the nearby ridge of evergreens.
“I just don’t think it looks safe.” Natasha said and planted her hands on her hips.
Wren having already frenzied with the camera on the outside of the tower was pressing on towards the black doorway gaping like an open mouth.
“It’s fine.” Wren said and with a step disappeared beyond the threshold. Natasha crept closer.
“Wren?” she called, but there was no answer. She came to stand right in front of the door and peered into the darkness. “Wren?” she called much louder. For a minute she held still and thought about what she had seen and heard. Wren took a step into the open doorway and vanished. There had been no sound of floorboards cracking and giving out, or of Wren screaming as she fell. Natasha repeated this fact to herself several times to calm herself down. “Wren?” she called again, “Don’t kid around. Are you okay?” But there was no answer and as Natasha studied the darkness beyond the open doorway she felt a cold chill race up her spine. The doorway was simply inky blackness. She stood right in front of it, careful not to cross into the tower. Nothing at all was visible. The darkness that she beheld was more than murk, more than the simple absence of light. It was a nearly tangible substance. Natasha stepped abruptly backward, recoiling from the mass of dark. Her mind was racing. Why hadn’t Wren noticed this oddity? What was it? What was happening. Natasha began to shriek,
“Wren! Wren! Answer me! Wren!.”
She stared up at the three rectangular windows near the broken top of the tower. She willed Wren’s face to appear there, with the camera, taking a photo of hysterical Natasha. But no face emerged in the dark rectangles, and without realizing that she was doing it, Natasha began to run in a wide circle around the tower. She screamed Wren’s name again and again, looking for some other opening, some explanation, some sign of her friend until she arrived once again at that yawning doorway of darkness. Trembling and panting, she picked up a stone and tossed it through the doorway and watched it disappear completely, as though it were being sucked into black velvet jell-o. It made no sound at all.
Natasha sunk down and rested on her heels sobbing. It seemed that she was having a nightmare, beyond a doubt. People don’t vanish like that. She sat and sobbed and waited for Wren to come back, then she waited to wake up, but neither events occurred. Eventually it grew dark and Natasha, doubting what she had perceived with her senses rose suddenly full of the conviction that Wren had fallen through the floor and needed help. With this in mind she raced back into the woods to return to the highway and flag someone down. But it was dark already, and Natasha had never been much good in the woods and was soon hopelessly lost and cold. She tripped and slid down a muddy slope and rolled into a stream. She crawled out unsure of which direction to proceed. The pale face of the moon glittered down from the tree tops and filled the surrounding forest with strange shadows and shapes. Nothing at all looked familiar.

The following morning a patrol man discovered the empty car parked in the turnout. A day later a search was launched at the request of Wren’s parents. Natasha was found with a twisted ankle. She told the story of Wren falling through the floorboards of the burnt out tower, but despite the exhaustive search no such tower could ever be located.

I Stepped Into The Wasteland

I stepped into the wasteland this morning. I knew, walking into the cold, fog-filled morning, what to expect. I had lived in it for many years. I had walked the trail. Followed the well-marked lines and over the highlighted boundaries. And though I expected it and had some vague sense of the death scent and dim florescent lights, it was stronger than the memory. The building was a wide one story square. We stood in quiet order, spilling from the open double glass doors to the edge of the parking lot. The sun had not peeked out from behind the clouds, and a woman close to me stood clutching her paper cup of coffee. The young man next to me, covered in a large black hoodie, kept a small bottle of orange juice in his pocket. I held my large jar of tea and goat milk close to my heart. “It’s not so bad,” I told myself, the line is moving fast. It’s nice to be out in the world with my tea.” I focused on the warmth of the glass, reaching me though the black wool jacket. The minutes passed and more joined the line. This was a necessary evil in a world of rules. Of bureaucratic technicality and parking signs and permits and details that required our money. We stood in line. The boy in the hoodie coughed and spit into the small pocket of ivy within the cemented sidewalk. I made a face, slightly disgusted at the sound. “Man, you know how close that guy came to hitting me? This close!!” There was an old Cadillac parked illegally in front of some parked cars. Two black youth stood by it. One talking loudly, the other just listening. I turned to the old man behind me. “It’s moving pretty fast.” “What’d you say?” he asked me. “The line is moving pretty fast.” “Yeah, it’s not so bad.” We talked for another twenty minutes while the line was slowly categorized by the gate keepers behind a desk close to the front door. The old man had moved to the city in 1950 and bought his double flat for $11,000. He said it was a lot of money at the time and that to buy it, he spent all his reserves, he could have bought a lot more properties in the neighborhood, in what is now known as Million-Dollar Hill. I turned to wish him good luck on his driving test, but he didn’t hear me, he was already focused on the black woman behind the desk, the woman that would give him a number. I held a small paper ticket in my hand. B042. They had just called B020. I took a seat, the old man chose another spot. I tried to read, but instead I looked around at the many rows of plastic chairs that lined the building. Sitting in almost every one was a bored looking human. This was the necessary evil. The bureaucratic monstrosity that moved like a leviathan without feeling, content only to take the living breath out of all that entered. I looked around again, unable to focus on the letters on the page, on the letters that could take me to another world, in fact, into a galaxy very far away, but there was too much in the room. Too much impatience, boredom…too much. I studied the people standing by the windows of the bureaucrats, the people who had come even earlier than I. B026! It was the cold unfeeling voice of a robot. A female sound that never felt joy. I felt myself becoming impatient, I closed my eyes and brought my attention inwards. “We should have called…” I heard the woman behind me say. “I know,” agreed her boyfriend. My eyes opened. Yes, I should have called. I thought about it so many times the day before, I just never did. Was it to snuff the suggestion? I looked around. There were no happy faces. The people slumped in their hard plastic chairs. This was a necessary evil. Necessary, but soul sucking. I watched the girl standing in front of me. She was tall, with long slender legs, but something seemed a little strange about her body. I scrutinized the contour of her shape through her tight jeans. Her feet were exposed in Coco Chanel sandals, worn for fashion on this cloudy day. I watched her, realizing that she had no hips, she was nearly a solid line. The lines made by her tight panties showed through her jeans. A small leather bag hung by a faux metal chain from her shoulder. She turned and looked around the room, making a face, one she must make often. I closed my eyes once again. I pulled my attention in. B042! It had been an hour. “I’m happy to see you!” I said with a smile. The woman behind the desk did not look at me. She was a small, portly Latin woman. She wore a pink short sleeved sweater. I looked at the small gold pendant on her neck, hanging from a thin gold chain. I couldn’t tell exactly what it was, but assumed it was religious. “What can I help you with?” She took my forms, I gave her my plastic card, a promise of money contained within its shape. I took some new forms and drove into the city. Hillsides covered in houses greeted me. In the heart of the city, there was traffic. There were a few still sleeping on the cold street. I searched for a place to park and entered another building. More lines, more people coughing. There were more numbers and more waiting and no one wanted to be there. I tried to find his eyes. How would he look at all this? I felt a smile coming from deep within me. For a moment, for the tiniest brief moment, I look around with his eyes and not my own. It all seemed a little pretty, a little humorous. I might use these people later, in a way they would never think of. The monster Samoan woman behind the counter. The other giantess who refused to give me a parking permit because of a technicality. The bureaucrats that were lined up like cattle behind glass windows. I stepped into the wasteland. There were rules and regulations, there was the desire, the desire of something inhuman, that thing wanted life. It took it. It took life with all the waiting and boredom and protocol. I closed my eyes and pulled the breath within me. I looked around. I remembered the day when I was on the street taking photos and everyone was beautiful. “Maybe it’s because you’re really seeing them,” my friend said. For a moment, in the small room, I looked into the wasteland. There was a man with one regular shoe, the other was a high platform. “His legs are different sizes,” I thought to myself. He was beautiful. I looked into the wasteland and saw a flicker. Both remembering and forgetting in nearly the same instant.

Exceptions

We have confused
The exception
For the rule
And the rule
For the exception.
What we think
We rarely are
Is what we are usually.
What we think
We usually are
Is what we are but rarely.
To look into ourselves
Too deeply
Is to risk
The lethal cold touch of despair.
To never look
Is to be already
Drowning in it.
What we are is here,
In this moment.
Not the exception
But the rule.
Not a moment away
But a moment
Deep within it.

She looked up at me, from her sanctuary by my heart, and she once again said the words I had already heard so often:
“This is not me. This is not who I am. You have met me at a very particular moment, a very unique moment… so please don’t think that this is what I am because it’s not…”
I felt her soft body against me, her naked legs pressed against my own and her stomach pressed against my side, and her sweat mingled with mine and it formed tiny rivers that slid towards the white ocean of the rumpled sheets. I leaned over and kissed her smooth white forehead and she shook her head. I kissed her again as she started to speak.
“I really want you to know… I wouldn’t want you to think… I wouldn’t want you to imagine that… you know?… this is simply not me… you understand? This is not me. Maybe it was once before… but I have left that behind me…even if it has happened now… it’s just a fluke… it’s simple not me…”
I nodded and wondered if she was referring to the compulsive smoking by the garden door, which left behind a trail of cigarettes over the decomposing moist surface of the walls, or maybe she was referring to her constant calling, to her angry jealousy, to her bouts of drinking, to the night when I sat by her in a little bar on Judah while she drank one beer after another and I just watched her eyes slowly drooping and I heard her words getting more and more difficult to comprehend while the old drunks sitting at the bar eyed us with shameless curiosity. Or maybe she simply referred to being here in my arms, to her naked and willing presence where it shouldn’t be. This was certainly not me, and not by choice. And maybe it wasn’t her either, maybe she was right. And in that case, we were two non existent beings borrowing the bodies of others to meet in a non existent place, an imaginary realm of twilight where improbable things could happen.
“I used to act like this… you understand?… but it’s just not me… I have grown beyond all that… you see?… you have to know that this is not me… otherwise you will get the wrong impression… you will believe the wrong things… and you will be wrong about me… how can you truly know me if you are wrong about me? You have to know the real me… this is not it!”
Maybe it was the fact that she had stayed with me for so many nights, so many that now I couldn’t even remember when she hadn’t been here, so many that it now seemed natural to have her small naked white body next to mine each time I half awoke in the middle of the night, touching her big brown nipples with my fingers and feeling them getting hard in the darkness, so many that I no longer flinched when she was upset about a movie or a dinner or a phone conversation, so many that I no longer felt disbelief each time I felt her body from within, each time she groaned into my ear and told me she couldn’t hold it any longer. Or maybe it was all the journeys into strange nether worlds that we had taken together, all the reckless jumping into the vacuum without fear of repercussions or consequences, all the spiraling colors and the deep drones that came from nowhere and took us to a place where her worries disappeared and my rationalizations vanished and we were simply together, floating in the middle of nothingness.
“I don’t want you to get the impression that this is me… are you even listening to me?… this is important!… I don’t want you to remember me some day and think that you knew me… because this is what you know… this is all that you know… and this isn’t me…”
Maybe she was right. Maybe this was all an exception. And it seemed to me that I had been living through a maze of exceptions and this was only the latest one and soon another exception would come calling, taking me further away from the norm, so far away that I would not be able to place it on a map and all the maps I had just then were written over naked white skin covered in tiny invisible hairs and little brown birthmarks.
“I am listening… I understand… this is not you…this is not me… it’s very clear now…”
And it was clear then, in a way, as it is now clear, but in a different way, and maybe later, years from now, I would think about it, and remember her words and the sound of her voice against my ear, and it would be all new again, and once again, I would understand. It had all been an exception. And beyond a certain place, beyond a certain barrier, it was all made of exceptions. Exceptions, exceptions and more exceptions, nothiing but exceptions all the way down.

The Snow

Shelly, my friend, sat on a massively tall red-brick wall. It was the very top of a building, only a couple of feet from the flat roof of the rectangular apartment complex. She sat on the ledge, her thick white legs were bright in the midnight light. A small breeze played with the edges of her thin silky white slip. She was relaxed there on the edge. Her hands were behind her and she relaxed into their support as she would with a comfortable chair. One of her feet was on the ledge, the knee of the same leg very close to her face. The other foot hung over the ledge. She looked like a rock star, confident and defiant, teasing the night. I could tell she was not okay. It looked like she had lived through many years of extensive drug abuse, and now, she sat relaxed, ready to die on the edge of that building.

I awoke. I was still.

The dream lingered. It was one of the many unusually strong ones that had come upon me in the week that I had been here in the mountains. Six other girls in bunk beds slept around me in the small wooden cabin. There was a girl above me now, dreaming her dreams. The cabin was dark and my fingers groped for the small headlamp that I had placed beside the bed’s legs before I closed my eyes. I had been with these women for a week. A full week of meditation and silence, there was still one more to go.

With the headlamp in my hand, I crawled out of the sleeping bag like a caterpillar breaking free of its cocoon. Only there were no orange and black wings, just a sleepy girl in baggy long johns and an oversized sweater. I walked to the door and stepped out as quietly as I could, but in the nearly silent mountain night, even a falling snowflake makes itself known.

And it was a sound I heard which moved like muted echoes. All around me, soft drifts of white snowflakes fell delicately. The ground and stairs were covered already with a thin coating, and I walked with a smile down the rough outlines of a path to the large cement dormitory a few hundred feet in front of me. The world was dark. The thick woods to my right were dark, the paths that led to the meditation hall were black. There were no lights, nothing to provide my city paranoia with security, but I let the initial habits of panic wash over and through me. The night felt safe. The stillness was safe. Different, much different than I was used to, but I could step into it. The falling snowflakes added a new element. A touch of the extraordinary, a light whisper of magic dancing on my eyelashes. It was all worth noticing, every leaf, every quietly waiting bough, but the snow brought an energy I was not used to. A duality of parallel lines, calm and still, yet filled with constant movement. They glittered somehow, without the moon, without street lamps, somehow they gave enough light that I could walk through them without the aid of my headlamp. I walked casually, letting them melt on my warm neck and in the folds of my clothes.

I entered the dormitory and used the bathrooms there, then I walked back into the snow drifts, back to the wooden stairs of my cabin, clunkily taking off my boots and moving the other shoes beneath the cover of the eaves. Then I crawled back into the silky red cocoon, ready to see what other tales the subconscious would spin for me.

When I woke the following morning and stepped onto the steps to retrieve my cold boots, the land was covered in snow at least a foot deep. So much had fallen in just a few hours. There had not been wall-shaking wind or rattling, it had just come down hard, intent on its descent. The buried path to the meditation hall was now white and invisible, I made my own way, delighted in the footprints I left behind. The snow brought with it a silence so complete. I could hear small out-weighed chunks of snow topple off tree branches and land with a thud on the already blanketed ground. It wasn’t just quiet, it was like the mountains themselves chose to whisper. It was like the woods nodded with a small wink and began to move just a little slower. There were people around me, others walking quietly to the large square building that awaited with pillows and warm walls. But despite the presence of humans, the mountains opened with its ways. Movements usually hidden among chatter and cars and noise and quick movement. A careful deer emerged from the white-wooden thicket and walked timidly to the bushes. With the whiteness, time slowed. There were no human sounds of laughter, nothing to disrupt the absolute serene stillness of trees, branches, grass, rocks, everything buried in snow. I walked the paths softly, silently filled with the sounds of snow and the simple process of a thaw.