#a writer climbing through a window to leave unseen

[ladytano]

okay everytime I finish an episode I go on wikipedia to read about the production and the entry for The City on the Edge of Forever is SO MUCH LONGER than all the other ones that I’ve read so far. The production sounds like absolute hellfire. Some vintage 56 year old drama for anyone who want to read about it lmao.

[augment-techs]

Literary Witches: A Celebration of Magical Women Writers

As Writing Prompts~

wife, sister, virgin, whore

an incantation, a naming, a blessing, a curse

weavers, potters, cooks, and healers

flip to any page; follow your wyrd

conjurer of hurricanes, zombies, and tall tales

with each story, the basket gains an apple

alchymist of monsters, children, the living and the dead

a terrible baby, their very arrival a murder

even the freshest thing is mixed with rot

a painful tale about the creation of life and what happens to shunned, abandoned children

shaman of dew, hummingbirds, and mushroom language

could not read or write and lived in poverty on the mountains

healer and oral poet

hermit of hospitals, belonging, and lost souls

"You think you're the only one who doesn't belong?"

at least some creatures can find a home

receiving two hundred electroshock treatments and narrowly escaping a lobotomy

grand dame of trickery, murder, and teatime

"Most unpleasant."

a consolatory apricot biscuit

sibyl of masks, extraterrestrial eggs, and twisted fantasies

smashes the crystal ball on the ground

what remains--glass shards and a black, sticky substance

the room is clean and the crystal ball intact

madame of roses, geometry, and repetition

grow feathers, slink into worms, shrink into dragonflies--anything to get out

undine of introspection, opulent dreams, and voyages

some collect seashells, others chart the sun's movement

some keep house, make lace, pursue lovers

dakini of holy ecstasy, the dark one, and ankle bells

poison becomes ashamed

miraculously escaped their poisoning attempts twice

fantasma of silence, death, and lilacs

a bird of blue bones drops a piece of paper

the paper unfolds into a palace

step in through the door

the music hollows

cursed to hear it forever

give in, eat the bird whole

storyteller of rattlesnakes, turquoise, and the sacred desert

the drought has gone on too long

spider's silk holding all things together shines with the light

high priestess of scholars, volcanoes, and eros

a grim jewel of astronomical price

fondles their muscles over coffee and toast

sorceress of islands, venom, and histories

the soup boils down to a thick black sludge

soothsayer of utopias, creeping women, and evil wallpaper

the unseen fairy

the people must realize the changes for themselves

the disastrous, sexist "rest cure" prescribed for postpartum depression

sorceress of names, houses, and solitude

sometimes the mango is perfectly juicy, sometimes underripe, sometimes too sweet, or bruised

cigar in hand, walk into the jacaranda trees, hanging black bras off the branches

'Use this to climb out,' read the notes tied on with ribbon

guardian of the waters, the porcelain, and the lexicon

they love these puddles

they will not survive this one

wolf child fight their way to the bank of the river; they survive

after a lifelong struggle with mental illness

fairy godparent of bloody tales, the circus, and mirror

"Not another one."

doll in a red riding habit

and a bleeding wolf escapes from under the cloth

dark drops of blood sink into the soil and the roses bloom a deeper, more delicious red

sumptuous tapestries depicting sexual, violent scenes

ornamented with symbols and adjectives

warrior witch of otherness, bodies electric, and sisterhood

the sword is for slaying ghosts and demons along the way

lava filling their wounds

the coroner writes

populated with mothers, children, sisters, anger, cancer, the erotic, unicorns, snails eating dead snakes, witches, fire, and the importance of refusing silence

specter of windows, flies, and the unexpected

travels freely between the afterworld and this world

a white dress kneeling in the flowerbeds

rebel of sensual love, green gardens, and perfume

they never speak of it, but each man is haunted by his vision

withered leaves, wilted geraniums and lilacs

write explicitly about sexuality

siren of the lyre, honey, and ruins

the rest of the words are illegible

how seriously each child puts those wings on in the mirror

seer of peacocks, weird country people, and glass eyes

pray to see humanity clearly

the doors creak open

cosmic traveler of crows, horses, and survival

joy lies down in a field

the music is a spell

courageously survived an oppressive childhood, teenage pregnancy, and domestic abuse

koldunya of winter, endurance, and willows

the sodden papers become bandages for the wounded

rations of potatoes, cabbage, and milk

queen of miracles, generations, and memory

fury of motherhood, marriage, and the moon

dismembers mannequins with ferocious, precise claws

terrified into the thrill of living

enchantress of bitter love, treachery, and jewels

summons a moonbeam into a locked room

climb down to find an underground chamber

"I am the ruler of this prison."

locked up in the bedroom for six months

witch of villages, domestic horrors, and omens

rabid cats, poisoned beetles, blood-tipped needles

the ice cream section of the twenty-four-hour grocery store at three a.m.

doesn't need help finding anything

marries the ordinary with the supernatural

sower of strange seeds, species, and the future

mutating with violent need for food, power, and sex

covertly tosses seeds kept in pockets into the neighbors' yards

watcher of the moors, fantasy, and cruel romance

brushed the carpets and took walks in the hills

death of tuberculosis at thirty

[luci-four]

I freakin adore your writing, like the use of themes and emotions are conveyed so well 💕 you’re a seriously talented writer >///< also I was wondering if you could write a belphie x insomniac reader? I hope you have a nice day or night

A/N: Thank you!!! Sometimes I feel like I take all the themes and flowery language a bit too far so it means a lot that you like it!!! I hope this one works for you ♥

Sleepless Nights, Midnight Flights. {Belphegor x Reader/MC}

Roaming the house at night felt like it was as close to a blessing as Belphegor was going to get.

He felt refreshed, now that he slept as much of the day away as he could; his brothers either asleep or confined to their rooms made the middle of the night feel so free to him.  

The air around him was cool and crisp—it felt nice to just stand in front of an open window and let the slight breeze caress his face. Every room in the house felt as though the air had stood still, some parts thick and heavy that felt as though someone had accidentally opened up a different reality, others light and airy without the pollution of people to ruin it that felt as like it’d be a sin to make the slightest of sounds when surrounded by it.

Sounds—that was probably his favourite part of the night, minus the fact he could be physically alone—there were no sounds. Well, that was a lie, but the sounds that came out in the dead of night were peaceful, ones he no longer registered as sounds and simply as part of a feeling deep within his chest. The occasional cry of a night-dwelling bird, the croak of a toad, the screaming of bugs-- he thought they were ridiculous, but maybe they were just enjoying the feeling too—they were all so soft, blending together to such a nostalgic melody. Just one sound out of place would tip him off.

The creaks of the boards beneath his feet were gentle, his eyes wide to see through the hallways clouded in the shadows—now that Beel was asleep, he was going to grab a snack; his ears perked at the faint sound of furniture scratching against the floor followed by the slightly louder exclamation of pain towards MC’s room.

He tiptoed to their door, listening to the low music playing in the background as they swore at some unseen inanimate object. Laughing to himself a bit, he tapped his knuckles gently against the wood and called to them in a whisper.

“MC?”

“...Yes?”

“Are you... alright?”

Through the door came sounds of struggle; MC grunted as though they had been climbing over things, scrambling, cursing following loud thuds. Belphie could tell they hit the door fairly heavily before swinging it open.

“Yeah, I’m fine.” They leaned against the door frame fairly lax to come across calm and collected before rushing to smooth out their disheveled appearance.  

Belphie tried to keep his laugh quiet, having to cover his face within his hands for a moment just to calm down. The sight of their flushed face and embarrassed rambling made his heart skip a beat, and he couldn’t hide his smile.

“Are you sure about that?”

“Yeah!”

“Then what is it that you’re doing, exactly?”

Looking past them, he could see their furniture tossed around with no rhyme nor rhythm to their placement; shelves and chairs, dressers and the couch, even their bed had taken up any sort of walking space within their room. It was obvious they had to climb over (and through) everything just to get to the door. He could see a piece of a bookcase peeking from behind the door, telling him they had to shove it to open the door.

“I’m... practicing feng shui.”

“At three in the morning?”

“Harmonizing your energies is an activity with no time restraints.”

“Don’t think that’s right.”

They giggled this time, folding into themselves a bit to keep themselves quiet, their hand gripping the door.

“Are ya sure?”

Belphie shook his head with a smile, gesturing to the mess behind them and feigning a disappointed look once they locked eyes with him.

“Disappointing.”  

“Listen!” They bit their lip to keep from laughing again, “Okay okay, so I might have just been... rearranging the room.”  

Their face dropped and they covered their mouth, eyes wide with sudden realization and a mix of regret and embarrassment.

“Oh no, did I wake you up? I’m so sorry! I didn’t realize I was being so loud, I tried to keep quiet each time I hit my shin on something or when I--”

“Hey, hey.” He gestured to calm them down, “I was already up, you’re fine.”

Resembling something of a confused owl, MC’s head turned to the side, their expression now an innocent bewilderment that Belphie had to look away from due to his heart leaping out of his throat.  

“Watch out, I’ll help you move it all back.”  

Now, Belphie didn’t enjoy entertaining the idea of manual labour in the middle of his serene time alone, but he was willing to admit spending the time with them was... interesting, to say the least. The dumb jokes they kept mouthing off, over-enthusiastic gestures, there were even a few times they couldn’t help but jump up and down with excitement. Despite their hyper movements and “go go go” attitude, Belphie noticed the exhaustion creeping up behind each flutter of their eyes.  

“Done and done!” MC cheered, “Thank you, Belphie.”

“Mm. Going to sleep now?”

“Nah, I’m feeling pretty good, now! If you’re tired you can go to sleep, I don’t mind--”

“I’m not,” he smiled gently, “Do you wanna go somewhere with me?”

“Go... somewhere?” They seemed nervous. “Isn’t it too late to go anywhere?”

“We won’t leave the house, it’s fine. Do you want to go?”

They pondered for a moment, he assumed they were still nervous—he certainly was. Alone—completely alone, he has to add—with MC was... tempting. Sweet, and just out of reach; he could almost taste it, and them.  He started to play with his hair, twisting a few strands between his fingers; he was fidgeting. Anxious, jittery, would they give him an answer already? Any answer would be enough to make his heart burst anyway--

“Okay, yeah.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah! Let’s go!”

Belphie exhaled with a smile, holding his hand out for MC to grab rather enthusiastically before heading through the realm of the quiet once more. A finger to his lips to remind them to hush, floorboards creaking with the tiptoed steps, the very soft, murmured giggles bouncing off of the surfaces.

The small gasp that escaped MC was adorable. The way they ran to the railing of the balcony, leaning over it to embrace the wind—he knew the feeling all too well. Freedom. Peace. Happiness. They turned back towards him and leaned their elbows against it while he crossed his arms and leaned as well.  

The two of them just... existed. The gentle breeze, the soft sounds, just the feeling of the presence of one another was ethereal. Seconds, minutes, hours—Belphie didn’t know how much time had passed, and he didn’t care. Moonlight bouncing off of their form, shining in their eyes, enveloping the space around them; Belphie laid his head on his arms and broke the silence with a calm voice.

“So, tell me. Why were you up?”

Their laugh had been a little regretful, something about it sad and tired.

“I’m up a lot of the time, just not as... perky.” They answered, rolling their head to stretch out their neck. “Insomnia. Nothing new, tonight I was just extra energetic.”

“Ah,” Belphie closed his eyes, “I know how that can be.”

Silence once again. Understanding, acceptance, companionship. The air was as light as ever, the sounds a dull hum in the background. Moments passed once again, so comfortable that Belphie hadn’t noticed the lights start to rise and the creatures grow quiet.

“You know...”

Their breathing, his heartbeat, his hushed voice—the only sounds left around him.  

“I like being awake—at night, at least.”

He started his thought; he needed to finish it. Tip of his tongue, words gearing up, ready to be spoken. The air between them was so still, open, ready, willing—all to hear what emotions he had to say.

“It’s quiet, peaceful. I get to enjoy myself. I get to breathe. I get to be alone.”

They’re looking at him now, the moonlight that once lit up their eyes now paled in comparison to the shadows the rising lights cast upon those irises. He can feel their expectations, he needs to speak, but how can he while he looked at them?  

The peace Belphegor got in the middle of the night was sacred; the ambiance of the time was refreshing, a beloved feeling near and dear to the demon’s heart. The occasional cry of a night-dwelling bird, the croak of a toad, the screaming of bugs; the still air-- some parts thick and heavy that felt as though someone had accidentally opened up a different reality, others light and airy without the pollution of people to ruin it—this air, this time, when everything stood still and everyone had slept, was the most serene, happy, and calm times of Belphie’s life.

“But... I wouldn’t mind being alone with you.”

[extremelyblackandwhite]

i wanna know what love is - 20

Pairing: rockstar! sebastian stan x writer!reader

Warnings: teasing

A/N: enjoy xx 💕💕

Last Chapter // Next Chapter

Y/N had slept on his shoulder for the whole plane journey and he didn’t dare move, he daren’t wake her up after waking her up this morning. Of course with that came the jokes from his bandmates and snarky remarks from Melody who’d get a snarky look from Mary in return. Luckily, he didn’t have to awake her up once the plane landed as the captain’s announcement did that for him and she was pissed. He couldn’t help it but find it rather cute how she would pout at not being allowed to sleep. 

They all went through security again, got their bags and all met up in a quiet zone of the airport to figure the best way to get into the bus without getting too much attention drawn to them, specially to Y/N who was new to all of this. Luckily, they weren’t and knew exactly how to go without being noticed, they just liked to brainstorm. Y/N knew they probably got a kick out of brainstorming ideas to be unseen. 

     - Y/N can go with one of the security guards to the back. - Michael pointed out but Y/N already knew what she was gonna do, and it wasn’t going to enter the bus again.

    - I think I’ll just get the taxi to the bay and then get a boat to St.Michaels. Gonna see my parents for a while, if that’s alright. 

    - Yeah, that’s alright, Y/N. We have around three days before the gig, so take your time. - Anthony replied, taking his eyes from his phone to look at her while he spoke and returning right back to it. He was probably speaking to his wife. 

    - Right, then I’ll see you guys in three days. - she kissed Sebastian goodbye and turned on her wheel to walk to the taxi area to see if she could hail one and get to her destination in one piece. Sebastian watched her go with a tinge of sadness, something that was greatly noticed by Mary. What could she say? She was a great emotional reader.

    - Do you wanna go with Y/N? - she questioned before they could all leave and go inside the bumpy, hard to sleep in bus until they reached Maryland, where they would once again sleep in the uncomfortable bus. Besides, if Melody was staying in, he was definitely gonna sleep in the coach. - Go on, just don’t sleep with her in her parents’ house. 

   - He’s not really gonna go to her ... - Melody started to complain but her complaint fell on def ears as he had already decided to start sprinting towards the taxi area, hoping she hadn’t caught one yet. Gladly, she had not caught a taxi yet and was seated on the sidewalk waiting for everyone to get one so she could try and hail a cab once again. How did she even survive in NY? Sebastian chuckled before walking over to her and sitting by her side.

   - Seb ... - she turned to see him, a look of worry in her face. - Are you alright? Please tell me you didn’t get kicked out of the band already.

   - Not yet, Mary just suggested I went with you to St.Michaels. 

   - Mary suggested? - she raised her eyebrows at him in pure disbelief. 

   - Yes, it’s a 30 minute journey from Washington to Maryland plus boat journey. You could get kidnapped, lost or worse drown at sea. - he added making her hold in a chuckle as she tried to look serious. - Unless you don’t want me to meet your folks. 

   - Can you hail a taxi? - she asked and he immediately got up on his feet, raising his arm up and as if by magic a taxi stopped. She sure needed to get famous as that was the only explanation as to why he could hail a taxi so easily.

The taxi drive was, to put in the least interesting. Small talk was not her strong suit, however it was Sebastian and he spent the whole half hour making the man question if he really knew him or if he was just going insane. She wanted to scold him for that, but she couldn’t deny it wasn’t funny. They got to the docks on time and she went over to the ticket place to get some passages while Sebastian stared at the boat. He hated boats. He never understood the fixation of famous people with boats, he personally hated them and he hated them even more once he had taken a half an hour journey only to get dumped at the beach along with Y/N in the middle of the most posh collection of beach houses. 

   - Your parents own a house here? - he questioned, following her as she walked through the sand to one of the white houses. - For someone who gets excited at the glitz and glamour, I don’t understand how you don’t get bored. You’re clearly rich. 

   - My family is rich, it’s their money not mine. - she replied. Y/N did indeed live comfortably until her teenage years where she decided to move to NY and from them on she went on surviving with her own money so she didn’t really have many memories from being surrounded with riches except for the holidays. In her mind, the money her parents had were theirs and she didn’t want anything to do with it. She was gonna make it without any monetary help from her family. They finally reached the porch of a big white house that looked straight out of a dream holiday magazine and Sebastian swore he still did not understand why she got interested by the riches of his lifestyle. She knocked on the door, and took to stand next to Sebastian. - Most of my family lives here.

   - Like a beehive? 

   - You could say so. - she chuckled but got interrupted by the door being opened. The woman in front of them had Y/N’s vibrant eyes and Sebastian guessed it was her mother. 

   - Y/N, what a lovely surprise. - Miss Wiley came to hug her daughter, her gaze still stuck on the man next to her. - I thought you were working.

   - I took a little vacation. - she smiled. - Mum, this is Sebastian Stan. The one who got me the tour article. 

   - Pleasure to meet you, I’m Elizabeth Wiley. - she extended her hand for Sebastian to shake which he did. - Please come inside.

Sebastian followed Y/N and her mother into the entrance. It was a very serene with white walls and light blue accents, something he’d expect to see coming into a beach house. It was mind-blowing to him how he could still hear the ocean waves as if he was on the beach. 

   - Who is it, Betty? - a man, probably in his mid 50′s dressed in a plad suit walked into the entrance. - Pumpkin, what are you doing here?

   - She came to give us a little visit. - her mother placed her arms on her shoulder. - Oh and this is Sebastian.

   - Are you her boyfriend? - he was quite blunt, something Sebastian should’ve been expecting from a political reporter but he was still taken aback. 

   - Dad. - Y/N scolded, a light warmth coming to her face.

   - It’s a fair question, pumpkin. 

   - Leave them alone, Harry. - her mother went to stay by his side. - Why don’t you two come into the living room? 

She took them onto the living room where an elderly man was sat down watching a movie Sebastian had briefly seen. His eyes immediately set on him and he felt a cold shudder run through his spine. He was speechless, not sure how to act. 

   - Look dad, Y/N came to visit us. - her mum told the man who got up to look at his granddaughter. - Oh and this is Sebastian, he’s the one who got Y/N the writing job. 

   - You look much more like your mother. - he commented, shaking her granddaughter’s hand which Sebastian found odd but didn’t dare comment considering he was still looking at him like he was the enemy.

   - Right, why don’t you go into the garden and call for your brother, we should be dinning in a bit. I’ll take your bags. - Elizabeth took their bags and disappeared into the hallway and Y/N pushed him through the house and into the back garden. He’d never been so happy to be far away from someone as he was right now. 

They reached the back garden which should really be called a back park in Sebastian’s opinion. He’d never seen a garden so big yet there he was and a bit further away was a man playing squash against a movable plastic wall. He turned his back to see what the rustling noise was and a smile plastered onto his face. He rushed through to the couple, completing ignoring Y/N and shaking Sebastian’s hand.

   - You sir, are a legend. - he said, shaking Sebastian’s hand thus becoming the 3rd man in the Wiley household that he did not know what to reply to. - I have most of your records.

   - Thank you. - was all he could say. 

   - Why, thank you Theseus for noticing me. - Y/N interjected, arms crossed and a playful look on her face. - Sebastian, this fanboy is my brother, Theseus. He often likes to pretend I don’t exist. 

   - Call me Theo. - he replied. Their parents were avid mythological readers so when their firstborn came along, they decided to name him after the mythical king and founder of Athens. He, however, immediately found a nickname to replace it, something Y/N never really decided to call him by. - So, what are you doing here? Sleeping with my sister or something?

   - No, I’d never do that. She’s a respectable woman and I wouldn’t dare ...

   - Chill. - he interrupted. - Save that for granddad. He’s the one who believes Y/N is innocent but I was there when she had a crush on Indiana Jones.

   - Why don’t we go freshen up. - she pushed Sebastian out of the garden before her brother could spill more secrets. She ignored the living room, having noticed how awkward the scene had been with her parents and grandparents. Y/N took the kitchen rout before climbing the stairs up to her bedroom.

Sebastian always had a thing to see other people’s childhood bedroom and Y/N’s was no different. She had a trophy stand which was no surprise for him, a few boyband posters along with some vintage movie posters. The thing he found funnier was the Phantom of the Opera mask hanging from the one of the windows.

  - 1st place at the Spelling Bee? - he lifted a bee shaped trophy from the stand chuckling at it. - Aw bunny, you’re a nerd.

  - Give me that. - she took it from him, placing it back on her shelf. She would be lying if she said she didn’t love her little trophy collection. - I’m really glad you came over.

  - Free time away from them with you ... - he placed his hands on her hand, moving her a bit closer to him. - Sounds like a real good plan for me.

  - Mh ... - she hummed, her hands on top of his. - I’m sorry about my grandpa. He’s a very ... old school man.

  - Elitist, you mean. 

  - He’s still my grandpa, Seb. Besides, I’m sure he’ll love you once he gets to know you.

  - Yes, because you obviously adored me when you first met me. 

  - Well, you did say that you loved when I talked dirty to you.

  - I’d still love if you talked dirty to me. - he placed his chin in the space between her shoulder and her neck, so close she could feel his breathing. Y/N once again got uncomfortable, pushing from him. Sebastian furrowed his eyebrows, putting his fingers against his forehead. - What’s wrong?

  - Nothing’s wrong. - she took her jacket off, hanging it on the two hanger screwed to the door. 

  - No there’s definitely something wrong because whenever I used to make any sex involving jokes you’d normally roll my eyes at me, not act like that. Is everything alright? - he questioned sitting on her twin bed. - You don’t need to tell me if you don’t want you. I just don’t want to hurt you or make you upset.

 - You’re not making me upset. - she sat by his side, hands on top of her legs.

 - Did I do something that annoyed you? You can tell me.

 - Sebastian, I’m a virgin.

[pebblesfromtheshore]

“Damn” he muttered, peering through the gloom. Behind him shrill notes filtered through the cool damp air, the singer unseen. Silent shapes blurred into greyness. Dawn.

She had been there and gone again. He glared at his phone, unreasonably bright, cable wrapped around fingers, two ear-pods hissed a rhythm his legs no longer needed. He stretched a calf gingerly, holding the wall tight as if it were trying to escape. His face creasing as the soreness of Mondays early run awakened.

While he had been sleeping she had visited again secretly. It was always in secret.

He traced her route, thumb sliding between screens, pausing, his eyes narrowed in concentration, tracking her footsteps, his tongue ran over his lips in concentration. They stayed dry.

He paused at each page, counting to the second where she had viewed and what downloaded, absorbing. Each stop of her journey was marked. Digital tracks.

He wondered why she had visited, what she could see, maybe what her thoughts might have been. His lips repeated a poem silently, he remembered writing that to her, it felt like a long time ago. He shook his head. She had logged off less than an hour before he had awoken to run.

He glanced up checking the progress of the sky as the stars which he had watched through the branches no longer showed .

“Damn, Damn……..Damn” the last syllable drawn out in frustration. This was becoming a problem again, habitually checking the phone, in the hope there might be a trace, a message from her to prove it was not….. He hesitated with the thought but said it out loud into the morning air. “.. a delusion”. It had been her phrase to describe him, but he had taken it to heart and he owned it now.

His eyes moved downwards, his thoughts in a moment went back months to when he had sought to find her, had tracked her steps from website to website as she changed title, conversations and topic but always was recognisable, that politeness, but always an underlying condescension, the quickness to laughter but always from a distance.

His thoughts drifted back further. Eighteen months ago he had first noticed her in his ignorance, and became entranced. If some people possessed eyes that twinkled, she had words which sparkled. But this had been no indulgent feast, no mutual descent into literary excess. Her phrases were always economic, almost spartan in their self analysis, an elegant and concise verbal brutality. She picked where he gorged, She danced where he stormed. She left while he had stayed.

She had been elusive but engaging, almost magical the way she disappeared only to casually re-appear as if two weeks absence were simply a momentary gap in traffic, a breath in a conversation. His searching revealed her many parallel existences in electronic dimensions where she travelled. What he realised now, was that she had not stopped or gone missing. Perhaps bored, she had simply moved to a new group of friends, writers. A new audience full of hearts, flowers and applause to embrace her. She too had been searching.

“Bitch” The insult brought a half smile briefly to his face; it was layered with admiration for the ease which she had made the transition from life to life, and jealousy he felt that she had the time and the friends to do it. Then he had been ignorant of the subtleties of the internet and stomped moodily around the shallow, posturing blogs with which she played her games, his included. Her poise embarrassed him still, though thankfully he was unaware at the time. He grimaced as he read a further set of his own indulgent words. His simplistic verbose passion for one so far beyond his reach, laid bare for all to see and laugh at.

“You dickhead” he whispered to himself. He felt he owned that label too. His outpourings made for grim reading. He had learned brevity too late.

She must have winced as he did now. He hoped she realised how deeply he had felt, but immediately doubted it himself.

So from spawned suitor he tried his hand at obsessional follower. He was crap at that too. Not that his efforts had been totally in vain. He had got close, too close at times, even onto the same blog as her till in a flourish of eloquence she had recovered from startled anxiety to vanish into the forest the internet can become. She left behind her fragments, words, branches of thought broken by the haste of her exit.

He had tried to find her, a second time but she was too elusive and left him floundering. He was a beginner without the luck that brings.

Eventually with a reality that dawned on his thoughts just as it did around him, he had made his exit. Learning that despite all his efforts he looked, to her, at best obsessive and at worst……some dangerous psychotic. His lips set into a firm flat line. Best not go there. The thoughts weighed heavy in his mind , pausing his movement as his mind reached back to the dark days. His face coloured involuntarily as he remembered how he had raged, how desperate he was. What a sorry sight he must have been. His mood darkened. He had realised at the time that he was acting out of character and was now ashamed.

To feel ashamed to fall in love with a dream and chase it. It was not a result he would have expected. It felt so wrong to abandon a dream. It was not how Hollywood would have preached it. This was reality.

Without anyone to talk to about the confusion which enveloped him, he became his own inquisitor to try secure the truth. He agonised over what had happened to uncover the secret of why he had behaved this way. Eventually he prised free enough to make sense. Leaving a bloody pulp, where his ego had been.

His reflection, had become his saviour. A realisation that slapped him one day when trimming his beard., There in front of him In the mirror, chin raised as the trimmer buzzed and the bristles became scattered stood a man, a father who’s daily existence was measured in bills, repairs, trips, activities and sleepovers, arrivals , departures and plans who could see no escape from a landscape of duty and loyalty. So different in youth, but now existing humourless, joyless exchanges, lists, organisation, zero 8passion, zero creativity, zero life. He occasionally escaped, or maybe was released to explore alone long meandering but absorbing journeys where as he pedalled alone along twisting lanes he forgot about the future and past the same, for a while he lived only in the present. He felt free in those moments. It took him back to his 20s. Small mercies; It gave him enough space to breathe clean air. Last year that too had been sacrificed on the alter of decorating. His adventure had been boxed, his passion humiliated. His strength, like his earnings had become the foundation to all their existences. He was the anchor submerged, out of sight, thrown deep in the raging waters, keeping his charges off the rocks while his grip held. He feared this was his lot until darkness closed his eyes for good and he became simply a memory, cut loose when no longer needed.

Her departure mirrored her arrival, it cut him deeply; Her silence more so. No matter how many times he repeated it, he could not shake the belief that he was the monster she had fled from. Beneath the calmness he smouldered still, he was stubborn, but slowly his hope died.

He rubbed an ear, thinking deeply as midges found their breakfast.

Her arrival was reminiscent of an accident. A blow not aimed at him but felt all the same. Just a space to show where he had stood a moment before, now prone, staring vacantly wondering what the fuck had just occurred. This had been her impact. In their exchanges he was no longer a bearded middle aged father. As he climbed off the floor and looked to how to join melee that seemed to surround him. The quiet thinker in him had gone, the father figure subdued, Gone. That person could wait.

He leant against the wall in another slow stretch, his knee popping as he moved. Wear and tear catching up with him. His head bowed as he placed his feet carefully, methodically. The sweat from his climb through the forest now dried tight to his face as it warmed in the early rays, his shirt no longer clung to his back. So long in his adult life he had been the calm, easy going reliable one. Then in that day it all changed. He had become unrecognisable, some vile ogre wanting her all for himself, prepared to abandon his life in exchange

She was not the only one who swapped between lives. It was just she did so with some pretence of control whilst he dramatically crashed headlong through the windows of his suburban existence into something else, another place he had not recognised, he had found himself staring back from the paned, jagged, broken glass, reflected as he felt. Shattered.

A dozen separate faces stared back, some recognisable but others with parts of who he was cracked, separated or simply missing. He had wallowed in impatience, frustrated but not knowing what caused it, ready for a fight but no one stood to oppose him.

He just remembered he had felt very angry and sad at the same time. His writing was poor in that time, unable to contain the passion she had unlocked twinned with the savagery of his hate for his electronic impotence. His digital adventure very nearly died in those weeks.

The return of these thoughts brought with them the doubt he had felt too. His breathing slowed as his mind once more slipped away from the present. No longer would he laugh when people mentioned obsessions and denial. These had been parts of him he had not seen before. Hate he knew and rage. But had never felt so utterly lost in someone’s every thought. Distance and silence had been new to him. He now knew both those prisons intimately.

She had posed him questions where he had seen only dull facts, had shown an insight to his doubts and had embraced the lack of trust in his history. She met his darkness and caressed with a darkness of her own.

In the reflection she offered him he saw clearly the face of the frightened lad who hid within him, who had left behind a home of violence to start again, create a life without the victim he knew he would have remained. That little boy had in some insane act of bravery or stupidity, he was never sure which, had reached out to touch her. To see if she was real. She was, but not to be trusted. She told him so.

With her words came a new vision for him, of someone who’s bravery was not skin deep. It had been a revelation. It was a turning of a corner before he had even been aware of the road he travelled was not straight. He endured a lifetime of change in the seconds he took to read her thoughts. He could forget the face and body who met him each morning in the mirror. He was transcendent of flesh, He became a simply a voice for the passion he felt.

Then she left.

This left him reeling, desperate for more. It filled his emptiness. No addiction would have equalled this. So many times over the years he had asked what twist of fate, what random chance or childhood experience had made him from his youngest days feel this cruel and selfish world so very deeply.

He had been a sensitive child forced to toughen up, to bury his hope beneath duty. Strangely he could feel when she was around, some sixth sense had made him check the apps on his phone. Sure enough, she had come to call.

But whilst his passion soared to heights unknown in his lifetime, his common sense told him it was all an illusion, an impossibility. Eventually once she had gone and her silence bleached the colour from each memory, he understood why he had to go, to leave. To not come back.

In a show of maturity which surprised him he had made a big effort of letting go. The irony, and he liked ironies, was that she had let go of him a long time before. He had just been too stupid, too blinded to accept that. His departure would have graced the most formulaic Hollywood film. The hopeless hero, close enough to hear her, to see her, but never close enough to touch or know the mystery she presented.

He looked up from his thoughts and blinked. His eyes glazed with tears as he recalled the morning he made that decision and acted on it.

In that moment he had lost more than just the chance to let the words which tumbled out of her head wash away his responsibilities. He had lost the brave reflection of who he could become. His future as a lover died that day. That realisation had hit him hard. “Fuck “ he whispered to the wall. “You have no idea of what affect you had.”

He turned his back to the wall, lifting ankles to stretch muscles and joints. Each protested then relaxed as the horizon ignited with the rising sun. He blinked again and stared hard, feeling the lashes of one eye full to the brim . Although his family still slept behind the walls and would not see, he did not want the morning to be saddened by his grieving for his lost self.

He sniffed hard. “very romantic” he murmured, and sniffed again harder.

Why keep coming back? Again and again but never to talk, always hiding, always looking, never connecting. Yet he knew she knew. They were connected already.

Was she reminiscing, some afternoon recollection to while away a tiresome lunch break. Had she amidst a gaggle of girls used him to point to as they swapped giggles and stories about the fumbled copulations or close escapes from groping tar stained fingers.

Was he just one more exhibit in her menagerie, collected, collated and with a double click, shelved.

“You left, I left, you left, we were so fucking good at leaving, so good at building walls…….” His voice raised “we had f****** nothing” his frustration called for mercy , but the trees like the birds within them showed none. He had not departed, not really. She had never been there to leave. She had already gone. “I’m tired girl, why not just let me go.”

He glanced at his reflection in the window, darkened suitably to match his mood. He was greyer than he had been a year ago. His beard now heavily flecked with silver. “Very distinguished” his wife had said, knowing the opposite was true. He looked tired. It was not through running. That let him share the quiet of the forest, it gave him strength. He could rise before dawn and pull on his shoes simply because his sleeping had been in shreds for months. Waking early – listening to the steady rhythmic breathing next to him. For her sleep practiced for 18 years was a sanctuary, for him a prison.

It was not her fault he had changed. She had married someone a lifetime ago who now no longer existed and did not know the imposter who lay down beside her. His friends often commented so, even his wife said he was no longer the same man. "You're not as nice as you were..." She had said one evening as they sat in the kitchen.

"People change.." he had fired back.

"I learned being nice gets you trodden on. Why are you so fixed on me being nice?" He had stared at her. She turned and walked away as she spoke over her shoulder, words almost lost as she hurried to leave.

"It's why I married you". the door closed behind her.

Although when they slept, they were together, the space between mere inches, it was also unbridgeable.

Yet in his mirror existence, tapping heroically at his cheap keyboard he could believe he was significant. A poet, a philosopher, part player, artist, at once both brave and witty. His darkness and pain were not a weakness, they were an identity, a scar that spoke more of his endurance not his pain, His strength not his shame. The girl’s departure had shattered that reflection. He grieved still for that loss. He grieved for who he used to be, the man who died, with that first stanza she sent him, as the creative forces, those twisted demons he had buried and boxed for so long, exploded in his chest at the touch of her words. She unlocked his monsters then slipped away, leaving his sanity in flames.

His own reflection looking back at him, lips now set in a line said it all. He had become a grey man, almost lost in the reflections of objects around him and the images through the window, a family home, cups on the table- letter from the bank and insurance, shoes piled by the door.

He had believed what she had told him at the outset – she had warned him not to fall for her. But fool, desperate fool that he was had given no serious thought to the warning.Now he was wiser, but too late. His eyes misted again at another painful memory he rubbed fiercely at an eyelid irritated by the emotion. He was a grown man, he shouldn’t do this. But his heart no longer listened. He simply did not believe himself, why would anyone else?

“Control”….. he muttered looking over his shoulder now at the trees, rough barked in the morning low sunlight. “I won’t give you control” almost as if she stood behind him listening.

He heard a sound, someone was rising in the house. He drew to the side of the window and watched a slight figure, unruly ginger hair fighting the hairband which strove to contain it, pad silently into the kitchen, pink patterns on crumpled pyjamas. – she glanced up surprised – feeling his gaze on her and smiled. Such warmth, the sun on his back momentarily eclipsed.

She examined him, blue eyes matched his own, smiled again as she fumbled for glasses in her pocket. They were not there, she gave up. Shrugged

She was good at reading him, this one. Much more so than his other daughter who like their mother would still be fast asleep. This slight, grinning freckled, awkward girl shared his quickness to laughter, a temper of hurricane magnitude and a relentless passion for beautiful things. As he watched, she absently pulled a loose strand of hair from her face turned and vanished. He heard a click of the door behind him, before two arms wrapped around him silently squeezing, readjusting then hugging tighter. His chin rested on the top of her head. He said nothing. His arms, now wrapped around her shoulders spoke for him.

“You needed that” she said, muffled, head buried in his chest. In response he surrendered the battle and tears rolled silently. His grip around her shoulders tightened.

“What were you doing so early ?” his daughter asked. With the back of his hand he quickly cleared away any trace of sadness loosening his hold on her. She twisted around within his grip.

“I couldn’t sleep so I came out to run” he saw her glance at the phone. “and checked my messages”. She could sense something, it showed in her frown, but wasn’t sure what it meant.

“You went without me..” she quietly scolded him. “Don’t ever go without me.. ”

“ I think we had a visitor”, he mumbled changing the subject “ I found tracks”

“Where” she squinted, eyes screwed up as she struggled with the distance.

“Out there”.. he waved his arm generally as he lied. “ but there’s nothing there any more…..”

He was ashamed that he could not admit what his truth was; another thing to isolate him. It was time to end the conversation, he could hear that the rest of his family was stirring. Water cascaded down the drain pipe beside him.

“I’m hungry” he announced.

His daughter, turned on her heel, and without letting go of his arm, pulled him bodily towards the door. He made a show of resisting, she pulled harder, she had his stubbornness too.

This was why he had made the choice to remain. She was his responsibility, but also his immense pride, together with her sister and despite the bleakness of the marriage they shared, their Mum, no matter the gaps that now lay between them. His daughters were something the elusive visitor from the far side of the world had never asked about. She would not. When she spoke it had been of her and him.

It was sad, because for all his fine words and flowing lines or his pretty framed but ultimately pointless photo landscapes. They were the only thing in his life of note.

The door closed behind him and within moments, time erased that he or she had been there.

They were the only two people who knew. One day neither would remember.

Neither understood how to speak to the other, how to turn the page and read anew.

That’s how stories end.

DB@D

October 2017

[cameronomicon]

Becoming Robin

I’m standing at the top of a carpeted staircase in the house where I spent my earliest years. The long sunlight of a Texas morning pours in through a window high above me, and I have shit my diaper. I’ve done something bad, and I know it. I’m in tears and I’m ashamed. This is my first memory, and it’s the moment that I become Robin.  

“I don’t think I’ve ever told anyone this,” I said to my brother, “and I don’t think I could tell many people without getting a negative reaction. But I’ve thought many times that it would be better if she were dead.”

I was talking about my mother, from whom both my brother and I are estranged. The ebb and flow of rapid deterioration and chronic decay that lasted the better part of two decades has forced us to remove our alcoholic mother from our lives. It’s an act of self-preservation she has often labeled as cruel. 

Everyone, it should be noted, is guilty of this cruelty. My mother, the great victim that she is, has cast the rest of the players in her life’s story as irredeemable villains who took advantage of her, set her up for failure, or outright betrayed her. This is after the countless half-hearted attempts at sobriety, the multiple treatment centers, the interventions, the third, fourth, and fifth chances. Those who have loved my mother have given her much. And it should always be noted in the same breath that she has also given much to those she has loved. But through the insane cataract of her disease, she now sees only villains. She has become twisted by resentment and fear, anger and self-pity. I think this must be a survival mechanism of her own, to reframe the narrative as “Robin vs the world” or else she might not be able to find the strength to wake up every morning in a reality where everyone she loved is gone. We are all of us, as it happens, just waiting this thing out now.

Robin stalks the perimeter of our lives like a predator just beyond the throw of the campfire’s light. We know she’s there, we’ve seen evidence, but she moves unseen the in darkness and shadows. She is a hungry ghost, as Gabor Maté would say. She haunts our lives, the ghost of who and what she once was, her unknowable but undeniable existence emanating from the howling void at her core. 

It would be better if she were dead. Then at least we would know where she was and what she was doing instead of dreading the infrequent but crushing calls from strangers, nurses, EMTs. And it would be over. That would be better. 

*

It’s impossible for me to separate myself from Robin, because I am her. Like my mother I have a passion and talent for the arts, and I share in her very dark but brilliant sense of humor. I am quite intelligent but fragile, and proud to a fault. I am aloof to the point of seeming arrogant, and insecure to the point of self-destruction. I hold others at arms length for far longer than necessary, but those I allow into my heart I hold there incredible fierceness, just like her. 

Most obviously, we share in disease: I am an alcoholic just like her. I’m also a drug addict, having been addicted to nicotine, prescription amphetamines, and cannabis. Some of these things I used together, and towards what I hope is the end of my own history of alcoholism, I was regularly mixing alcohol, benzos, and weed. I drank in the morning to silence the shakes. I could hardly eat. I felt like I was dying. In fact, I spent most of 2018 thinking about my own death, and wishing I had the courage to bring it about. A few times, in my booze-fueled despair, I held a knife to my wrists. I thought about buying a gun. I believed I was doomed, and there was no point in delaying the inevitable. 

This had all happened before, in the early 2000s, when I went to rehab for the first time, and then lived in a halfway house, and sank to unprecedented depths before finally resurfacing to join the world again. And since then I had been coasting in relationship and lifestyle which permitted and encouraged daily alcohol use, until that itself met its inevitable and cataclysmic end. And then I climbed into a time machine back to 2005 and began to self-destruct once more.

And it is impossible for me to not compare the sorry state of my decline with that which I have found my mother in many times. Her passed out on the floor of her apartment was me passed out in a doorway outside. Her vomiting in public and the deterioration of her physical appearance were my own. Her leaving friends and loved ones baffled, heartbroken, and confused was the look of bewildered pain on the face of my friend Stephanie when she came to my apartment to help me get to rehab this past summer. The anger and white hot resentment churning at the core of her engine spun its revolutions within me as well. I have seen her claw her way back from the edge of total defeat in brilliant and heartbreaking flashes of sobriety, only to let the people of this world fail her and give her the excuse she was desperate for to try her hand at drinking again. I have been there, too. 

I think that, ultimately, I am lucky that I came to learn my truth at a young age. Even when still active in my addiction, I knew. My ex-wife knew. There’s no way to arrive at a conclusion other than “I am an alcoholic” after going through everything I’ve been through and to still have been a daily drinker. This is where my mom and I begin to differ. 

Along with lacking her tireless ambition, her work ethic, raw talent and the many, many successes she achieved by my age, one other major thing sets us apart: my mother has always denied that she is just like me. She has never admitted she is an alcoholic. 

*

“No human being is empty or deficient at the core,” Dr. Maté writes, “but many live as if they were and experience themselves primarily that way. Attempting to obliterate the sense of deficiency and emptiness that is the core state of any addict is like laboring to fill in a canyon with shovelfuls of dust.”

Something that my therapist told me, that I had never realized before, is that human beings aren’t born with shame. That’s why little kids are so free and charmingly weird, untethered by the conventions adults place on them. Kids learn shame. They are taught to feel it. Shame isn’t the same thing as feeling guilt, shame is something much more insidious, something that can eat away at a person’s sense of self. Shame is not feeling bad about what you’ve done, but about who you are, is I think how my therapist distilled it. Shame is my first memory. That’s how my story begins.

And I can point back to feelings of shame, and trying to erase or cope with shame or any other strong emotion, as a core motivation for my drinking and substance abuse. That is my original damage, the flaw in my life’s marble.

The writers of the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous say “bottles were just a symbol” when describing their malady. And I agree. If I hadn’t found alcohol first, and if it hadn’t done for me what I desperately craved—the silencing of my inner dialogue, the obliteration of my self-hatred and insecurities, the soothing of pain and freeing of emotion and desire, that utter freedom to feel and to destroy feeling—then I would have found something else to do the job. Hell, Adderall did that, too.

When I say that my first memory at the top of the stairs is when I became Robin, it’s because I believe that there’s also something missing in my mom, some perceived void as Dr. Maté said, that is at the core of everything she is and has become. I believe there was a fundamental ruination, perhaps similar or entirely different from my own, that snapped off a part of her brain that she’s been scrambling to find, fix, or obliterate the memory of ever since. I believe that she stood at the top of her own staircase and sustained her own mortal wound. She has been laboring to fill in her own canyon with dust, yet cannot see the futility of the effort.

I don’t remember much of what my mom told me about her childhood, other than my Nana made sloppy Joes and her older sister was a bully about two things: The Rolling Stones (mom was a Beatles fan) and Star Trek (mom liked Star Wars). Knowing what I do now about my mom—and myself—I would not be surprised if she chose these diametrically opposed favorites just to needle her sister. But my takeaway now from this lack of knowledge, and the fact that we were never particularly close with either her family or my father’s, is that the damage she experienced lies somewhere therein. Something happened to her in childhood that formed her: some great pressure exerted upon her formed the diamond of her unbreakable will, and ultimately, the poison in her heart. 

She had some moment in which she became Cameron, which she never could have recognized at the time. She may not remember it, and she would certainly deny that anything like this could have had such an effect on her. But I believe strongly in my heart it was there. 

Of course, I may be wrong about all of this. I’m not an expert on addiction, I’m just a drunk like Robin. But I’ve gotten honest and looked deeply at myself and that itself has tremendous value; I’ve held up the mirror, and in it I’ve seen my mother there looking back at me: a little girl in Arlington, Texas, crying. Afraid. Ashamed, even. I would hug her if I could, and tell her everything will be ok. That no matter what happens, she is loved, and she is enough. 

[cordiona]

river notes

Light is carried on the dark river and not for the first time: they have a meeting every night, with or without the moon as witness, with or without clouds. There aren’t enough ships in this world in which jazz is played inside but this is one of them — this one, this ship, though it hasn’t got to know any others of its kind. No, no other fire-red ships in which old jazz musicians sit on steps and play music inside. The trombone’s end is pointed at the trumpet and soon there is air flowing through it: it’s the trumpet’s time to shine. The air smells of music [whatever that smell is] and what is music without air, anyway: it’s nothing: it’s silence. Bright gadgets vibrate inside pockets but who has the time to look at them right in the middle of this ten minutes long song [and the answer is some people have, some others don’t]. Is it the ship swaying or just the sounds? The beer won’t let one tell the difference and so one won’t.

A pause is announced. The only music now is of the intonations of different words in this language that scratches the throat. When I was younger, one says: in den Siebzigern… there were already ships in which jazz was played, floating on the Elbe together with the night’s lights. [There is a harbour on the other side of the river, one that [as harbours wont to do] doesn’t stop — what are the containers on the other side listening to? It is quarter to ten and so there is no way of knowing.] That’s where I met my wife; on a boat. I had been introduced to jazz a few weeks before, as a friend of mine led me to the club. Oh, really? Aha. Yes really what a lucky day that was. Now I’m retired. I come here on other Mondays too — some ten Mondays a year. Ah, that sounds nice. Yes, very much so, it is. There was another club, do you know it? no, of course you don’t — look at your young face —, another one, in a basement — I was often there too. The voice comes from a chequered shirt [dark brown and red and black and blue] restrained by a vest, the pianist walks by, beer in hand [a narrow space to walk by inside the former boiler room filled with beings and chairs]. I used to like only rock n’ roll but then in den Siebzigern the friend of mine invited me to the club, the one inside a Keller, as I said. I love you for sentimental reasons: I hope you do believe me — all looking ahead [except for the ones who aren’t], no way to look away. Feet start moving and how could they not — this is what the feet were born to do: feel the swing of improvisation — and the hands join in, envious of the other shaking pieces [such as the head]. The listeners’ bodies and faces distorted on the saxophone’s surface, all mashed up together: the listeners’ faces all mashed up, the kind of face one makes when music worms its way into one. The song is over with the usual heightened bang, Spende, if you like what you’re hearing: Spende, it’ll make the musicians very very happy and ensure we can keep playing for you. We all have bills to pay, you know, we all have bills: we all have the kind of bills that people in general have, you know, musicians too. Nonsense: nonsense, the old unused pipes chime in, you never think of the rent the musicians positioned on the makeshift stage have to pay. We’re at St. James Infirmary now, what a song what a song it is: here we go, tonight’s leader, the trombone is pointed up and blows air into an unseen space and out of it comes a confetti strip soaring downwards and down and swirling and down and around and plötzlich inside a half-litre beer mug a quarter full — from the other side of the tiny table a poke arrives to the drinker’s arm, who looks at the pokerer and around and to what the formerly-poking finger is pointing towards and then shrugs — shrugs, war schon schal [not that it would’ve been a problem] and looks ahead, towards the infirmary’s tale which now proceeds wordlessly. 

People on the steps leading down to the boiler room, exceedingly in sight though there they choose to stay, the musicians’ backs turned to them. There is an alto sax here, someone says: an alto sax, it comes down hanging around a young man’s neck — they come down, unsure of themselves they come down slowly, all eyes on them: I don’t have to play, they say, it’s alright, I don’t have to play — there is no space for him on or around the tight stage and so he leans against a tall table and soon comes his time, soon his time comes: it comes now and he goes, he goes as the others look and hear. His time is gone: we go back to a trumpet. All the while some rounded black glasses play the contrabass, a wispy nose in between, the contrabass standing somewhat-still in front of the glasses-wearer who sometimes closes his eyes [but only sometimes], as the music carries him away. It’s getting late. What time is it now? The musicians disband for a while, in search of food and drink — musicians are people, it seems? — and attendance dwindles. It is a Monday after all, it is a Monday like many other ones are, even for retired people, wir müssen die Bahn nehmen, schönen Abend noch and goodbye. There are empty chairs all around and the sounds from people’s mouths make less sound — because there are less people with mouths to make any sound. Some stay, some stay behind and think you go, you catch your train: I’ll stay. Unemployed writers don’t have much else to do and they only sometimes manage to sleep — and when they do, oh, when they do… well, then they do: writers are people too, it seems. Another metallic confetti strip falls, this time to the ground, as two or three or four instrument cases are zipped open and closed, the instruments resting inside — are you going already? yes, I have to work in the morning oh do you? yes, it’s late I see now, and so go the other one two three — where is the fourth one? already gone. One might’ve bought a drink hadn’t the remaining musicians flocked to the stage — the last set. Are you enjoying the music? — well, you must be, since you’re still here says the trombonist /slash/ singer, directed at a specific person in the now-smaller crowd and then reaches for the microphone [which stands outside the crowded stage, one level below all musicians]: it’s the last set, we’ll play one song and a half. Someone has a birthday today! someone has a birthday says the contrabassist we have thirteen minutes and then it’s his birthday, looking at his clock. One song and a half is what we’ll play and then it’s this lad’s birthday, I hear. A-one, two, three four — all together now, now that all musicians fit on the minute stage. Happy birthd- no, it’s not midnight yet and here it’s considered bad luck if you say it before midnight arrives — it goes on for the half song and then [is it time now? the contrabassist looks at his clock] sax and trumpet are the first ones to engage in birthday song.

It is time. It is time it is time, the drinkers leave the bar the lingering musicians head homewards [wherever their homes might be] bills are paid trains are taken outside the ship. A customary gush of wind, the Elbe river glints: a saxophone floats by followed by a trumpet and another saxophone and here comes a cymbal, gleaming together in harmony with the river — in a joint effort between the lights coming from the harbour and the other side of the street and the lighthouse-wannabe atop the ship and the boat which strolls on by framed by thousands of tiny blue lights reflected on brass and dark water.

On a train heading north at the first hour of the day ears buzzing the train station quietly sitting in a quiet neighbourhood climbing down the stairs to meet the street and wait for the green light across the neoclassic building at the corner with the wine shop and the oversized plastic bottle of wine planted in front of the shop window. An unexpected mid-block meeting between a late night listener train taker and a young person walking their dog a few hours before sunrise. 

—

carolina simionato writes and makes music as soft verges and does other sorts of things, such as befriending leaves and writing unnecessary biographies in third-person. you can reach her at carols (at) protonmail (dot) ch

[osang171819]

A Quarter Canvas

By Rosario Patino-Yap

 Borja St., Caritan Sur:

The last of the moving van left.  I had spent the morning running around the bungalow that had been home to Harold and me. I wandered through the house to see if anything precious was left behind.  No, nothing was forgotten.  Except for the potted mums that lined the curving pathway.  They were newly-watered and weeded.  Looking up the heavens in colorful blooms.  

My “sunny side up” house echoed in silence.  The sunshine yellow house earned that monicker because of my penchant for the color.   Inside, no single bric-a-brac that had filled up every nook and cranny was left.   The miniature windmill replica Harold bought in Bangui, Ilocos Sur, the rattan hammock that had hung in the verandah, the butaca that had soothed my aching body and soul – all were spirited away in the giant snails called “Aloha Moves It.”  

Outside the house, the children played “tumbang preso” and “sha-tong.  Summer was when children played these indigenous games of tag.   Every now and then, the patpat flew in the air and the children scampered to catch this thin sliver of stick.  The morning air was punctuated by gleeful shrieks from the children. So carefree and dead to the cares of the world.   The reality reared its ugly head when an ambulant peddler hollered “taho” in the distance.  While the neighborhood maglalako shouted off her paninda for the day.

“Ano ba Totoy?  Kay aga-aga magtatambay ka na naman dine sa tindahan ko?” Manang Luning’s voice boomed inside her sari-sari store.  She was asking for the nth time why Totoy loitered early in front of her store.  “Hala, dun ka sa DOTA.net magtambay,” she shooed away the teenager.  Like swatting a fly off of one’s food.

“Naku naman, Aling Luning, hindi po wi-fi area itong tindahan nyo,” Totoy retorted. He sheepishly lumbered away from the store.

A dog barked at an unseen cat.  The hum of a washing machine had started a neighbor’s day.   A balmy air blew and the clothes that hung from the clothesline flapped about madly. They made snapping sounds.    In my mind, I had hung clothes out to dry in that clothesline, too.  I had carefully slipped shirts into plastic hangers.  I had clipped pants onto the line so they dangled there like rows of people doing headstands.  They evoked images of torsos, their arms and heads chopped off by some unseen hands.  

I stood near the window for a while listening to these familiar sounds.   It seemed a cacophony of loved and hated realities of Borja Street.    As I stood in the window, I knew my co-teacher Nica was getting ready for work.  Armed with her shoulder bag and a luggage that carried her instructional materials, she waited for the tricycle.   Nearby, Bryan was displaying wares in his e-bookstore.   It promised another busy day for him.

Rousing myself from the reverie, I dusted off the dust and cobwebs that clung to my skinny jeans and tattered halter top. How did these silky threads reach me? I wondered. Tracing the source of the cobwebs, I stood transfixed for a moment at the intricate web.  An industrious spider might have spun from one window grill to another when we were not looking.   I suddenly noticed the errant tears on my cheeks - and hastily wiped them.  

My feet led me to the master’s bedroom - just my OC self doing her work.   I unlocked the built-in drawer I seldom opened.  I cannot even recall what was in it.  I took out a set of keys and tried each one of them.   I finally inserted one and the lock clicked open.   The air of many years escaped the moment I opened the drawer.   It was strange how the years can seep into thing.  It called to mind sepia pictures taken by a photographer who had to cover himself together with the huge camera.  

  A silent gasp escaped from my parched throat. There, hidden in the back panels of the drawer, forgotten and tucked for what seemed to be ages, was Samuel’s painting. It was a “thank you” present he gave me.    Weathered and old, the canvas smelled musty.  

I took the painting out of the drawer.  I gingerly touched it, fearful by doing so it might crumble or smudge off.   It seemed cool and soft to my touch.  I turned it around.   I squinted to read the scrawled note on the edge.  

“Dear Ma’am Rhodora, you were the powder keg that sparked my interest to achieve and have a life.  Till we meet again. Your best student Samuel”

How long has it been since the painting was given me?

 Primero High School  

           The acacia-lined campus was abuzz. Everywhere, academic discussion and multiple intelligence tasks filled up every classroom of the landmark high school. I sauntered proudly to my room in the Special Program in the Arts building.  It seemed another ordinary day for me.  I looked forward to some colorful exchange of ideas with my budding artists and grandmasters.

           “Mune kamu ta balay na artista yra” greeted me in the stairwell.   It welcomed everyone to the abode of the SPA students.  A peep into the rooms was like a show window of aspiring dancers, singers, painters, writers and media practitioners.  It had always seemed like a preparation for the annual arts festival. Or of the local Pavvurulun.

            “Yeah!!!! SPA rocks!!!” Samuel slurred as he strutted inside my classroom during recess.  Bloodshot eyes, fleeting eye contact, tottering steps- tell tale signs of something bad.  His arm had wounds which were probably self-inflicted as he was wont to do.   I worried at the ease of how he sneaked in.  After all, “The Terminator” was known for his hawk-like vigilance at the gate.  

Seeing me as I enter the classroom, Sandra my student, intercepted me.

“Teacher, iba po ang amoy ni Samuel,” she muttered under her breath.  But it was loud enough for me to hear.   He was telling me that Samuel reeked of liquor.  Even without this information, I knew Samuel was drunk.

As if on cue, Samuel noticed my presence.  With pleading eyes and a plaintiff wail, he whimpered, “Teacher, may I just talk to Giselle? Di po nya kasi sinasagot ang mga text ko.”   He informed me of their usual lovers’ spat.  Gisele had refused to answer his text messages again.  

He staggered towards Giselle’s seat but he tripped on his shoelaces.  Just as soon, he vomited.

“Oh no!” Giselle screamed in embarrassment. Her scream was like a clarion call for chaos. The class turned into a bedlam.  Everyone tried to avoid his outstretched flailing arms.  And the gooey puddle of his lunch.  Some ran to the back of the room.  A few climbed my table.  Others rushed out to call the guards.  All the while, I stood in the middle of the surging tide.

 Samuel was plastered on the floor.  The room hushed into silence.  Then, like a torrent of rain, his tears came unbidden.  The silent and shameless tears that he seemed to have kept at bay fell.  It stained and wetted his immaculate uniform.  He was curled like a baby inside his mother’s womb and he sobbed inconsolably.

 Trying to put some semblance of order inside my classroom, I pulled him up.  All 65 kilos of him was forcibly pulled by my small hands.  The force - or lack of it, I did not notice- sobered him.  He looked lost and embarrassed all of a sudden.  He turned to look at the faces of classmates who gawked at the spectacle.  

“I am sorry.  Oh I am so sorry,” he repeated.

A whistle was sounded. The class was a Red Sea that parted to let the rushing “Terminator” in. Two others were in tow.

“Teacher Rhodora, are you okay?” he asked while he surveyed the situation.  The ruckus had reached the guard house and the guidance services.  Poor Samuel, he reminded me of a prisoner walking towards the guillotine.  His shadowed face cast me a forlorn look.

“Honey, are we set?” my husband Harold’s voice brought me back from that day. Back to the present where I now sit and listened.    I smiled sheepishly for being caught unaware then I replied,” Yup, just about.”

I reached for his hand and I stood up.   As if hearing his voiceless question, I added, “It’s just that I wanted to double check the house before we left.  Then here, I remember the painting given by a former student,” I added.

Harold, noticing the cubism painting in my hands, reached out and brought it into the light.  He examined the painting of a mysterious lady with a poignant sad look on her eye.   An empty rattan crib before her.  The painting seemed to echo my disillusionment of trying to conceive for the longest time.  It seemed a dirge to my failed attempts at motherhood.  Bittersweet and the pain unfathomed.  A silent scream that I have quieted.

“Dear Ma’am Rhodora, you were the powder keg that sparked my interest to achieve and have a life.  Till we meet again. Your best student Samuel” Harold read.  He stood silent for a few moments.  Lost, too, in the message that the painting whispered.  

“How long has it been since he was advised by the school to transfer?” he asked.

   Again, nostalgia beckoned me.  A wave that rushed back to shore after straying in the ocean.   The memories came back unbidden after five years.  

 After thorough investigation and several “call parents,” Samuel was advised to leave the school.  He violated rules and regulations.  His classmates were somber on the day he said goodbye.  I had a fleeting remembrance of him when he first came to my freshmen class. All innocence and raw Ben-Cab talent.  I knew then that with proper tutelage and constant practice, he would be a grandmaster. But where had all the innocence and that raw talent gone?  What happened in between, I sadly pondered.

 I recalled the week after he transferred school.  I had my classroom all by myself.  The periodic exams were set for the next day hence classrooms had been thoroughly cleaned. Classes were shortened for the purpose. The smell of newly-applied floor wax hung heavy in the air.  The armchairs were one seat apart.   All systems go for the exams.

  I sat to enjoy my late lunch of lechon carajay, eggplant omelet and tomatoes laced with boneless CK bagoong.  An iced cold soda perspired beside my Tupperware.  And the chewy yema I made the night before promised sweet heaven.  That sumptuous feast of deep fried pork and fish sauce plus the caramel could lull one to sleep on that balmy afternoon.  

The birds chirped on the ancient acacia trees that dotted the campus.  The lilting melody of the ice cream vendo machine could be heard in the distance.  The orbit fan hummed and it joined their symphony.  Ah, one of life’s simple pleasures, I sighed.  

Suddenly, I heard a soft- it not, timid- knock on the door.  Samuel stood outside it.   He entered the room carrying a big package wrapped in newspaper.  He looked his usual old self – immaculate but different school uniform, polished black leather shoes, sun browned face and Gatsbied hair.   He walked his cocky walk and a shy smile crept on his lips.   I saw a glimpse of the freshman that he was three years before.  He came near me and off-handedly gave me the package.

“What is this?” I asked in surprise.  I reached for my soda to wash down the last of the carajay.

“It’s a gift, teacher.  Open it,” he replied.

“Oh you shouldn’t have bothered.”  I felt uneasy for what looked like an extravagant gift. But I fumbled to unwrap the gift.  I looked at him.  He gazed out of the windows –avoiding my gaze.  I waited for him to say something.   I knew he had much to say.

“I thank you for never giving up on me, Teacher Rhods” he went on after what seemed like forever. “I realized now that I needed your criticism and your pieces of advice. You kept on at me, despite the others giving up.  That had kept me grounded.  It put some sense into my muddled head.”  He smiled shyly when he said this.

“Oh, that’s what teachers are for,” I replied.  I might have sounded flippant to him.  Disbelief on the sudden change probably showed in my face because a cloud flitted on his black eyes.  But he regained his ground and continued.

“Maybe, God wisely designed the human body so that man can never kick his own self nor pat his own back. Through my rebellious period, you were my parola.”  

I tried to swallow the air that blocked my throat.  Emotions rendered my tongue immobile.  To be compared to a lighthouse echoed in my head.  I tried to say a wisecrack or a sensible advice.  Nothing came handy.

“Oh by the way teacher, I drew that painting for you. A keepsake.”  With those words, he walked away as quickly and as silently as he entered.  

   “Earth to Rhodora.  Paging my dear Rhodora.   Whoever saw my sweet Rhodora, please direct her to where I stand.”

The voice of my husband reverberated in the silent room. His voice and his smiling face jolted me from my reverie - the second time that day. I noticed that I have been revisiting the past.   I laughed so happily that he couldn’t help but join me in my laughter.

“Tell me honey,” I asked Harold, “What did my student mean when he said I was a powder keg?”

 Kissing my hand and holding me in his arms, Harold answered, “Maybe because you had stepped on stage in his darkest moment and had led him out of the dark, then you stepped down and watched him move forward. But your single act of gesture has become the ember that will keep him on the right track wherever life leads him.”

That made sense.

“And maybe, just maybe,” he said sotto voce, and with a twinkle in his eyes,” because you never seemed to grow old, a fresh red rose ever since.  The guidance you showed had ignited his passion to live.  And hopefully, his passion for the visual arts because he seemed to have lots of promise.”

A wistful sigh escaped from me.    In the distance, a bus sounded its horn.  A neighbor’s dog barked at the playing children.  Manang Luning’s voice competed with the local radio station.  The din sounded so familiar that it brought back memories of happy years spent in my “sunny side up.”  I don’t know when I started thinking of it as my “sunny side up” home but it always warmed my heart.

The memories came back so vividly.  A movie reel that had gone backwards.   I could hear the sounds and see the pictures again.   It brought to my mind the nights when there were power outages.   Everyone was outside his house and just sat under the moonlit night.  The mosquitoes were swatted as everyone swapped local tales and rumors. The balut vendor would pass by and offer his pampalakas ng tuhod  na balut or penoy as aphrodisiacs for the men.  The ubiquitous barbecue stood laden with barbecue, hotdog, isaw, betamax, and iud.  I saw the children playing hide and seek or san pedro till fatigue and sleep beckoned them.  Online games, tablets, and  X-box were unknown then.

It replayed scenes during summers where the popular halo-halo stands dissipated the sweltering heat.  If not swarming these ice havens, the children used to have a grand time climbing up the fruits trees. They would help themselves to Lolo Ifan’s mangga, duhat and kallupit.  The old folks would do their siesta under the trees or played tong-its.

Again in my de javued mind, I recall Nino, Julius, and Jessem playing ungoy-unggoyan while Chloe and her sister Jiya straddled their trainer bikes. Everyone seemed unmindful of the unending investigation of the SAF incident, or the milk tea poisoning or the corruption of government officials

   But it was time to move into our new home a block away from the old one.   It was time to savor the good life after a couple of years eking out a living.   It was time to quit renting the “sunny side up.” And it was time to leave the painting to the new lessee of the house - Samuel’s long lost father.  

 Sometimes, life is serendipitous. Who would have thought that the man who wanted to rent the “sunny side up” was his father?   Again, I looked back on that meeting with Samuel’s father.   Seeing him again who accompanied his father earlier that week - pieced together the puzzle.

“My wife and I parted ways.  Looking back, the blow was hard for Samuel to understand,” he broached.

“So he rebelled,” I said softly. My heart aching for those children caught in the crossfire of dysfunctional marriages.   It was sad how more and more families throw in the towel and quit the fight for family.  

  Talking to him for some time that day opened the door. It answered the questions that crossed my mind when his son stopped painting and quit being top student.  It filled the gaps of those times when nobody responded to my “call parents”- those letters that requested parents’ meeting.

Samuel that day, a picture of his old self, reassured me,” I am okay now, Ma’am. Life may not be fair but it is still life I would like to live.”

In my mind, I watched them walk away together.  A father and a son trying to be family despite being a far cry from the ideal.

 We had spent our days and nights in this house.  I had slept on my butaca, its rocking motion soothing me on those turbulent nights when I had to come to terms with my miscarriages.  The motion was like my mind, moving from today to yesterday and back. But the present has a clearer purpose now.

 With light steps and a radiant smile brought about by knowing I had helped a poor child get his acts together despite his dysfunctional family, I hooked my arm onto Harold’s arm.  We walked out of the old house and headed east to where our new “ube-ice cream colored” house awaited us.  In the distance, I saw the sun diffusing its yellow light on the world.  I looked up and welcomed it.

[deepeningbluesatdusk]

Tracks

“Damn” he muttered, peering through the gloom. Behind him shrill notes filtered through the cool damp air, the singer unseen.  Silent shapes blurred into greyness.  Dawn.

She had been there and gone again.  He glared at his phone, unreasonably bright, cable wrapped around fingers, two ear-pods hissed a rhythm his legs no longer needed. He stretched a calf gingerly, holding the wall tight as if it were trying to escape. His face creasing  as the soreness of Mondays early run awakened.

While he had been sleeping she had visited again secretly. It was always in secret.

He traced her route, thumb sliding between screens, pausing, his eyes narrowed in concentration, tracking her footsteps, his tongue ran over his lips in concentration. They stayed dry. He paused at each page, counting to the second where she had viewed and what downloaded, absorbing. Each stop of her journey was marked. Digital tracks.  

He wondered why she had visited, what she could see, maybe what her thoughts might have been. His lips repeated a poem silently, he remembered writing that to her, it felt like a long time ago. He shook his head. She had logged off less than an hour before he had awoken to run.

He glanced up checking the progress of the sky as the stars which he had watched through the branches no longer showed .

“Damn, Damn……..Damn” the last syllable drawn out in frustration. This was becoming a problem again, habitually checking the phone, in the hope there might be a trace, a message from her to prove it was not….. He hesitated with the thought but said it out loud into the morning air. “.. a delusion”. It had been her phrase to describe him, but he had taken it to heart and he owned it now.

His eyes moved downwards, his thoughts in a moment went back months to when he had sought to find her, had tracked her steps from website to website as she changed title, conversations and topic but always was recognisable, that politeness, but always an underlying condescension, the quickness to laughter but always from a distance.

His thoughts drifted back further. Eighteen months ago he had first noticed her in his ignorance, and became entranced. If some people possessed eyes that twinkled, she had words which sparkled. But this had been no indulgent feast, no mutual descent into literary  excess. Her phrases were always economic, almost spartan in their self analysis, an elegant and concise verbal brutality.  She picked where he gorged, She danced where he stormed. She left while he had stayed.

She had been elusive but engaging, almost magical the way she disappeared only to casually re-appear as if  two weeks absence were simply a momentary gap in traffic, a breath in a conversation. His searching revealed her many parallel existences in electronic dimensions where she travelled.  What he realised now, was that she had not stopped or gone missing. Perhaps bored, she had simply moved to a new group of friends, writers. A new audience full of hearts, flowers and applause to embrace her. She too had been searching.  

“Bitch” The insult brought a half smile briefly to his face; it was layered with admiration for the ease which she had made the transition from life to life, and jealousy he felt that she had the time and the friends to do it. Then he had been ignorant of the subtleties of the internet and stomped moodily around the shallow, posturing blogs with which she played her games, his included. Her poise embarrassed him still, though thankfully he was unaware at the time. He grimaced as he read a further set of his own indulgent words.  His simplistic verbose passion for one so far beyond his reach, laid bare for all to see and laugh at.    

“You dickhead” he whispered to himself. He felt he owned that label too. His outpourings made for grim reading. He had learned brevity too late. She must have winced as he did now. He hoped she realised how deeply he had felt, but immediately doubted it himself.  

So from spawned suitor he tried his hand at obsessional follower. He was crap at that too. Not that his efforts had been totally in vain. He had got close, too close at times, even onto the same blog as her till in a flourish of eloquence she had recovered from startled anxiety to vanish into the  forest the internet can become. She left behind her fragments, words, branches of thought broken by the haste of her exit.

He had tried to find her, a second time but she was too elusive and left him floundering. He was a beginner without the luck that brings.

Eventually with a reality that dawned on his thoughts just as it did around him, he had made his exit. Learning that despite all his efforts he looked, to her, at best obsessive and at worst……some dangerous psychotic. His lips set into a firm flat line. Best not go there. The thoughts weighed heavy in his mind , pausing his movement as his mind reached back to the dark days. His face coloured involuntarily as he remembered how he had raged, how desperate he was. What a sorry sight he must have been.  His mood darkened. He had realised at the time that he was acting out of character and was now ashamed.

To feel ashamed to fall in love with a dream and chase it. It was not a result he would have expected. It felt so wrong to abandon a dream. It was not how Hollywood would have preached it. This was reality.

Without anyone to talk to about the confusion which enveloped him, he became his own inquisitor to try secure the truth. He agonised over what had happened to uncover the secret of why he had behaved this way. Eventually  he prised free enough to make sense. Leaving a bloody pulp, where his ego had been.  

His reflection, had become his saviour. A realisation that slapped him one day when trimming his beard., There in front of him In the mirror, chin raised as the trimmer buzzed and the bristles became scattered stood a man, a father who’s daily existence was measured in bills, repairs, trips, activities and sleepovers, arrivals , departures and  plans who could see no escape  from a landscape of duty and loyalty. So different in youth, but now existing humourless, joyless exchanges, lists, organisation, zero passion,  zero creativity, zero life. He occasionally escaped, or maybe was released  to explore alone long meandering but absorbing cycle journeys where he forgot about the future and past the same, for a while he lived only in the present. He felt free. It took him back to his 20s. Small mercies; It gave him enough space to breathe clean air.  Last year that too had been sacrificed on the alter of decorating. His adventure had been boxed, his passion humiliated. His strength, like his earnings had become the foundation to all their existences. He was the anchor submerged, out of sight, thrown deep in the waters, kept while his grip held. He feared this was his lot until darkness closed his eyes for good and he became simply a memory, or cut loose when no longer needed.

 Her departure mirrored her arrival, it cut him deeply; Her silence more so. No matter how many times he repeated it, he could not shake the belief that he was the monster she hadfled from. Beneath the calmness he smouldered still, he was stubborn, but slowly his hope died.

He rubbed an ear, thinking deeply as midges found their breakfast.

Her arrival was reminiscent of an accident.  A blow not aimed at him but felt all the same. Just a space to show where he had stood a moment before, now prone, staring vacantly wondering what the fuck had just occurred. This had been her impact. In their exchanges he was no longer a bearded middle aged father. As he climbed off the floor and looked to how to join melee that seemed to surround him. The quiet man in him had gone, the father figure subdued,  Gone. That person could wait.  

He leant against the wall in another slow stretch, his knee popping as he moved. Wear and tear catching up with him. His head bowed as he placed his feet carefully, methodically. The sweat from his climb through the forest now dried tight to his face as it warmed in the early rays, his shirt no longer clung to his back. So long in his adult life he had been the calm, easy going reliable one. Then in that day it all changed. He had become unrecognisable, some vile ogre wanting her all for himself, prepared to abandon his life in exchange

She was not the only one who swapped between lives. It was just she did so with some pretence of control, whilst he dramatically crashed headlong through the windows of his suburban existence into something else, another place he had not recognised, he had found himself staring back from the paned, jagged, broken glass, reflected as he felt. Shattered.  

A dozen broken separate faces  stared back, some recognisable but others with parts of who he was cracked, or simply missing. He had wallowed in impatience, frustrated but not knowing what caused it, ready for a fight but no one stood to oppose him.  

He just remembered he had felt very angry and  sad at the same time. His writing was poor in that time, unable to contain the passion she had unlocked twinned with the savagery of his hate  for his electronic impotence. His digital adventure very nearly died in those weeks.

The return of these thoughts brought with them the doubt he had felt too. His breathing slowed as his mind once more slipped away from the present.  No longer would he laugh when people mentioned obsessions and denial.  These had been parts of him he had not seen before. Hate he knew and rage. But had never felt so utterly lost in someone’s every thought. Distance and silence had been new to him. He now knew both those tortures intimately.

She had posed him questions where he had seen only dull facts, had shown an insight to his doubts and had embraced the lack of trust in his history. She met his darkness and caressed  with a darkness of her own.

In the reflection she offered him he saw clearly the face of the frightened lad who hid within him, who had left behind a home of violence to start again, create a life without the victim he knew he would have remained. That little boy had in some insane act of bravery or stupidity, he was never sure which, had reached out to touch her. To see if she was real.  She was, but not to be trusted. She told him so.

With her words came a new vision for him, of someone who’s bravery was not skin deep. It had been a revelation.  It was a turning of a corner before he had even been aware of the road he travelled was not straight.   He endured a lifetime of change in the seconds he took to read her thoughts. He could forget the face and body who met him each morning in the mirror. He was transcendent of flesh, He became a simply a voice for the passion he felt.

Then she left.

This left him reeling, desperate for more. It filled his emptiness. No addiction would have equalled this. So many times over the years he had asked what twist of fate, what random chance or childhood experience had made him from his youngest days feel this cruel and selfish world so very deeply.

He had been a sensitive child forced to toughen up, to bury his hope beneath duty. Strangely he could feel when she was around, some sixth sense had made him check the apps on his phone. Sure enough, she had come to call.

But whilst his passion soared to heights unknown in his lifetime, his common sense told him it was all an illusion, an impossibility. Eventually once she had gone and her silence bleached the colour from each memory, he understood why he had to mentally release her, to leave. To not come back.

In a show of maturity which surprised him he had made a big effort of letting go. The irony, and he liked ironies, was that she had let go of him a long time before. He had just been too stupid, too blinded to accept that. His departure would have graced the most formulaic Hollywood film.  The hopeless hero, close enough to hear her, to see her, but never close enough to touch or know the mystery she presented.

He looked up from his thoughts and blinked. His eyes glazed with tears as he recalled the morning he made that decision and acted on it.

In that moment he had lost more than just the chance to let the words which tumbled out of her head wash away his responsibilities. He had lost the brave reflection of who he could become. His future as a lover died that day.  That realisation had hit him hard. “Fuck “  he whispered to the wall, throat catching involuntarily. “You have no idea of what you did to me...”

He turned his back to the wall, lifting ankles to stretch muscles and joints. Each protested then relaxed as the horizon ignited with the rising sun. He blinked again and stared hard, feeling the lashes of one eye full to the brim . Although his family still slept behind the walls and would not see, he did not want the morning to be saddened by his grieving for his lost self.

He sniffed hard. “very romantic”  he murmured, and sniffed again harder.

Why keep coming back? Again and again but never to talk, always hiding, always looking, never connecting. Yet he knew she knew. They were connected already. Was she reminiscing, some afternoon recollection to while away a tiresome lunch break. Had she amidst a gaggle of girls used him to point to as they swapped giggles and stories about the fumbled copulations or close escapes from groping tar stained fingers.  

Was he just one more exhibit in her menagerie, collected, collated and with a double click, on dusty shelf stored to reminisce.

“You left, I left, you left, we were so fucking good at leaving, so good at building walls…….” His voice raised “we had fucking nothing”,  his frustration called for mercy , but the trees like the birds within them showed none. He had not departed, not really. She had never been there to leave. She had already gone. “I’m tired girl, why not just let me go.”

He glanced at his reflection in the window, darkened suitably to match his mood. He was greyer than he had been a year ago. His beard now heavily flecked with silver. “Very distinguished” his wife had said, knowing the opposite was true. He looked tired. It was not through running. That let him share the quiet of the forest, it gave him strength. He could rise before dawn and pull on his shoes simply because his sleeping had been in shreds for months. Waking early – listening to the steady rhythmic breathing next to him. For her sleep practiced for 18 years was a sanctuary, for him a prison.

It was not her fault he had changed. She had married someone a lifetime ago who now no longer existed and did not know the imposter who lay down beside her. His friends often commented so, even his wife said he was no longer the same man. "You're  not as nice as you were..." She had said one evening as they sat in the kitchen.

"People change.." he had fired back.  

"I learned being nice gets you trodden on. Why are you so fixed on me being nice?"

He had stared at her. She  turned and walked away as she spoke over her shoulder, words almost lost as she hurried to leave.

"It's why I married you".    the door closed behind her.

Although when they slept, they were together, the space between mere inches, it was also unbridgeable.

Yet in his mirror existence, tapping heroically at his cheap keyboard he could believe he was significant. A poet, a philosopher, part player, artist, at once both brave and witty. His darkness and pain were not a weakness, they were an identity, a scar that spoke more of his endurance not his pain, His strength not his shame. The girl’s  departure had shattered that reflection. He grieved still for that loss. He grieved for who he used to be, the man who died, with that first stanza she sent him, as the creative forces he had buried and boxed for so long, exploded in his chest at the touch of her words. She unlocked his demons then slipped away, leaving his sanity in flames.

His own reflection looking back at him again, lips now set in a line said it all. He felt had become a grey man, almost lost in the reflections of objects around him and the images through the window, a family home, cups on the table- letter from the bank and insurance, shoes piled by the door.  

He had believed what she had told him at the outset – she had warned him not to fall for her. But fool, desperate fool that he was had given no serious thought to the warning.Now he was wiser, but too late. His eyes misted again at another painful memory he rubbed fiercely at an eyelid irritated by the emotion. He was a grown man, he shouldn’t do this. But his heart no longer listened. He simply did not believe himself, why would anyone else?

“Control”….. he muttered looking over his shoulder now at the trees, rough barked in the morning low sunlight.  “I won’t give you control” almost as if she stood behind him listening.

He heard a sound, someone was rising in the house. He drew to the side of the window and watched a slight figure, unruly ginger hair fighting the hairband which  strove to contain it, pad silently into the kitchen, pink patterns on crumpled pyjamas. – she glanced up surprised – feeling his gaze on her and smiled. Such warmth, the sun on his back momentarily eclipsed.

She examined him, blue eyes matched his own, smiled again as she fumbled for glasses in her pocket. They were not there, she gave up. Shrugged

She was good at reading him, this one. Much more so than his other daughter who like their mother would still be fast asleep.  This slight, grinning freckled, awkward girl shared his quickness to laughter, a temper of hurricane magnitude and a relentless passion for beautiful things. As he watched, she absently pulled a loose strand of hair from her face turned and vanished. He heard a click of the door behind him, before two arms wrapped around him silently squeezing, readjusting then hugging tighter. He turned inside her grip, chin rested on the top of her head. He said nothing. His arms, now wrapped around her shoulders spoke for him.  

“You needed that” she said, muffled, head buried in his chest. In response he surrendered the battle and tears rolled silently. His grip around her shoulders tightened.

“What were you doing so early ?” his daughter asked. With the back of his hand he quickly cleared away any trace of sadness loosening his hold on her. She twisted around peering up to his face.

“I couldn’t sleep so I came out to run”.

He saw her glance at the phone. “and checked my messages”. 

She could sense something, it showed in her frown, but wasn’t sure what it meant.

“You went without me..” she quietly scolded him. “Don’t ever go without me.. ”

“ I think we had a visitor”,

He mumbled abruptly changing the subject “ I found tracks”

“Where” she squinted, eyes screwed up as she struggled with the distance.  

“Out there”.. he waved his arm generally as he lied. “ but there’s nothing there any more…..”

He was ashamed that he could not admit what his truth was;  another thing to isolate him. It was time to end the conversation, he could hear that the rest of his family was stirring. Water cascaded down the drain pipe beside him.

“I’m hungry” he announced.

His daughter, turned on her heel, and without letting go of his arm, pulled him bodily towards the door. He made a show of resisting, she pulled harder. She had his stubbornness too.

This was why he had made the choice to remain. She was his responsibility, but also his immense pride, together with her sister. Despite the vacant life, filled with awkward silence and the unsaid questions he knew their Mum relied on him, although daily  with practiced efficiency they showed each other how deeply they no longer cared.

His daughters were something the elusive visitor from the far side of the world had never asked about. She would not. When she spoke it had only been of her and him.  

It was sad, because for all his fine words and flowing lines or his pretty but ultimately pointless landscapes. They were the only thing in his life of note.

The door closed behind him and within moments, time erased that he or she had been there.  

They were the only two people who knew. One day neither would remember.

Neither understood how to speak to the other, how to turn the page and read anew.  

That’s how stories end.

DB@D

October 2017

[phoenix1966sbottom]

When Jared/Sam is or interacts with aliens...as always, heed the warnings where the original story is posted. And please consider leaving a comment. It’s all the writer ever gets in return for their time, effort and generosity!

At the End of the World by ashtraythief on Ao3. Jared/Jensen. J2 AU.  Jensen collects the wonders of the verse to preserve them; only observing, never getting involved. When he comes to a planet called Earth, he realizes he’s capable of deeper emotions than he was designed to have.

Grave series by all_the_damned_vampires on Ao3. Jared/Jensen. J2 AU.   Jared is pretty sure he was insane even before he was abducted. Not many people can survive a global pandemic with their minds intact. For a long time, it’s just Jared alone in the room, tended and manipulated by an unseen force. (past Jared/Adrienne in flashbacks)

Chasing Darkness by ashtraythief on Ao3. Jared/Jensen. J2 AU.  Discharged from the military after the war and unable to find a regular job, Jensen and Dani end up on JD’s mining planet Wora. It’s one of the most hostile environments in the Old Galaxy, but the pay is astronomical. The job sounds easy enough: protect the miners. While battling the demons of his past, Jensen meets Jared, a beautiful, sought after companion, who is isolated by his own secrets. Jared had come to Wora, dragged by Chad, with the need to make some serious money. It doesn’t take Jensen long to figure out Jared’s secret and he has to decide how much he’s willing to risk to protect him.

As Boundless As the Sea by cherie_morte on LiveJournal. Jared/Jensen. J2 AU.  Jensen is an Engelon, a race whose home planet was abandoned thousands of years ago. Now what remains of their collective live in a large spaceship that travels to find, conquer, and drain new planets and their inhabitants of the one precious substance they need to survive: water.  When Jensen unintentionally takes a human form, his fellow Engelons have finally had enough. They cast him down to Earth, far from any ocean, where it is assumed he will die without access to water. But Jensen is rescued by Jared, a man who lives alone on the farm Jensen was dropped on. Jared has lost everything he ever held dear, but he has not lost his kindness or his willingness to help a very strange stranger in need.

Close Encounters by morganoconner on Ao3. Jared/Jensen. J2 AU.  This is the story of how an alien named Jensen and a human named Jared met, fell in love, and got their happily ever after. (no penetrative sex)

Mission Voyager by soulmatecest on Ao3. Jared/Jensen. J2 AU.  Earth has been colonized by a non-violent and pacifist race of aliens who have the ability to morph their bodies to look like humans and be able to live on this planet. But they believe real humans to be too violent and dangerous to keep around. It has been almost two years since Jared Padalecki ran to hide with a group of survivors, living in abandoned buildings and stealing supplies to survive.

I Can Fly (But I Want His Wings) by mystik on Ao3. Jared/Jensen. J2 AU.  After a tragic death a couple years ago, the life of nineteen year-old Jared can be described in one word: numb. But one day, he meets a man that can change his life for good. A man that is literally different from anyone he ever met and that will turn not only his present, but his past upside down. Aliens are real after all. (warning: background Jared/Sandy (nothing explicit) and past Jared/Chad)

The Ethereal by saucyminx on Ao3. Jared/Jensen. J2 AU.  Jared Padalecki had just about settled into his place as a member of the Earth Division squad aboard space station TwoTwo, ready to follow in the line of his family’s military linage. But everything he knew was about to change when an otherwise average day had him crossing paths with a should be extinct Ethereal. Especially when, against all odds, Jared found himself drawn to the half breed he’d been raised to despise.

World Domination is Harder than it Looks by kellifer_fic on LiveJournal. Jared/Jensen. J2 AU.  Jensen Ackles is an alien and Jared is hell-bent on cuddling exposing him for what he is. (no penetrative sex)

The Third Kind by BewareTheIdes15 on Ao3. Jared/Jensen/Misha. J2/M AU.  "So you see too?" Jensen whispers again, peeping around the edge of the bedroom door. The thing has climbed out from under the bedclothes and sprawled out in a long slice of sunlight pouring through the window. He's almost sure it wasn't that big last night. (no penetrative sex)

The Taking by morrezela on AO3. Jared/Jensen. J2 AU.  Jared was on vacation on the mysterious and beautiful Parnath. He had known about the ‘takings’ that could happen; he just never thought that he would be that one tourist that would have it happen to him.

Legacy by c-is-for on LiveJournal. Jared/Jensen. J2 AU.  Jared is a high school outcast, bullied for being gay and for having a father who had some strange theories before he disappeared. Jensen is a perpetual outsider, constantly on the move, trying to blend in as a normal teenager when he's anything but. When it comes time to make a stand against the forces pursuing Jensen, Jared discovers that his father's bizarre notions might have contained more truth than anyone realized. (only kissing)

The Squid Monster by morrezela on Ao3. Jared/Jensen. J2 AU.  Jared picks up an intergalactic squid that decides to live on his inner thigh

Blood Feud by morrezela on Ao3. Jared/Jensen. J2 AU.  Jared and his team were sent to evacuate a training facility on the latest colonized planet, but his mission wasn’t exactly successful. Now he either has to try to negotiate with the enemies who want him dead, or let a group of young cadets starve to death.

What About the Heart You Promised to the Tin Man? by misskittye on LiveJournal. Jared/Jensen. J2 AU.  Jared Padalecki is a regular guy who runs into Jensen (literally) after watching a falling star crash into a lake. Jensen is more than meets the eye (while also being easy on the eyes) and he drags poor Jared into the plot of a sci-fi action movie. (no penetrative sex)

It’s Supernatural, Extraterrestrial by thorkiship18 on Ao3. Sam/Dean. Unrealated wincest AU. Dean Winchester is a Twenty-four year old truck driver with 0.3% of ties to the world around him. He's never had a long lasting relationship or a friendship for more than a week because he believes that everyone and everything around him is stupid.One rainy night, Dean almost runs down a young boy in the middle of the road. A boy who knows zero english and is ignorant to everything on Earth and also carries around a GPS like device that points east.Shenanigans and all types of fuckery ensue! (no explicit sex)

I Will Follow You by hunters_retreat on Ao3. Jared/Jensen. J2 AU.  He did notice, as he’d turned, the way Jensen had licked his lips as he let his eyes trail over Jared one more time.  It may not mean anything.  It might mean everything.

Stardust and Hunting Go Hand in Hand by blackrose_17 on Ao3. Sam/Jack, Sam/Dean.   Sam Winchester was supposed to go to Stanford but a chance meeting with a Police Box changed his destiny and all those around him. Sam had known from a young age that Dean was his mate, his alpha but Dean didn’t see him as anything but a little brother. Jack on the other hand saw Sam for the omega he was and very interested. The last thing Dean ever expected to see back in his life was his little brother who’s heart he broke pregnant and mourning the loss of his lover. But together they realize that they are whole together and the other half of each other’s soul. (warning: mpreg) 

Veterans of the Psychic War by kellwyntar on LiveJournal. Jared/Jensen. J2 AU.  When the invasion came, no-one was ready. Humanity faltered. We died by the thousands, then by the millions. Nations fell before them before the survivors could begin to hold them back. At the most desperate moment in humanity's history, two men would face the battle. Jared Padalecki, a Psion whose power could only lead him to self-destruction alone in the face of the horrors of war, and Jensen Ackles, a Guardian fractured by his past. Apart, they are broken and incomplete. Together, they just might save the world, and maybe even themselves. (the sex is ambiguous)

Think of the Queen by kerfuffling on Ao3. Jared/Jensen. J2 AU.  Jared never expected his ass to become the star of the show when he and Jensen find themselves trapped in a cave on an alien world.

Mayuon by hunters_retreat on Ao3. Jared/Jensen. J2 AU.  Jared never believed anyone would be crazy enough to fund his research, but every crazier things had happened.  Like finding that his belief in an ancestor race was true and he'd found their home planet.  Or that the men he'd traveled with had turned out to be mercenaries, ready to kill the king and his people so that they could go back to Earth and start bringing people in to 'colonize' their new home.  Or that Jared could fall so completely in love with the king who hated him for the part he played in the mercenaries finding his people.  With a race against time, can Jared find a way to stop the ancient ceremony that would kill Jensen and his people?  Will he be able to stop the mercenaries in their plot to destroy the Martrikian people?  And will he find a way to show Jensen that he really is the man he believed he was when they fell in love?

The End (of Something) by ashtraythief on Ao3. Jared/Jensen. J2 AU.  Jared and Jensen are captured by the enemy. In the face of almost certain death, Jensen finally makes a move. (no penetrative sex)

Garden of Ackles by morrezela on Ao3. Jared/Jensen. J2 AU.  Long ago, Jensen Ackles was in an accident that left him in a wheelchair for life. He didn't let that stop him from amassing a small fortune and buying his own mansion at a dirt cheap price - no pun intended. But the mysterious gardens needed some work done, and Jensen couldn't do that with his own power. He hired Jared to be his gardener instead.

It’s Supernatural, Extraterrestrial by ghostboi on AO3. Jared/Jensen. J2 AU.   The far-reaching Love Story of Sam & Dean grabs the attention of some real big fans. (kissing only)

The Right Language by hunters_retreat on Ao3. Jared/Jensen. J2 AU.  It would be lectures all day and it would only end when Jared was taken to the Crowned Prince for the ceremony.  Hopefully, a translator would be found before then.

Alien!Crack Verse by Annie46fic on Ao3. Jared/Jensen. J2 AU.   Jared and Jensen have the best ‘How we met’ story ever (warning: mpreg)

The Real World: New New York by DarceyDelaney on Ao3. Jared/Jensen. J2 AU.  Hundreds of years in the future, Jared takes part in Earth’s latest attempt at a reality TV phenomenon—they’ve revamped The Real World, but this time around, it’s taking place in space, specifically New New York, Mars. Jared originally signs on just to get Chad to shut up, but when he meets Jensen, his shy, really really ridiculously good-looking Martian housemate, he decides reality TV might not be so stupid after all. (the sex is ambiguous)

What Comes Next, Alien Sex? by zempasuchil on Ao3. Jared/Jensen. J2 AU.  Jensen really IS too beautiful to be human. His true alien form is a little... strange. (chapter 2 is Jensen’s backstory where he does bottom for an OMC).

One for the Book by ashtraythief on Ao3. Jared/Jensen. J2 AU.  Jared loved his job as ambassador to the Space Council. He especially loved to sample local customs.

Abductions and Amnesia by hunters_retreat on Ao3.  Jared/Jensen. J2 AU.   Jensen was a Prime and his dedication to Jared would never allow room for someone else. He would wait on Jared forever. Jared just wished it was love he saw in the other man’s eyes and not just the unswerving loyalty of a Prime that had been trained into him with his devotion. (the sex is ambiguous)

Forced Entry by virtualpersonal on Ao3. Sam/Dean. Wincest AU.  Captain Winchester doesn’t like people messing around in his mind. He’s had some run-ins with telepaths and he hates them all. Too bad he's been paired up to work with Sam Wesson, one of the highest rated Telepaths in the Tel Unit.

My Favorite Martian by Ephermeralk on Ao3. Sam/Dean. Wincest AU.   When a space capsule crashes onto the beach where Dean’s working as an astronomer, he expects a NASA astronaut inside, not a humanoid extra-terrestrial named Sam. And he definitely doesn’t expect them to have much in common--like, say, being brothers. After all, his own brother Sam had died years ago in what was supposedly a house fire.

Deja Vu bu Zara_Zee on Ao3. Jared/Jensen. J2 AU. Dean Winchester has a pretty sweet life. He works in construction; he married his long-time girlfriend, Carmen, straight out of high school; and he’s almost paid off a basic apartment in the Middle District. He may never have left his home district, let alone his home planet, but he’s happy… more-or-less.So why does he keep dreaming about the red wastelands of Mars? Why does he know more about the Martian Resistance than he has any right to? And who do the long, long legs and decidedly male butt that have him waking up achingly hard every morning belong to?Maybe Dean just needs a holiday? He couldn’t afford a real one, of course, but maybe he could go to Déjà Vu and get the memories of a holiday implanted; get Mars out of his system.Of course, that’s when the trouble really starts.

And I’m going to sneak a gen series in here. You can always read it with wincest goggles on.

Xenophobia by selecasharp and pixymisa on LiveJournal. Sam& Dean. Gen AU.  In space, no one can hear you scream. And its sequel, Xenocide.  This time, it’s war.

[papermoth-bird-blog]

California Coast: Santa Cruz to San Francisco.

On our way down to Santa Cruz, we tried to take our time once again. That being said, we did take many of the look off’’s on the previous days’ trip. And, I will admit, there was growing antsiness in my inner world. I was about ready to be by myself again, and yet, I was still so far from that being logistically possible. 

We drove through Big Sur again towards Monterey, stopping to look at cows and flowers and water bodies. Gopala insisted he wanted to try to pet a cow- despite my “I don’t think they’d like that much”. As we rounded each bend, I imagined all the people who had ridden along these same roads. Kerouac, without a doubt, but so many more writers and artists & muses themselves. Not to mention all the people that had travelled this coastal highway that I’d never even heard of, and maybe wouldn’t ever. Each scattering their own thoughts into the wind as they passed along this road. Each of these people forming new parts of themselves here too. It did feel like a gateway of some sort to me. An unseen passageway- one that wasn’t so tangible, or perhaps concretely emotional, but one that I am strangely sure was there. 

The car climbed off the coast & towards the inland road. We came across a farm stand- one that had some of the best produce prices I’ve ever see- 3 avocados for a dollar! 7 kiwis for a dollar! I got myself a big bag of banana chips & a bunch of fresh stuff (including mangoes, blood oranges, avocados) all under 6 dollars. Gonna say that might be the bargain of the whole trip. I ate avocados & orange in the car as we eventually rolled into Santa Cruz. The thing about getting up at 5 is that your day complete already as you are still sitting in early afternoon. We waited for the Library to open so we could charge our devices. Gopala also wanted to print more photos of Gurus and Gods for his car. Once my phone was charged enough, I took the opportunity to taste independence again, if not for a short amount of time. I told Gopala I was going for a walk & vaguely waved that I’d be back in a bit. 

‘A bit’ turned out the be a couple hours later. Even that didn’t really feel like enough time alone. I knew what I really need, what I really wanted, was to be really truly alone & in control of my being- my schedule, my routine, my diet. Gopala had a bad tendency to judge absolutely everything I do. Only to follow up with some Vendatic reasoning if I showed any kind of indifference to the stuff he was telling me. What irritates me most about men, is that they seem to think “quiet & polite” means “weak & a push-over”, That alone really bubbles-up my inner demon. More then that though, I felt like my schedule wasn’t in my control either, I kept saying “I think I just need to get to San Fran and regroup”, but we found lots of reasons to delay.

Santa Cruz.

For what it’s worth, Santa Cruz is a really beautiful place and definitely has a really cool vibe about it. There were the most skaters I’ve ever seen in one area-- with the potential exception of Venice Beach. Driving down the streets you saw cool old cars with surf boards sticking out the windows or strapped onto the rook- waiting for the slightest bit of warmer weather. The beach was pretty nice, with a pier & bars like most Californian City Beaches. In addition to that, though, there is also a full blown carnival set up down there. Colourful rides & the like. Out of all the carnivals I’ve ever been to, this one genuinely had one of the best vibes about it- but maybe that’s because I walked through it alone (or rather on the phone with Kluane) due to it being the off season. The town is also filled with a lot of new-agey shops that smell like incense- although a little more gentrified than other places I’ve been. Overall Santa Cruz felt a little dream & half asleep. It’s a college town (a similar size to Kingston ON), that you can tell gets packed in summer with people seaking that iconic “California” experience. 

Like much of the coast, there are a lot of people in Santa Cruz living out of their vans, not by force, but by choice. At the library, we pulled up next to this guy with a long grey beard & dreads tucking into his trucker hat. The van had all kinds of sticker stuck to the sides- bands, places & funny sayings- but mostly bands. Later in the day, we struck up a conversation with him, when he heard us listening to Jerry Garcia as Gopala redecorated the inside of his mobile shrine. He passed us a flyer & invited us to a few shows for the following week. Gopala seemed interested, but The shows started at 9, which was definitely later than we were staying up at that point. Plus he might have seen the pleading “please let’s just leave” face I had on. The guy went on to talk about conspiracy theories of the California fires & about surfing & about the “hundred year bloom” that was about to happen in Death Valley. On another trip- perhaps with my sisters- I could really settle into the vibe & would have loved to stay and make friends like this, but this time, I knew, was not the time. 

Along with the distinctly laid back vibe, there is a really strong & healthy rebel vibe. We happened upon Subrosa (which, when I walked by before, drew me in too for whatever reason...maybe someone told me about & I forgot). Anyways, they were having a “Free Fair”, meaning everything there was Free- Nice clothing, massages, books, trinkets, homemade food, electronics & instruments. I myself, collected a t-shirt from an artist I think lives in New Orleans (because I recognize their work) & a couple ‘zines from their library which was about herbalism & making tincture. I kinda took a deep breath, because these people reminded me of my community back home. I overheard conversations like “oh, I’m teaching for two weeks at witch camp” & “yeah I was gathering a lot of pursulane recently”. I smiled to myself as the young girl whispered to her mom “look mom! There’s our farmer!” There was a guy also dressed up like a full blown pirate- like something out of Pirates of the Caribbean. I walked around the patio- looking a the lace & silk scarves hanging from the trees- talking myself down, because I knew I had absolutely no more room in my pack.

Gopala ended up getting into a Vendantic argument with that very same farmer not five minutes later. I snapped to attention- but there was nothing I could really do. The guy was pointing out that the bindi Gopala was wearing might be considered cultural appropriation, and Gopala went immediately into a schpeal about “well that only makes sense if you think you are the body”. To which the guy said “huh?” “you aren’t the body, you aren’t the mind, you are god”. You could tell the guy did not want to engage in that way and he about said as much, adding “I actually like being in my body & connecting to it” to which Gopala said something like “Well you are living in full ignorance then”. I wanted to scream out of embarrassment, but also on behalf of my allyship with this man. As we got into the car, I tried to explain to Gopala that he shouldn’t engage with people like that & why it might be inappropriate & how he is speaking from an opinion of the Truth, but that other people connect to Truth in a different way. He wasn’t interested in hearing me though, and pretty much accused me too of being “asleep”, to which he told me I’d feel better if I did some breathing excersizes. Instead I repacked my bag & held my breath (literally) for fear that if I let any of my breath out it would come tumbling out with curse words and further angry grumbles. He was reminding me more and more of a definite mixture of two of my least favourite ex-boyfriends and I was getting a huge urge to straight up run away. I was determined to get to San Fran, though and it was only an hour & a half away at that point. 

We paused again near the seashore- because Gopala suggested doing meditation at the beach- I think he was trying to do it for me partitally, but we couldn’t find cheap parking anywhere. Instead we found a lot further up & I hoped out the car & called a friend. And cried a little out of frustration. And then I cried a little more about Ellie- and what a hard ass she had been. And that she was the type of person to say exactly what she meant & what she wanted & stuck to her guns like no one else. If I learned anything from her, it was that. I felt better after that cry. I knew that I had all that in me too. And I was fully resolved to use those skills, I didn’t care about being sweet and fully polite at that point. 

San Francisco.

We got back in the car & finally drove onto the highway towards San Francisco. All the way, I was messaging friends who might have friends or contacts in San Fran- so I could ground with a friendly face of some sort. My friend Asa (who I stayed with in NOLA) used to live in Oakland (the city just across the bridge from san fran). He found a friend that I could stay with, which felt like a huge relief. She was out until late evening tho, so I decided to get a hostel for the night. I got Gopala to drop me off at the HI city centre & did my best not to full run out of the car. I didn’t think to look back though. 

The Hostel is huge- obviously an old hotel of apartment building or something. It’s old, but has all the charms that come along with creaky buildings- including an old-fashioned elevator & distinct architecture features. The walls are covered in Art that depicts witches & little gothic characters. The front desk people looked normal enough- except one girl who was a full blown goth, complete with pleather jacket with fur trim, shaved hair style & the most dramatic eyebrows I’ve seen in a long while. Gothy-girl band music played over the common areas. I felt immediately at home/calm. 

I went up to my room & decided the best thing I could do for myself was to re:group in simple ways- shower, meditate, read, check in with a few friends & write. I met my dorm mates- two girls from Germany on a road trip through the western part of America. We chatted for a while about travel & the Grand Canyon & the Coast of California. They leave today for the rest of their. I have to check out at 11 from the hostel & make my way to oakland with my big pack. Gopala already messaged me about coming to a Sivananda Vedanta thing, but I’m just gonna leave that message hanging a bit. I’ll have to get back to him eventually because I owe him gas money. For the mean time, I’m gonna take a breather & experience the city by myself. 

So far, it feels a lot like New York- tall buildings everywhere- the “never sleep” vibe. I’m in a district called the Tenderloin, near chinatown. There are lots of homeless people around, so I went low pressure about the walking-around-at-night-by-myself. I did do some research about things to do around here. I heard tell that the Mission district is home to the best Burritos in the country- which I read on trip advisor first. But as soon as I went back into the lobby, a few people came in talking loudly about them too. So you know I’m going to have to do that. Apparently the city is fairly walkable. The German girls told me three days would be plenty to feel like I’ve “seen San Francisco”. I’m looking forward to it, but already planning my trip back to LA so that I have some wiggle room for my trip to Mexico. I’m really looking forward to that & hoping to save as much money as I can here (ha! the most expensive city in the sates) so that I have more money to do exciting things with my friends in Tulum. Trying my best to be present though, with all that being said. I have a good feeling about today, and that’s all I really need. 

[danithebookaholic-blog]

NEW RELEASE!

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The Winnowing (Stanley & Hazel #2) 

By Jo Schaffer

Published by: Month9Books Publication date: February 26th 2019 Genres: Historical, Young Adult

Synopsis:

Darkness descends over St. Louis, a city already rocked by the Great Depression. More and more people are disappearing, and some have turned up dead.  A sinister secret society is putting forward their plan known as “The Winnowing,” designed to wipe out those they consider “undesirable.”

After Stanley and Hazel foil the diabolical plans of Charles Chouteau, they become instant celebrities. Hazel is thrust into the role of debutante, and risks loses herself in it. Meanwhile, Stanley must deal with the horrific tragedy of his best friend’s death while being threatened by the unseen forces of the Veiled Prophet.

With things spiraling out of control, Stanley and Hazel’s relationship is tested, possibly beyond repair. As bodies pile up, people become more desperate. The divide between wealthy and poor grows ever wider, threatening to tear their worlds apart. Now, the two must find a way to work together if there is any hope at all of saving their relationship and their futures.

Goodreads

Excerpt:

The renegade newsie climbed on top of the metal box and forced the window open a crack with a crowbar he produced from his baggy trousers. Then he sat and lit a cigarette. He puffed on it a few times before reaching into the inside pocket of his oversized coat. He pulled out a bottle that sloshed with liquid and removed the cork.

He took a handkerchief and stuffed it into the bottle of liquid, leaving a tail of it hanging out of the top. Pinching his cigarette between two fingers, he contemplated the tip, while smoke trailed out of his nose.

Henri sniffed the air, and his ears perked. Before Hazel could stop the young dog, he jumped and let out a bark.

Arthur sprung to his feet, turning in Hazel’s direction.

Bananas. She squeezed her eyes shut, hoping he wouldn’t see her where she crouched.

“Peek-a-boo,” Arthur said, slow and deliberate. “I see you, Princess.”

Knees shaking, Hazel slowly stood to face him. She gripped Henri’s leash. He was her only defense.

“Where do you go, Hazel Malloy?” Gabriel said in her ear.

“What?”

“I can feel you thinking hard.” He chuckled.

Hazel smiled. “I like this song,” she said, embarrassed as though he could actually tell that he’d caught her thinking about him.

“I do too.” He pressed his cheek to hers, and she let him.

As the song ended, there was a slight disturbance from the far end of the room. Hazel glanced up, and her heart paused.

Bananas.

Stanley stood in the entrance of the conservatory, tall and suited up, a hard look on his face, one eye almost swollen shut. He was flanked by some of his Knights, looking rough and out of place in suits, smirks on their faces as they scanned the room. It was like Eliot Ness and his Untouchables about to raid.

The “good people” of St. Louis stared uneasily and made way as the boys stalked into the room. Hazel sometimes forgot what they must look like to everyone else. They were a tough looking lot, battle scarred, and imposing.

The song ended and in the pause before the next one began, Stanley took long strides across the room, toward where Hazel and Gabriel stood, still holding hands.

Stanley’s eye twitched. “Heya, Haze.” He tilted his head toward Gabriel. “If it isn't soft slugger trying to get to first base.” His jaw flexed, and he breathed in through his nose, and Hazel knew he was counting to ten.

Gabriel released Hazel’s hand and calmly replied, “Good to see you, Fields. You clean up nice.”

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Author Bio:

Jo Schaffer was born and raised in the California Bay Area in a huge, creative family. She is a YA novelist, speaker, writer at Patheos.com, works in film production and is a Taekwondo black belt.

She's a founding member of Writers Cubed and co-founder of the Teen Author Boot Camp, one of the largest conferences in the nation for youth ages 13-19. She and a crew of local and international bestselling authors present writing workshops to hundreds of attendees at the Utah-based conference as well as hundreds of others worldwide who view the conference online.

Jo loves being involved in anything that promotes literacy and family. She is passionate about community, travel, books, music, healthy eating, classic films and martial arts. Her brain is always spinning new ideas for books and sometimes she even gets around to blogging.

Jo is mom to three strapping sons and lives in the beautiful mountains of Utah.

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Movie endings are the culmination of the whole experience. In fact, it’s a sure mark of a bad movie if people don’t bother to stay until the end. Lots of movies save a surprise for the ending, a jolt that puts the entire movie into perspective. In some cases, though, it goes beyond surprise to outright confusion. You’re left slack-jawed, maybe even angry at the lack of a definitive resolution to the story you just invested 90 minutes of your hard-earned time in. You need to know, dammit, if the heroine really dies in the end, or if the whole plot was a dream and a cruel director had just left you hanging. On the flip side, some movies end with scenes so bizarre you’re not really sure what you just saw. Or what it meant. Or you’re left looking for meaning where there’s actually none, and you suspect it, but you can never be entirely sure. We’ve delved into 15 of the most confusing and dumbfounding movie endings of the last few decades and tried to find answers to that burning question: WTF did I just see?

#1 Inception (2010) At the end of Christopher Nolan’s Inception, Cobb pulls out of the dream world — maybe — and he’s reunited with his kids. We see a top spinning on the table, and the camera cuts to black just as it seems to begin to wobble. The top is Cobb’s Totem — the object that he can use to test reality vs dream world by the way it acts. So if it begins to fall to gravity naturally, that means it’s real, right? But, perhaps that assumption is already off base. Christopher Nolan said as much in a speech to the Princeton University graduation class of 2015, where he also commented that he gets more questions about Inception‘s ending than any of his other films. According to Nolan, the question shouldn’t really revolve around whether it’s a dream or reality. The point is, Cobb is with his children and is happy, and that’s the subjective reality he prefers — no matter where it lands on the objective reality scale. If Cobb doesn’t care, why should you?

#2 Birdman (2014) The Oscar-winning black comedy Birdman by director Alejandro G. Iñárritu left many viewers scratching their heads. On the surface, it’s about a down-and-out actor named Riggan Thomson, played by Michael Keaton. He’s trying to make a comeback on Broadway. Riggan was once famous for playing a superhero by the name of Birdman in a trilogy of movies 20 years ago, but he’s also shown performing superhuman feats in the real world. It’s not until later in the film that we realize none of it is real. Riggan is trying to mount a play while dealing with a daughter just out of rehab, and an influential movie critic, who, on the eve of opening night, promises to kill his production with a bad review. The performance goes well, but after a talk with his ex-wife, Riggan takes a loaded gun on stage so that the final scene suicide will happen for real. It’s a theatrical sensation, garnering great reviews. Riggan wakes up in hospital, having blown off his nose by mistake. His daughter visits him, and when he leaves the room, he climbs out on the ledge after some birds. His daughter returns, looking frantically for him out the window, but then slowly looks up to the sky and smiles. Does this mean he was Birdman after all? The writers and director have been coy but have suggested it’s really about Riggan and Sam, his daughter. Riggan has committed suicide, and Sam has begun to hallucinate the way he did. The film’s subtitle is “The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance,” and Sam simply chooses to ignore the truth.

#3 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) There have been many essays and editorials written about this film in the almost 50 years since its release in 1968. According to director Stanley Kubrick and writer Arthur C. Clarke, the film’s ending can be understood on various levels. An interview published in the book The Film Director as Superstar by Joseph Gelmis (1970) explains the various levels. The last surviving astronaut, Bowman, reaches Jupiter, where an artifact left by aliens millions of years ago zips him into another part of the galaxy. He ends up as a zoo creature for extraterrestrials inside an environment shaped by his own imagination and dreams. Then, he’s reborn as the superhuman “Starchild” ready to take humanity to the next level. As Kubrick tells it, other meanings and mythological and subconscious dimensions are determined by each viewer’s own reaction to the visuals of the story. In other words, it means whatever you want it to mean.

#4 Donnie Darko (2001) In the surreal cult fave Donnie Darko, Jake Gyllenhaal’s titular Donnie gets woken up in the middle of the night by a giant rabbit, who tells him the world is ending and saves him from a jet engine that crashes through the roof into his room. But the jet engine is actually coming from the future, 28 days ahead. The time anomaly creates a Tangent Universe, an alternate dimension where Donnie and Frank-Bunny work to save the world. In this movie, you have to understand the 28 days and the Tangent Universe as a kind of loop. If Donnie can close the loop, he saves the world from endlessly slipping through this rift in the space-time continuum. This is where it gets really complicated. To do that, he has to send the jet engine that has broken off of a plane in the Tangent Universe back to the Primary Universe through a wormhole 28 days from the opening scene, thereby actually killing himself in the Primary Universe as the Tangent Universe disappears. Got all that?

#5 Interstellar (2014) Christopher Nolan ends up on this again; he does seem to love a convoluted wrap-up to his stories. The plot of Interstellar revolves around the concept of alternate universes and realities and the idea that time can be experienced in different ways that aren’t necessarily linear, based on work by theoretical physicist Kip Thorne. Matthew McConaughey plays Cooper, a former NASA pilot who is part of a team trying to save humanity by finding us a new home. The trip involves a wormhole that lets them slip through time and space to the other side of the universe. It comes down to Cooper thinking he’s sacrificing himself in order to reduce the weight on the spaceship Endurance so his teammate Amelia can make it to the new planet. But instead of drifting through space as he expects to, he gets pulled into The Tesseract, which is the cause of the wormhole, with the help of unseen “future humans.” He ends up being able to bend time back to talk to his daughter Murph, played by Jessica Chastain, and tell her how to save humanity. He then slides back through the wormhole, presumably to reunite with Amelia and begin colonization of humanity’s new home. The only way to understand the ending is to get the concept of a wormhole and the way it manipulates time differently from one end to the other. That and a degree in astrophysics.

#6 Total Recall (1990 & 2012) The story varies slightly between the 1990 and 2012 versions of Total Recall, based on the Philip K. Dick story We Can Remember It For You Wholesale. In all versions, though, a blue-collar laborer named Quaid has strangely vivid dreams where he’s a secret agent. He goes to a company called Total Recall that can implant memories of vacations you can’t afford. Quaid decides to implant an adventure as a spy, and the story begins to go sideways as he actually gets caught up in a secretive resistance organization. Or does he? The plot twists in and around itself, eventually revealing Quaid as a double agent who is really working for Vilos Cohaagen, the evil industrialist who’s bent on world domination. Then, in another twist, he ends up a double-double agent who’s only pretending to be a double-agent. He saves the world and gets the girl. Or does he? In the final scene, there seems to be a sign that, in fact, the whole story has only been part of the fantasy implanted by the lab techs at Total Recall. But… The truth of the matter has been a popular subject of debate over the years, and Paul Verhoeven, director of the original 1990 version starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, finally spoke about it in a 2015 interview. His answer was somewhat unsatisfying — it’s both. It’s both true and not true, post-modern dudes — both dream and reality.

#7 Black Swan (2010) Natalie Portman starred as a ballerina with a problem with her mental, if not physical balance in this movie by Darren Aronofsky. If you want to grasp the end of Black Swan, it helps to understand that director Darren Aronofsky thinks of it as a kind of companion to his previous film, The Wrestler, starring Mickey Rourke. The Wrestler ends with Rourke’s Randy “The Ram” Robinson choosing to die rather than quit wrestling. As Black Swan fades to white, our heroine Nine is lying on a mattress backstage, visibly bloodied. “Perfect,” she says at the end. “I was perfect.” Yes but… there’s really no coming back from the performance that drove you literally insane. Does she die after the credits start rolling? It doesn’t really matter since she’s irreversibly broken from the experience. She’s given it her all, and it took everything she had.

#8 Drive (2011) Drive is an action thriller with an arthouse sense of style, focusing on a character known only as Driver and played by Ryan Gosling. He’s a stunt driver who takes on shady driving jobs for shady people for extra cash. When a heist goes sideways, the Driver turns violent but in the end shows a selfless streak as well as he takes a hit to let the girl and the kid (there’s naturally an innocent girl and cute, plucky kid involved) escape to safety. As the movie ends, he’s wounded in the gut but manages to drag himself back to his car and drive away into the night. The ending is left open, in what is obviously a deliberate move. Does the Driver simply keel over a few blocks later and die? Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn has compared the story to a contemporary Grimm’s fairytale, where the underdog hero saves the princess from an evil but powerful king. Refn said in an interview that in his mind, the character does live on to have more adventures.

#9 Looper (2012) At the end of Looper, the younger Joe shoots himself, and older Joe, along with the turbulent scene of impending doom, disappears… what? The ending left many viewers scratching their heads. In Looper, Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Joe, a young assassin sent back in time from the future. Criminals from the future send their hit targets back to a time when disposing bodies was much easier. The Loopers do the deed and are handsomely rewarded, but there’s a catch: one day, their future crime bosses send their future selves back, and they have to perform that hit, too. It’s called “closing the loop,” and it’s happening more and more often as a mysterious crime boss from the future, called the Rainmaker, who is said to have supernatural powers, starts eliminating the Loopers one by one. And so, one day, young Joe goes to a hit and is confronted by old Joe, played by Bruce Willis. Taken by surprise, old Joe manages to escape young Joe, determined to kill the Rainmaker as a young child, and thereby avoid the death of his wife at the hands of Rainmaker’s henchmen. Got it so far? The ending comes when young Joe realizes that old Joe’s vengeance is, in fact, the life-changing act that will send the Rainmaker on a path of criminality and revenge on Loopers, resulting in… That’s why he kills himself, eliminating old Joe, and letting the young Rainmaker live his life in peace. Whew.

#10 Montenegro (1981) Susan Anspach had the starring role in this dark erotic comedy by Serbian director Dusan Makavejev. Here, the ending is actually explained but still manages to deliver that WTF factor, along with a detail thrown in at the end that throws another wrinkle into it. Susan plays Marilyn, the bored, listless American wife of a Swedish businessman, living among his boring Swedish family in Stockholm. One day, said husband goes on a business trip, and Marilyn goes to meet him. But her trip to the airport goes awry, and she ends up in a low-end part of town full of immigrant workers from Eastern and Southern Europe. Marilyn spends a couple of days in a questionable nightclub where sex and violence is the norm, and she takes to her new normal like a duck to water. As she opens herself up to the goings on, she gets involved with a gypsy by the name of Montenegro (not subtle, Mr. Makavejev), and they have a spectacular hookup. So, you’re thinking, she finally finds herself or something along those lines. And then you’d be watching in horror as she kills him and then goes home to her uptight family and proceeds to feed them dinner, while a caption tells you the meal has been poisoned. It finishes with “The story was based on real events.” That last part, we weren’t able to confirm. Your mistake, with this movie, was assuming it was about a woman finding empowerment. Instead, it was a story about senseless violence. Or insanity. Or something.

#11 Aguirre: Wrath of God (1972) German director Werner Herzog is responsible for this meditation on the insanity of imperialism and people in general. The movie was made with a minimalist approach to plot and dialogue and a progressive/Krautrock soundtrack and quickly became an art house cult favorite. It stars German actor Klaus Kinski as one of a group of Spanish conquistadors trying to make their way down the Amazon River in an ill-conceived quest to find El Dorado, the legendary city of gold. Kinski and Herzog famously feuded throughout the whole shoot, which happened on location in Peru, terrorizing both their fellow actors and the Amazonian people they were working with. In the movie, the expedition is doomed as the nutty Spaniards try to negotiate their way through the jungle in heavy armor. They’re soon dropping like flies, their supplies running low, and then their rafts are lost when the river rises. In the end, Kinski’s lone-surviving conquistador is standing on a raft in the river, under attack by hostile natives and overrun by monkeys (yes, monkeys), and he’s mumbling about this being only the beginning of his empire. Just to add to the delirium, Okello, the slave, has suggested earlier that the Indians are an illusion. Is there some twist to the ending? Is there an illusion inside the illusion? No, not really. It ends with madness, and that’s the only message there is. Madness.

#12 Chinatown (1974) The infamous Roman Polanski directed this noir story about Jake Gittes, a private eye played by Jack Nicholson, as he unravels the horribly twisted tale of a wealthy Los Angeles clan that keeps you guessing until the end, and then stuns you with the last shot. There are so many twists, and it all unravels so quickly that you may not get it all in just one viewing. Gittes is hired by a woman calling herself Evelyn Mulwray to follow her husband around. Said husband just happens to be the chief engineer for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, and he’s found drowned in a reservoir. Soon, Gittes is involved in dirty deals that see municipal employees deliberately drying out parcels of land so they can be sold at a low price, and it turns out that Evelyn’s father is the culprit. The story gets even darker when it’s finally revealed that Evelyn was a victim of her father’s incest and that their daughter is now his new victim of choice. In the end, it turns out the cops are in on the whole thing, and they shoot Evelyn as she’s attempting to flee with her daughter. The last shot we see is of Katherine, the young girl, being driven away with grandpa. Yuck. Really? Yes, really. As one of the cops tells Gittes at the end, “Forget it Jake. It’s Chinatown.” The moral of the story is that rich, evil people can do whatever they want. You need a hot shower after you watch this one.

#13 American Psycho (2000) Christian Bale stars as a wealthy investment banking exec in NYC with a double life in this adaptation of the book of the same name by Bret Easton Ellis. Bale’s Patrick Bateman is banker by day, vicious serial killer by night. We see him murder a colleague, Paul Allen, with an ax because he’s annoyed the man has a nicer business card. He has a threesome and kills first one partner, then the other as she tries to run away horrified through an apartment full of dead bodies. One day, after a conversation with an ATM, he kills a woman in public and ends up in a police chase, slaughtering a few more people on the way. Finally, rattled, he confesses all on a long voicemail message to his lawyer. But… the next morning, Bateman ends up at Paul’s apartment, which is empty and for sale, and the Realtor tells him no one named Paul Allen ever lived there. All the decomposing bodies he’s been storing there have disappeared. Later, his secretary is horrified to discover Bateman’s notebook filled with drawings of murder and rape. Confused, he runs into his lawyer, who laughs off the phone confession and mentions that he’s just had dinner with Paul Allen in London. So was the whole thing just Bateman’s sicko fantasy world? That conclusion may be true, but it misses the true point of the ending — the absurdist way that no one believes him and that he won’t get the punishment he now wants. “This confession has meant nothing,” he laments.

#14 Barton Fink (1991) Barton Fink is a period drama by the Coen Brothers, a dark satire about Hollywood, the nature of relationships, and creativity. Fink, played by John Turturro, begins the story as a successful playwright in 1940s New York City. He’s persuaded to migrate to Hollywood to cash in on a lucrative screenwriting gig, but once he’s in the city that manufactures the world’s dreams and fantasies, he finds a seedy hotel room and abuse at the hands of various studio executives. On the peeling wallpaper of his spartan hotel room, there’s a print of a girl in a bikini on the beach — the Hollywood of the ideal. One by one, his illusions are dashed, including an admiration for fellow writer W. P. Mayhew that he learns is misplaced, and a friend and neighbor who turns out to be a homicidal maniac. After he escapes his burning building, his career equally in ruins, Fink wanders, dazed, to a beach, and there she is, the beautiful woman in a bikini of his dreams — and that picture on his wall. Does that mean the story was a dream of Fink’s? Not entirely, according to a 1991 interview with Joel Coen, who says they were trying for “a logic of the irrational.” After all, you’d be plenty freaked out after seeing your neighbor kill a couple of cops and set the building ablaze. “We wanted the film’s atmosphere to reflect the psychological state of the protagonist.”

#15 Enemy (2013) Jake Gyllenhaal plays Adam in this movie that follows the lines of a game or puzzle. Adam is a history professor who one day discovers an exact double named Anthony. Adam becomes obsessed with Anthony, and everyone mixes them up, including Adam’s wife Mary and Anthony’s pregnant wife Helen. Everyone sleeps with everyone, and near the end, Mary and Anthony end up in a car crash that we assume has killed both. We then see Adam ready to assume Anthony’s identity with Helen. The last shot follows as he enters the bedroom and finds a tarantula that fills the room but is apparently scared and shrinking against the wall. What? Now, if you were paying attention, you’d have noticed a recurring spider theme throughout the movie, one that’s linked with women. There’s the spider that an erotic performer is about to crush with her platform heel in front of Adam at a private show and the spider that seems to hover menacingly above the city skyscrapers as the two doppelgangers meet in a hotel room. The movie has a nightmarish quality about it, and it’s probably best understood as such. Adam and his double are really two sides of the same character, a man who’s trying to evade his issues with women, and, in the end, introvert Adam chooses to become the cooler extrovert Anthony.

Source: TheRichest