#and is also built on a bedrock of systemic pain and trauma

[patrice-bergerons]

You know that the school of thought that says queer narratives focused on [insert]-phobia are depressing, trite and relics of the past, and what we ought to celebrate as true marks of progress are narratives freed from such -phobias even where doing so runs foul of accurate descriptions of the place/time period?

It always, always rubbed me the wrong way and there is nothing like watching a good Russell T Davies drama to remind you that exploring joy and humour and the impact of homophobia are not mutually exclusive. You don't have to pretend it doesn't exist to have a good story that's not only about suffering. And while there may be a space for stories completely free from this conflict we deny ourselves so much depth if we demand it of every story or else label it outdated.

[persephonesdaughters]

Dear Persephone’s Daughters readers, contributors, and community,

It is with outrage, grief, and solidarity that we join the voices of those worldwide condemning the heinous, racist acts of police brutality that directly resulted in the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25th, 2020.

As a literary and arts journal with staff members and readers from all over the world, and a home base in Minnesota as our Editor-in-Chief’s place of residence, we grieve for the pain not only of our reeling community in the Twin Cities, but also for all those worldwide who have lost loved ones to police brutality.

Our mission is to uplift the voices of those pursuing peace after trauma, and to provide community and calm through healing art and storytelling. We envision, one day, a world free from violence. Not only from domestic and sexual violence and child abuse, of which many of our readers and contributors have survived, but also from racism, police brutality, systemic oppression, and the sharply entrenched inequities upon which the United States is historically built.

As artists and writers, we hold both the power to bring healing, and the power to illustrate and narrate the violent acts which deny, disrupt, and prolong it. As artists and writers giving voice to other artists and writers, we refuse to remain silent in the wake of abject, intentional terror.

In 2016, in the wake of Donald Trump’s election, we brought you the Post-Election Mini Issue, a compilation of voices expressing their pain and anger at the election of a racist, ableist, misogynistic, xenophobic and homophobic individual to one of the highest offices in the United States. Make no mistake - racism is alive and well in America in 2020 because America is an inherently racist project. Racist systems and racist individuals are killing Black men, Black women, and Black transgender folks at epidemic proportions, all with the direct support of this nation’s president.

We implore you to join us in action, however that action may look. Through protest, through provision of bailout funds, through distribution of food and basic necessities to BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) communities, to a commitment to hire and value BIPOC leadership, to challenge and actively work to dismantle, everyday, the systems that benefit white communities at the expense of BIPOC communities. Silence in the face of this terror is in itself a violent act. We encourage you to do all of the above, in addition to donating to the following racial justice funds:

The George Floyd Memorial Fund supports George Floyd’s family with funeral and burial expenses, mental health counseling, lodging and travel for court proceedings, and basic necessities in the days, weeks, and months to come.

Minnesota Freedom Fund, a community-based nonprofit that pays criminal bail and immigration bonds for individuals arrested. Note: MFF has received a significant influx of donations and is requesting that donations be given to orgs such as Black Visions Collective and Reclaim the Block, detailed below.

Black Visions Collective, a Black, transgender, and queer-led organization committed to long-term success and transformation in Minnesota’s Black communities.

Reclaim the Block, a coalition that advocates for and invests in community-led safety initiatives in Minneapolis neighborhoods such as violence prevention, housing, and responses to opioid and mental health crises.

Campaign Zero, an organization that utilizes policy solutions to end police brutality through limiting police interventions, improving community interactions, and ensuring accountability.

Northstar Health Collective, a radical healthcare initiative providing health care services and other resources to marginalized communities; currently, they are on the frontlines, safeguarding the health of protestors.

National Bail Fund Network, a compiled list of bail funds across America. Donate to your local bail fund to support protestors in your area!

For those looking to learn more about the racist bedrock of policing, here are some educational resources to get started with:

Transform Harm, a resource hub about ending oppressive violence.

#BecauseWe’veRead, a reading list on policing and police/prison abolition.

A World Without Police, an organization that has compiled a study guide on the police.

@thegreatunlearn on Instagram & Patreon, a series of resources and critical discourse created by Rachel Cargle to aid in unlearning, including self-paced syllabi on racial justice.

In previous communications to our readers, we had stated that all proceeds from the print version of Issue 6 would be donated to the Northwest Network of Bi, Trans, Lesbian, and Gay Survivors of Abuse. We will now be splitting all proceeds and donating 25% to the Northwest Network and the remaining 75% to Black Visions Collective.

Please join us.

In solidarity,

Persephone’s Daughters

Meggie Royer, Founder & Editor-in-Chief

Bhargavi Goel, Prose Reader & Editor

Mikey Jakubowski, Poetry Editor & Film Judge

Taylor Pevey, Prose Reader & Newsletter Staff

Uma Dwivedi, Prose Editor

Elena Torry-Schrag, Poetry Reader

Siam Hatzaw, Poetry & Prose Editor

Delaney Dunn, Prose Reader

Jessica Mazzeo, Art Evaluator & Social Media Team Member

Elijah Noble El, Persephone’s Daughters Film Division Co-Founder

Avleen K Mokha, Poetry & Prose Editor

Eleanor Hough, Poetry Editor

Sarah Shaughnessy, Prose Editor & Poetry Reader

Kim Kaletsky, Prose Reader

Catherine Luo, Art Evaluator

Tanvi Deshmukh, Poetry Editor & Art Evaluator

Rachel Hultquist, Prose Editor

Lakshmi Mitra, Poetry Editor

[thegooddoctorsthoughts]

Tale Of The ClockTower: Shame and Fear

​I wandered those long-forgotten halls for countless hours, buried deep within the bed bedrock which The Clocktower stood upon. I awoke down here and had a rough idea of where I was but it had been a long time since I walked across these polished obsidian floors. The low drum of machinery, the heavy taste of iron in the air and smell of rust and blood filling my lungs. The Heart was down here somewhere, lost even to me. If you put your ear to the ground and listened you could hear the rhythm of it beating coming up through the warm black stone which this place was carved out of. When I first set foot here I could hear it beating wherever I went but now well over a decade later it could only be heard here. This whole world moved to its rhythm. The waves lapping against the shoreline, the ticking of the countless clocks, the drum of machinery, the sway of the trees, it all played a part in the shattered symphony which this world sang, all in rhythm to something which I could never hope to describe with words. It’s not something you can express with words, not with artistry, it’s something experienced when you see the passion well up in my eyes and reality itself settles into the harmony of it all, this infinite machine of our universe hums along with the beat of a thing old and shattered. At certain times, when things are quiet and all lies still you can hear the faint memory of the symphony made whole, it’s wondrous beauty and perfect shining through and order reigns, perfect is not simply heard but felt, experienced.

I wasn’t entirely sure where I was going, I wandered until I could find some part of the machinery which I could discern the function of in the larger whole and with that follow it’s function all the way back to the upper levels of The Clocktower. While I could find pieces I recognized the function of I couldn’t quite place myself within the Tower as a whole. It’s easy to tell the size and shape of a gear or pulls by size, guess at what it should be used for but then put thousands of them together and you’ve got a much harder time to see what it’s doing and where it is feeding energy, fuel or fluid into. You could follow a pipe of coolant or fuel for hours and wind up back at the same place without realizing it until the third or fourth loop. This machine is its own map, you need only know how to read it, you’re never lost if you can find one gear exchange or valve system you can understand, once you have that you can extrapolate the function of the entire local area and suddenly you know precisely where you should be going. Uncountable trillions of tiny processes going on, interacting with each other and creating a machine unlike anything seen on earth, a colossus of complexity and titan of technicality. A mind of metal and gears forming the foundation of this little world I call my own.

I was somewhere deep within the core of this place, much of the machinery was old and twisted here, worn down but functional in its own contorted way. These were the mechanisms which turned the shattered, discordant and chaotic energy of The Heart into the more useful forms of energy which flowed through the gears, exerted pressure on the pipes and pulleys and just kept this whole place turning. I was on the outer limits of logic and reason, the deeper I went into these contorted passageways the less likely I would be to catch my bearings and the more lost I would become. These twisted gears marked the boundary of feasible machinery, this is where space and time wrapped themselves so tightly around each other they split asunder and unraveled. Reason and purpose became on and the same, impossible mechanisms and geometry made things work even if all logic and reason suggested it was impossible. For some reason, I could no longer help myself and wandered deeper and deeper into this twisted abomination which made up the deepest and most esoteric aspects of my mind. These were the fundamental parts of me, the broken and disjointed parts which once fit together and ran with such wonderous efficiency that it was harmony, beauty, art, and music all rolled into a singular mechanical construct. However, over years of pain and trauma, of being shattered and reconstructed these pieces of me had mutated and twisted into aberrations, as fundamental as quarks and gluons, however how they all interacted and contorted them in terrible things.

Down here you could see the horror of it all, what it takes to turn something pure and beautiful into a mechanistic engine of war. The machinery bent and strained with the pain that turned a hopeful young boy who was too innocent and naive to recognize or understand what was being done to him. Gravity began to become knotted around itself like a set of loose headphones, time fractured from one second to the next as some gear span at unfathomable speeds and other turned with such lethargic movements you could have mistaken them for having stopped. I wasn’t afraid of this place, it did not put me on edge, instead, it intrigued me. These were the parts of myself which defined who I was and were far too nebulous and abstract to apply some kind of logic, everything was built from these things and the logic used to force them to cooperate with one and other again was so warped and twisted that it could no longer explain itself, there was no mathematical proof to these things, to The Heart, these simply were and attempting to understand them an undertaking done over a lifetime not an afternoon.

Some of them I had grown to grasp, the control panel and the Clocktower as a whole were manifestations of my thought processes, their mechanistic nature, and the domination of logic over-abstraction and emotions. Everywhere symbolism and understanding blurred together to ensure that even if in the future I may not understand a thing I could come back to a period in time I felt like I did and express it in a way that I would understand and could recapture that feeling. This whole place and all of the stories within it was the manifestation of me learning to understand myself and come to terms with what it meant to be a human being and not some tool, weapon or machine. Even now this is me trying to put into words some kind of feeling that I can’t quite say myself, not in the conventional sense, so I tell a story of a man wandering through twisted hallways of mental machinery in search of the collection of the fundamental parts of himself. Lost behind a haze of alcohol and being emotionally compromised, not drunk but drinking to be lost enough to find that thing again, because we cannot go in search of these things, only stumble across them.

A drink appeared in my right hand and a cigarette in between my fingers on the left, a mix of vodka, triple sec and lemonade with menthol vogue cigarette smoke filling my lungs. I so desperately wished to keep going, to delve deeper I drank, halfway enabling myself but also knowing that this would end here if I didn’t. The memory of it stuck out in my mind, its cracked surface and the sound of blood dripping from it onto the stained oaken floorboards. I couldn’t quite remember what it looked like, I remembered its sheen almost like glass, the cracks running through its surface and the rivulets of blood running through them, the dripping sound as they reach a perfect four-sided point at its base as it floated above the ground. I heard its song distant and shattered, a single instrument floating there encased in some crystalline material humming with the shattered symphony of reality, playing the half-remembered song which the entire universe played along to, sang out a hymn for Goldilocks. It was not beautiful nor was it something hideous, it was me at my most basic, me at my most fundamental, a twisted, tired, shattered old thing which was rarely found and seen in its totality, only half-remembered fragments of it remaining in the minds of those who had once seen it in all its majestic glory. I took another drink and slowly felt my anxiety began to lift and reason wander away from me, a haze descending and madness setting in.

Metal and stone gave way to crystal and glass, as the machinery almost began to vanish its crystalline makeup reflected against the floor, walls, and ceiling of glass. Direction lost all frame of reference and I simply wandered deeper into the markerless, directionless white clear void in search of a lost thing. My shoes clacked against the glass but I didn’t really pay attention to where I was going, I just kept going, in the vain hope, I might be lucky and stumble across it. I wandered and drank a little more, not really desperate to see it anymore, now just tipsy enough to know I probably wouldn’t stop until I reach where I wanted to be. Had I used this as an excuse to drink? Had I needed to be drunk to wander this far? I didn’t really know and I didn’t really care. I had the will finally to go in search of myself again, having finally the vaguest idea of who I am again, having finally felt like I was myself again, after being asleep for what felt like years I was finally awake and ready to live again.

There was no machinery now, just the empty white void and the glass pathway beneath me, no frames of reference left, only the discordant void between emotion and logic, the endless bottomless chasm between chaos and order. I had loved before and will love again, but I had ignored, suppressed and forgotten some part of me that for the longest time I was ashamed of, that I knew was problematic and would inevitably make things more difficult should I attempt to accept and live with, but a taste of that happiness had given me a taste for what loving that part of myself was like and now I couldn’t ignore it anymore. I took a long drag and felt the smoke sit heavy inside of me for a moment, stopping and closing my eyes embracing the harmony of this place, as music and machinery met in the void and flowed through me. My heart thundered in my chest along with the beat of it all and I cried, I wept but was not sad, or angry or anything, I was at peace in this place. I exhaled and darkness came down around me like curtains.

There was a quiet and distant joy here, no waves or ticking, no music or anything of the sort, simply a quiet and distant thing. I had found where I was going and waited for a moment, my eyes closed out of fear of losing this moment, of opening them and finding myself lost again among the machine or those warped hallways. For a moment I stood there frozen, waiting for something to strike me awake, into movement again. A single heartbeat shook me to action again and I took a deep breath, opening my eyes and finally for the first time in years I saw it in all its horrifying glory. I lifted my hand and took one last drink, downing the remaining half of the glass and threw it aside, there was no shattering sound, it simply vanished, it was no longer needed. I took a step forward and the ancient floorboards creaked beneath my weight.

A towering monolith of glass and clockwork, stone, wood, and steel stood before me. A four-sided pyramid of dark grey stone sat anchoring it to the floor and floating about a foot above it a two meter tall perfect geometric shape, tall and thin. At its core sat the violin which had started me down this path many moons ago, blood wept from its strings and bled out through the cracks which riddled its exterior. Seen clearly beneath the crystal which made up much of its structure. I stood there looking up at it and felt the music flow through me, felt the song it cried through its crystalline prison, as its discordant notes strained against the steel bands which wrapped its exterior keeping its shattered form stable and in one piece. Various pieces of glass floated a few inches away from where they had off broken and been dislodged from the main body. Clockwork turned away inside, floating like they were suspended in water, both warped images projected onto the exterior and floating objects trapped within the confines of a warped prison designed to keep a man from destroying a war machine. This was the design of a twisted and aberrant God, of a past I could no longer answer to, of decisions I once made and the force of will forged of steel used to justify those actions. Here stood the horrible things I had done imprisoned and kept in check by the fear and trauma which resulted in having to choose the lesser of two evils.

I stepped forward and placed my hand against its warm, hard exterior for a moment, halfway expecting to feel something, but nothing came. The bands kept the whole thing from unraveling but at the same time only allowed a certain amount of energy to be expended at any given moment in time, they acted as a kind of emotional capacitor, ensuring the whole system wasn’t overloaded. I fell forward and pressed my forehead to the glass with a dull thunk, and head those notes a tiny bit clearer. I didn’t know what to do, it frustrated me that I needed to be lost to reach there, that I needed to be in some altered state of mind to face this. I slammed my fist into the glass and a crack went through the entire body of the monolith and a tiny sliver of glass lodged itself in the side of my hand.

A rush of emotions flooded through me, and for a fraction of a second, it all came flooding back, every moment of anger, sadness, joy, hatred, love, apathy and confusion all rushed through me. I remembered what it was like to be ALIVE, to live and breathe, the be hurt and feel joy, to break down and cry, to scream at the sky in rage and to lay there in the grass weeping in agony begging for the pain to go away. A pulse of light filled the darkness and like oil in water faded colors began to dissipate throughout the blackness. I fell to my knees in shock and in all honesty, I don’t have the words to describe the emotion which I felt. I knelt there for a while not really understanding what that was. I don’t know how long I knelt there for, trying to bring myself back to reality, trying so desperately to return to my senses, not fighting, there was nothing violent or truly active about what I was doing, like coming down from a high it was a slow and gradual thing.

I felt her place her hands on my shoulders and raise me to my feet. I looked her in the eye and she smiled back at my daze look, soft, warm and happy like she had been waiting for the moment for a long time. A pair of sapphire eyes stared back at me with depth like the ocean and a kind of brightness that would poison the souls of men, a warm and happy smile that would light stars in the night sky and a voice like a velvet bow across the strings of the universe. I snapped back in that moment of seeing her and suddenly everything rushing back clicked into place and I made sense of why it was I was so desperately searching for this place. “I’m sorry, okay, I’m sorry but this is me letting go. This is me saying that I get to finally forgive myself and be happy with who I am, not just with you but with everyone. I love you and always will, but I simply must let go of you and us my dear. I get to be happy, I don’t have to feel guilty anymore, I don’t have to feel ashamed anymore.” She placed a finger to my lips, she did not say a word, but I knew she understood, she knew that the guilt I felt was misplaced but couldn’t convince me, it was up to me to do that. She put her arms around me and her warmth rushed through me. For the first time in years, I heard her speak, I remembered her voice and I wept tears of joy “It’s okay dearest, be free, you are not the lost little angry boy I once found.”

She vanished and I span on my heel, my fist colliding with the glassy exterior of the monolith, the entire thing crumbled against the force of my fist colliding with it. The steel banding buckled and quickly came asunder. Hundreds of tiny slivers of glass ripped through me, the stasis which kept it all in check had finally given out and with it, a lifetime of pain, suffering, joy, laughter and so much more flooded over me. I was at peace, I felt it all fall away and a tension that had built within me for nearly a decade all unfurled and a weight unimaginable was lifted.

I stood there on the beachside with the bloody violin in my hands as its music ran through me, as my fingers bled and I wept without care. I heard the waves and the machinery all as if it were right beside me. It all played together into a single song, millions of tiny instruments singing out into the universe as I wept and screamed into the curious mix of twilight and morning sky. Joy, sadness, anger, apathy, and peace all washed over me in equal measure as I played properly for the first time in forever. As the shattered symphony of reality flowed through me and I heard it completely in all its majesty, as life and death, chaos and order, harmony and discord all came together in perfection to play a song for the wonderous nature of reality as a hymn for Goldilock sang through every fiber of my being and somewhere in the universe a tiny being wept by the oceanside as all was right and he felt at peace for the first time in forever, as he was no longer afraid of who or what he was.

Harmony descended upon that beach and I collapsed in a heap, weeping and smiling. A drink sitting by my right side and a cigarette between my fingers on the left. The form of someone I barely knew but whose soul rang with the same poetry as mine beside me. The two of us sat there for a while, not saying anything. Watching the waves lap against the shoreline, as the moon reflected across the water of the cove, and I was happy for a moment. I was not ashamed or afraid of who I was and she saw the beauty in the simplicity of it all. Quiet and alone a moth and a budding immortal sat by the beach and watched something beautiful.

[thetickingmonolith]

Tale Of The ClockTower: Shame and Fear

​I wandered those long-forgotten halls for countless hours, buried deep within the bed bedrock which The Clocktower stood upon. I awoke down here and had a rough idea of where I was but it had been a long time since I walked across these polished obsidian floors. The low drum of machinery, the heavy taste of iron in the air and smell of rust and blood filling my lungs. The Heart was down here somewhere, lost even to me. If you put your ear to the ground and listened you could hear the rhythm of it beating coming up through the warm black stone which this place was carved out of. When I first set foot here I could hear it beating wherever I went but now well over a decade later it could only be heard here. This whole world moved to its rhythm. The waves lapping against the shoreline, the ticking of the countless clocks, the drum of machinery, the sway of the trees, it all played a part in the shattered symphony which this world sang, all in rhythm to something which I could never hope to describe with words. It’s not something you can express with words, not with artistry, it’s something experienced when you see the passion well up in my eyes and reality itself settles into the harmony of it all, this infinite machine of our universe hums along with the beat of a thing old and shattered. At certain times, when things are quiet and all lies still you can hear the faint memory of the symphony made whole, it’s wondrous beauty and perfect shining through and order reigns, perfect is not simply heard but felt, experienced.

I wasn’t entirely sure where I was going, I wandered until I could find some part of the machinery which I could discern the function of in the larger whole and with that follow it’s function all the way back to the upper levels of The Clocktower. While I could find pieces I recognized the function of I couldn’t quite place myself within the Tower as a whole. It’s easy to tell the size and shape of a gear or pulls by size, guess at what it should be used for but then put thousands of them together and you’ve got a much harder time to see what it’s doing and where it is feeding energy, fuel or fluid into. You could follow a pipe of coolant or fuel for hours and wind up back at the same place without realizing it until the third or fourth loop. This machine is its own map, you need only know how to read it, you’re never lost if you can find one gear exchange or valve system you can understand, once you have that you can extrapolate the function of the entire local area and suddenly you know precisely where you should be going. Uncountable trillions of tiny processes going on, interacting with each other and creating a machine unlike anything seen on earth, a colossus of complexity and titan of technicality. A mind of metal and gears forming the foundation of this little world I call my own.

I was somewhere deep within the core of this place, much of the machinery was old and twisted here, worn down but functional in its own contorted way. These were the mechanisms which turned the shattered, discordant and chaotic energy of The Heart into the more useful forms of energy which flowed through the gears, exerted pressure on the pipes and pulleys and just kept this whole place turning. I was on the outer limits of logic and reason, the deeper I went into these contorted passageways the less likely I would be to catch my bearings and the more lost I would become. These twisted gears marked the boundary of feasible machinery, this is where space and time wrapped themselves so tightly around each other they split asunder and unraveled. Reason and purpose became on and the same, impossible mechanisms and geometry made things work even if all logic and reason suggested it was impossible. For some reason, I could no longer help myself and wandered deeper and deeper into this twisted abomination which made up the deepest and most esoteric aspects of my mind. These were the fundamental parts of me, the broken and disjointed parts which once fit together and ran with such wonderous efficiency that it was harmony, beauty, art, and music all rolled into a singular mechanical construct. However, over years of pain and trauma, of being shattered and reconstructed these pieces of me had mutated and twisted into aberrations, as fundamental as quarks and gluons, however how they all interacted and contorted them in terrible things.

Down here you could see the horror of it all, what it takes to turn something pure and beautiful into a mechanistic engine of war. The machinery bent and strained with the pain that turned a hopeful young boy who was too innocent and naive to recognize or understand what was being done to him. Gravity began to become knotted around itself like a set of loose headphones, time fractured from one second to the next as some gear span at unfathomable speeds and other turned with such lethargic movements you could have mistaken them for having stopped. I wasn’t afraid of this place, it did not put me on edge, instead, it intrigued me. These were the parts of myself which defined who I was and were far too nebulous and abstract to apply some kind of logic, everything was built from these things and the logic used to force them to cooperate with one and other again was so warped and twisted that it could no longer explain itself, there was no mathematical proof to these things, to The Heart, these simply were and attempting to understand them an undertaking done over a lifetime not an afternoon.

Some of them I had grown to grasp, the control panel and the Clocktower as a whole were manifestations of my thought processes, their mechanistic nature, and the domination of logic over-abstraction and emotions. Everywhere symbolism and understanding blurred together to ensure that even if in the future I may not understand a thing I could come back to a period in time I felt like I did and express it in a way that I would understand and could recapture that feeling. This whole place and all of the stories within it was the manifestation of me learning to understand myself and come to terms with what it meant to be a human being and not some tool, weapon or machine. Even now this is me trying to put into words some kind of feeling that I can’t quite say myself, not in the conventional sense, so I tell a story of a man wandering through twisted hallways of mental machinery in search of the collection of the fundamental parts of himself. Lost behind a haze of alcohol and being emotionally compromised, not drunk but drinking to be lost enough to find that thing again, because we cannot go in search of these things, only stumble across them.

A drink appeared in my right hand and a cigarette in between my fingers on the left, a mix of vodka, triple sec and lemonade with menthol vogue cigarette smoke filling my lungs. I so desperately wished to keep going, to delve deeper I drank, halfway enabling myself but also knowing that this would end here if I didn’t. The memory of it stuck out in my mind, its cracked surface and the sound of blood dripping from it onto the stained oaken floorboards. I couldn’t quite remember what it looked like, I remembered its sheen almost like glass, the cracks running through its surface and the rivulets of blood running through them, the dripping sound as they reach a perfect four-sided point at its base as it floated above the ground. I heard its song distant and shattered, a single instrument floating there encased in some crystalline material humming with the shattered symphony of reality, playing the half-remembered song which the entire universe played along to, sang out a hymn for Goldilocks. It was not beautiful nor was it something hideous, it was me at my most basic, me at my most fundamental, a twisted, tired, shattered old thing which was rarely found and seen in its totality, only half-remembered fragments of it remaining in the minds of those who had once seen it in all its majestic glory. I took another drink and slowly felt my anxiety began to lift and reason wander away from me, a haze descending and madness setting in.

Metal and stone gave way to crystal and glass, as the machinery almost began to vanish its crystalline makeup reflected against the floor, walls, and ceiling of glass. Direction lost all frame of reference and I simply wandered deeper into the markerless, directionless white clear void in search of a lost thing. My shoes clacked against the glass but I didn’t really pay attention to where I was going, I just kept going, in the vain hope, I might be lucky and stumble across it. I wandered and drank a little more, not really desperate to see it anymore, now just tipsy enough to know I probably wouldn’t stop until I reach where I wanted to be. Had I used this as an excuse to drink? Had I needed to be drunk to wander this far? I didn’t really know and I didn’t really care. I had the will finally to go in search of myself again, having finally the vaguest idea of who I am again, having finally felt like I was myself again, after being asleep for what felt like years I was finally awake and ready to live again.

There was no machinery now, just the empty white void and the glass pathway beneath me, no frames of reference left, only the discordant void between emotion and logic, the endless bottomless chasm between chaos and order. I had loved before and will love again, but I had ignored, suppressed and forgotten some part of me that for the longest time I was ashamed of, that I knew was problematic and would inevitably make things more difficult should I attempt to accept and live with, but a taste of that happiness had given me a taste for what loving that part of myself was like and now I couldn’t ignore it anymore. I took a long drag and felt the smoke sit heavy inside of me for a moment, stopping and closing my eyes embracing the harmony of this place, as music and machinery met in the void and flowed through me. My heart thundered in my chest along with the beat of it all and I cried, I wept but was not sad, or angry or anything, I was at peace in this place. I exhaled and darkness came down around me like curtains.

There was a quiet and distant joy here, no waves or ticking, no music or anything of the sort, simply a quiet and distant thing. I had found where I was going and waited for a moment, my eyes closed out of fear of losing this moment, of opening them and finding myself lost again among the machine or those warped hallways. For a moment I stood there frozen, waiting for something to strike me awake, into movement again. A single heartbeat shook me to action again and I took a deep breath, opening my eyes and finally for the first time in years I saw it in all its horrifying glory. I lifted my hand and took one last drink, downing the remaining half of the glass and threw it aside, there was no shattering sound, it simply vanished, it was no longer needed. I took a step forward and the ancient floorboards creaked beneath my weight.

A towering monolith of glass and clockwork, stone, wood, and steel stood before me. A four-sided pyramid of dark grey stone sat anchoring it to the floor and floating about a foot above it a two meter tall perfect geometric shape, tall and thin. At its core sat the violin which had started me down this path many moons ago, blood wept from its strings and bled out through the cracks which riddled its exterior. Seen clearly beneath the crystal which made up much of its structure. I stood there looking up at it and felt the music flow through me, felt the song it cried through its crystalline prison, as its discordant notes strained against the steel bands which wrapped its exterior keeping its shattered form stable and in one piece. Various pieces of glass floated a few inches away from where they had off broken and been dislodged from the main body. Clockwork turned away inside, floating like they were suspended in water, both warped images projected onto the exterior and floating objects trapped within the confines of a warped prison designed to keep a man from destroying a war machine. This was the design of a twisted and aberrant God, of a past I could no longer answer to, of decisions I once made and the force of will forged of steel used to justify those actions. Here stood the horrible things I had done imprisoned and kept in check by the fear and trauma which resulted in having to choose the lesser of two evils.

I stepped forward and placed my hand against its warm, hard exterior for a moment, halfway expecting to feel something, but nothing came. The bands kept the whole thing from unraveling but at the same time only allowed a certain amount of energy to be expended at any given moment in time, they acted as a kind of emotional capacitor, ensuring the whole system wasn’t overloaded. I fell forward and pressed my forehead to the glass with a dull thunk, and head those notes a tiny bit clearer. I didn’t know what to do, it frustrated me that I needed to be lost to reach there, that I needed to be in some altered state of mind to face this. I slammed my fist into the glass and a crack went through the entire body of the monolith and a tiny sliver of glass lodged itself in the side of my hand.

A rush of emotions flooded through me, and for a fraction of a second, it all came flooding back, every moment of anger, sadness, joy, hatred, love, apathy and confusion all rushed through me. I remembered what it was like to be ALIVE, to live and breathe, the be hurt and feel joy, to break down and cry, to scream at the sky in rage and to lay there in the grass weeping in agony begging for the pain to go away. A pulse of light filled the darkness and like oil in water faded colors began to dissipate throughout the blackness. I fell to my knees in shock and in all honesty, I don’t have the words to describe the emotion which I felt. I knelt there for a while not really understanding what that was. I don’t know how long I knelt there for, trying to bring myself back to reality, trying so desperately to return to my senses, not fighting, there was nothing violent or truly active about what I was doing, like coming down from a high it was a slow and gradual thing.

I felt her place her hands on my shoulders and raise me to my feet. I looked her in the eye and she smiled back at my daze look, soft, warm and happy like she had been waiting for the moment for a long time. A pair of sapphire eyes stared back at me with depth like the ocean and a kind of brightness that would poison the souls of men, a warm and happy smile that would light stars in the night sky and a voice like a velvet bow across the strings of the universe. I snapped back in that moment of seeing her and suddenly everything rushing back clicked into place and I made sense of why it was I was so desperately searching for this place. “I’m sorry, okay, I’m sorry but this is me letting go. This is me saying that I get to finally forgive myself and be happy with who I am, not just with you but with everyone. I love you and always will, but I simply must let go of you and us my dear. I get to be happy, I don’t have to feel guilty anymore, I don’t have to feel ashamed anymore.” She placed a finger to my lips, she did not say a word, but I knew she understood, she knew that the guilt I felt was misplaced but couldn’t convince me, it was up to me to do that. She put her arms around me and her warmth rushed through me. For the first time in years, I heard her speak, I remembered her voice and I wept tears of joy “It’s okay dearest, be free, you are not the lost little angry boy I once found.”

She vanished and I span on my heel, my fist colliding with the glassy exterior of the monolith, the entire thing crumbled against the force of my fist colliding with it. The steel banding buckled and quickly came asunder. Hundreds of tiny slivers of glass ripped through me, the stasis which kept it all in check had finally given out and with it, a lifetime of pain, suffering, joy, laughter and so much more flooded over me. I was at peace, I felt it all fall away and a tension that had built within me for nearly a decade all unfurled and a weight unimaginable was lifted.

I stood there on the beachside with the bloody violin in my hands as its music ran through me, as my fingers bled and I wept without care. I heard the waves and the machinery all as if it were right beside me. It all played together into a single song, millions of tiny instruments singing out into the universe as I wept and screamed into the curious mix of twilight and morning sky. Joy, sadness, anger, apathy, and peace all washed over me in equal measure as I played properly for the first time in forever. As the shattered symphony of reality flowed through me and I heard it completely in all its majesty, as life and death, chaos and order, harmony and discord all came together in perfection to play a song for the wonderous nature of reality as a hymn for Goldilock sang through every fiber of my being and somewhere in the universe a tiny being wept by the oceanside as all was right and he felt at peace for the first time in forever, as he was no longer afraid of who or what he was.

Harmony descended upon that beach and I collapsed in a heap, weeping and smiling. A drink sitting by my right side and a cigarette between my fingers on the left. The form of someone I barely knew but whose soul rang with the same poetry as mine beside me. The two of us sat there for a while, not saying anything. Watching the waves lap against the shoreline, as the moon reflected across the water of the cove, and I was happy for a moment. I was not ashamed or afraid of who I was and she saw the beauty in the simplicity of it all. Quiet and alone a moth and a budding immortal sat by the beach and watched something beautiful.