Fables

It is said, when you walk the line separating the land of the living and the land of the dead, it will bring you closer to both. Soldiers, in war, for example, will tell you that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life. After a hairy firefight, when the earth is calm and still and soiled with blood, the hills come alive. The trees whisper and sing along with the wind. The senses are heightened. More acute. And at the same time they are numb. Deadened. Dulled.

Junkies will tell you a similar tale. After you od... after the adrenaline shot has run it's course through your veins into your heart... after you've been yanked back away from the light... in the static calm aftermath as you're lying in your bed, you notice things you normally wouldn't. The smell of hospital food as the cart passes your room. The squeaky wheel in need of oiling. Quiet conversation. Conversation you can almost see as well as hear... like peering at a cloud of smoke billowing in under the door - or perhaps this cloud is death letting himself out.

I often ask myself why I choose to leave my thoughts here... why I continuously return to this barren field and piss on this same skeletal tree over and over again. Why I choose to live and relive and relive these emotions I, at the same time, so ardently try so hard to lock away. I don't tell stories, it is what it is. It is what actually happened. My version. My blurred reality. A love story. A tragedy. A specific series of events that now, as my memories fade and dusk approaches and ominous shadows fill in the fathomless gaps that remain where hope and optimism once dwelled, distance me from what I once was and tether me to what I have become. And what's the point?

Often a true love story has no point. Or else the point doesn't hit you until years later, in your sleep, and you wake up, turn on your computer, and write it all out. Put it all out on the line, every nuance, every minute detail, jotting it all down like a dream journal except these are broken dreams. And when you get to the end you sit for a long time staring at the blinking cursor on the white screen. You close your eyes and when you open them up again you find you've forgotten. Love is dead. And you wonder to yourself: Christ, what IS the point? No point, but what you said needed to be said so you press save, undress, and return to bed. You lay in bed and hear the breeze rustle the wind chime and cars creep by with crackling tires and the faint thump of music and you realize the moral of the story lies therein. It is buried within the silence of the night, or the white-noise hum deep underground where the dead slumber.

It is discovered... or perhaps discovers us... when we choose to walk the line that separates the two realms.