Stripped

So many yesterdays shrouded in shadow. The camera obscures the past filtering out all pain and suffering thus revealing a forlorn distant happiness that wraps around me tightly like a suffocating blanket… and it only leads to more pain ironically. It precludes yet even more suffering and more emptiness… and so it goes. Every day is a death. Every night a rebirth - only to face yet another lifetime chained to a rock near the crashing sea as vultures feast on exposed innards.

A friend of mine told me we need this hurt… that we should embrace it. Because the day we forget the past is the day we no longer mourn for those departed, dead, alive, or both… The day we stop is the day we cease to honor these whispering ghosts whom dwell between the tiny spaces between our eyelids in the dreamy, shadowy half-light.

It is the day we no longer leave flowers on silent graves.

And lately it seems as though I spend more time in dream - with my soul wandering ever deeper into the wilderness, as I sit before this screen watching the snowfall - desperately searching of you. I can hear your cries and I know you're out there, like me, scanning the skyline waiting for a sign that will probably never come. I listen and try to discern what you say, above the chaotic din of broken souls who wash about alongside us in the endless pool Mnemosyne, here where Acheron and Cocytus meet… countless dry, dead souls.

This is my hurt.

This is my paradigm... my path. This is the endless rollercoaster I ride on the diabolical Moebius fire-dragon - an endless series of great peaks and deep valleys, with no destination, nor no end, ever in sight. Just the next score.

And all I can ask… or plead… is that you please never stop searching for me.

The Beaches at Avernus

Many people believe destiny is a fixed timeline of events that is inevitable and unchangeable. Try as we might, sorrow and pain is inescapable. Some have tried, only to fail. Oedipus, MacBeth, Tess… all unable to outmaneuver fate and ultimately, resigned to tragic loss.

Resignation - salty seas and distant shores far, far away from here. Black waves, like a million fingers, claw white sand and there they lie devoid of all hope, life, and meaning: stinking masses of rotting flesh. Once a king, now… nothing.

And I sit upon a broken throne and upon my brow a broken crown and in my heart so many broken vows.

"Why did the whales beach? Did they do it for your benefit? Did you call them?"

Feint echoes of you resonate through the hollow caverns of my soul. They scatter and dissipate like golden-brown leaves heralding the onset of winter. Laughter now a distant memory, a myth told around a dwindling fire that may or may not have actually happened a long, long time ago in a more innocent time.

I miss you. I need you. I am dead here without you. Like your whales, I have given up. I have resigned to my fate… every time the needle punctures a vein, I hover ever closer to those distant shores. The dying songs of my brethren, like Ulysses' sirens, fill my ears and blind my thoughts.

There is only one promise left, and I remain steadfast to my word as a mariner guided by the stars: when I die I will wait here for you alone in darkness. It is here I grieve.