Creative Cloud

Storms and Bees

                I was born in the Texas Flatlands, near the bay of Matagorda during a power outage on the day of March 16^th, 1993, to a loving father, a sweating and screaming mother, and a storm.  They, out of jest, or remembrance perhaps, named me Mark after the storm which had nearly been the death of me. The hurricane had come out of nowhere, just like my birth; it had been expected to hit in a few days time and my parents were just putting the finishing touches on storm-proofing their house. I was born in a room with no light that lay just to the outside of the living room; the windows were nailed up and the stench of the rain couldn’t seep through. The hospital was miles away and driving in such a storm would have been the most reckless move my parents would have made. Had they done that I may not have been born; they may have died, flipped on the side of the road and killed the three of us. Had that happened I would have never been named Mark, and all traces of me would have been washed away by torrential flooding and heavy winds. In some ways I am grateful for the events that befell me.

                I was called “Slow-learner” by all of those who knew me. I was interested only in the mechanisms of the world, even at an early age I would stand within a field of Daisies and postulate on how they could mean the difference between life and death. The swarm of the honey-bees made little buzzing noises in the background of my life and It became evident to me and all those who knew me that I was an eternal bee stuck in the hive-mind of the yellow-and-black striped things. To some I was the producer of sweet nectar that filled their tongues and sat upon their toast in a thickening mess of golden brown. To others I was the key, the pollinating figure that meant the difference between life and death.

                When I was fourteen the field of flowers that I had loved so much was bulldozed and replaced by a mini-mart that had the slogan of “In and out if five minutes flat”. A young man with a red baseball capped worked there on Thursdays and Fridays from Five A.M to Five P.M and got a one hour and thirty minute break around lunch time—depending on how busy the store was. A year or so after they opened they partnered with a gas company and sported a row of new gasoline machines that proudly brought them a new frenzy of costumers in SUVS , Trucks, and the occasional sports car. On those days the young man in the red baseball cap would peer out of the window so that he could see who was driving the sports car; when they came into the store he was extra nice to them, he would ask them how their day was, and tell them to have a nice one as they left. They were frequently cross with him, they said little to nothing and often yelled at him for not getting things done fast enough. He still smiled and offered them a sincere apology. I never understood that.

                I tried to find another field of flowers but I soon found that all the Flatlands that I had grown to love were being replaced with slabs of concrete or dirt. I knew of only one place that still had an abundance of flat land: the place where I was born. My parents had sold the place early on though, when they were struggling for money, to a wealthy patron who valued his isolation. I traveled there only once—in my early twenties—and found all the flatlands had been bulldozed and replaced with little white and red signs that read “for sale.” My place of birth had gone up to the highest bidder, and I resigned myself to not caring, turning to my car, and roaming back home to my urban lifestyle.

                                                          ***

                My honeybee self made many mistakes but had few regrets, save one wild night when I had returned home for the Christmas season. I had come in from my college home in the hill-country to the outskirts of Houston, to my great family home that was a two-story brick thing with rooms like castle spires. It was a cold December, the first in a long stretch of cold Decembers that would string together the Texas landscape in a barrage of winter wear and frozen faces. My honeybee self had found its way to a foreign hive, buzzing around a one-story house near the middle of my population-nine-thousand-town, a few miles south of the prison high school. I had come with the aching desire for redemption and renewal and had promised myself that if any such places like fields of flowers still existed I would attempt to find them and live the remainder of my life there. The town had become vacant of such fields and I had figured I might as well celebrate the demise of such a place and flock, like my bee counterparts, from the confines of a flower-less town.

                He had shown up in usual demeanor and after a few drinks I felt the inspired action of striking up a conversation with someone of his status who was sure to be the death of such a fragile creature such as myself. I told him of my fascination for fields and he returned the favor by agreeing. We rode out in his truck to a desolate baseball field that he called his “home away from home” and he proceeded to stand in the middle of the field, his arms outstretched in a drunken God-like glory and profess his dying wish to be buried here, within the light of his life—the prime of his heritage—the glory that he had once held so privileged and close to his chest like a valuable jewel. We had sex on the field, despite the fact that I found him pathetic. I made no notion of a continued connection but he demanded that I answer him. He demanded that I tell him where I was going, what I was doing; he demanded that I stay with him and that we could be, as he put it, “happy amongst the fields.” I thought it was a sad existence to live in such a state; to mix fields of flowers with the artificially grown grass of the baseball field. His pale naked body against the backdrop of the night seemed sagging and pointless; his blond hair was sweaty against his forehead, and his cheeks were rosy red against the cold. He begged me in such a pathetic way that I couldn’t help but agree, and so I followed him back to his house and waited till he fell asleep next to me, then got up and crept out  the door to my car and then back home.

                I lingered only for a little while longer in that flowerless town; he called me a total of thirteen times while I was still in town, left a voicemail three times, and barraged me with too many texts to count. He considered it strange that I would leave him in such a fashion; he figured me (or I’m sure he did) as some sort of creature that was bound to mechanisms of uniformity and sociability. He thought I was a nester, some form of mother bird who roosted and left the nest only sporadically; found life-long homes and relationships within the confines of those around them—those who too had lived in the upper portions of Houston; their home. He had no clue that my presence was marked by that of danger: that my honey-bee self doubled as the means of ultimate destruction: the duality of an individual set to be both the bringer of life and death—that from the get go I was marked as the presence of ill fortune: the eternal storm, and that my self-imposed animal identity had only doubled down on that claim. I found it odd too; how many nights had I too imagined frolicking naked with someone of his caliber. How many times had I tricked myself in adolescent-temper into visions of locker rooms or isolated bedrooms where boys in uniform would strip themselves down and become the very essence of sensuality that had been portrayed to me, postulated by the pornographic poster-boys of my generation? How could I deny such a longing, such a naturalistic desire as skin against skin, lip against lip? How could those things be mocked, taken for granted—left alone in the twilight of the evening when they were just beginning to bud?

                I was the slow-learner, that much was true. It had taken me years to reach the conclusion, the final sense that I had longed for in my youthful stupor; the sense that I had fought over; the fields of flowers and the Texas flatlands that had become my legacy. All of these things cried out to me in various forms in that town. All of them were mismatched and well-meaning. They were like specters that haunted me; ghost towns that existed in my frame of mind; towns that had been destroyed by storms or swarms of bees leaving the hive and venturing off to find more precious flowers. And that is what I was: the hive-mind, eternally searching for  a place to pollinate; connecting the world in an endless orgy of sexual reproduction and metaphysical manifestation that lingered over the hill-countries and the flatlands of this great land. My various homes had been sold, my various lives calculated and offered up to the highest bidder;  the sexualized versions of myself propped up against the pornographic postulations of baseball boys with loves for fields—stalled in the center of time and space—the once great place that they had stood and decided they belonged; the place where they had found true happiness, juxtaposed next to the individual that could bring them none.

                From the moment I was born I was the bringer of bad news, born a storm, a slow-learning nothing, forced to wander across the Texas landscape and wreak havoc upon the unsuspecting baby-blues that had found themselves within my path. I had fancied myself a bee, the bringer of life and good fortune, but I had come to the realization of what I was. I was the storm, the continual storm, and nothing would ever change that.

Rebirth in Three Parts:

I.

                Following the dispersal of the sun, I took out on that single stretch of road that joined itself near the end and forked off towards the beach front. There I saw birds flocking to their trees and humans packing up their beach gear and entering into their massive RV’s to sleep the night away. A few of them had set up a bonfire near the lip of the sea and were sitting around it in lawn chairs, laughing and telling stories about their youth. They were old but in the light of the fire their faces looked young and smooth; there was no way for me to tell the generation gap that was before me. I resigned myself to sitting near the edge of the water and looking out in introspection. I had always wanted to swim at night, but with the concept so close to me it seemed a frightening task. What if I were to get lost? What if I were to be swallowed whole by the mess of black that stretched on for miles? What if I were to never see the warm amber of a fire ever again? I pushed these thoughts away and stripped out of my clothes, folded them neatly on the beach and then dove into the water. It was cool against my skin; I fell into the darkness and was surrounded. One of the men around the fire swore he heard something, but a woman just laughed and told him it was nothing more than the crack of the fire.

II.

                The weeds that push up through the cemetery mean nothing to the dead. Their consciousnesses have long since left this world. They exist in another spectrum—or perhaps in another sense. The collective energy that comprised their body continually recycles throughout the Earth. It was and ever more shall be. It makes up food and people, and trees, and animals. It creates elements and fuses bonds together. It helps and heals and hurts and on the rare occasion infuses the self with a means of understanding. The weeds still push up, they are fueled by the energy laying dormant in the ground: the collection of bone and muscle tissue that dissolves and seeps into the ground. The dead do not care, they cannot feel their rotting flesh, they cannot feel their tattered hearts. They know nothing, they are incapable of knowing. To them the weeds are one thing only: a reminder of their continual presence upon the world of the living. The weeds that push up through the cemetery mean nothing to the dead, and yet, they mean everything.

III.

                At four-forty-seven he kissed me for the very first time. He was shy about it and his face was bright cherry red. He leaned in and then backed away; he wasn’t sure if it was appropriate, he wasn’t sure if I would allow it. He kissed me and then his eyes lit up, he wanted to go back for more but he was afraid. He wanted to seal the kiss with another and another. He wanted to spend hours locked in the embrace of lips, the image of red stacked upon red, eyes closed, worlds interlocked. He didn’t. He retreated and shuffled his feet against the ground. He opened his mouth to apologize. The word’s I’m sorry barely left his lips and then I kissed him again. He wasn’t sorry. No human ever is sorry for something like that. We don’t kiss people out of sorrow—not on the lips at least—we kiss them out of joy, out of want and desire. He wasn’t sorry for that desire, he was sorry for what he believed to be my inability to reciprocate it. At four-forty-seven he kissed me for the last time, never knowing how ironic it truly was.  He lingered on for a while and then disappeared into the air. I could see him move away, but somehow he wasn’t there, as if he were a ghost among the living. For the first time in a while the embrace had died, red no longer lived upon red and I could breathe once more.

Que Sera, Sera

“It takes more than strength,” She said while unwrapping another cupcake and biting into the center, trying hard not to let the crumbs fall on her new sundress. “It takes perseverance—which I guess some call strength—talent, smarts, and a whole heck of a lot of luck to get anywhere in life.”

He couldn’t disagree with her on that, he knew the pains of trying and failing himself, hell who didn’t in these times? It seemed like hundreds of people were all lined up for jobs and not a single one of them was guaranteed a position. He found it odd to tell the truth, it was almost as if he had been transported to a whole different universe in which the things he had been told—the laws by which he lived—no longer applied. How many times had he sat through a boring lecture about the principles of following your dreams, about having passion for whatever you do, or about wanting to change the world? How many times had he been told that if you do what you love the money would come, or if you tried your hardest you could make it through? Now all he had was an overflowing amount of debt, a noisy cold-water-only apartment, a somehow worthless college degree, and an army of people breathing down his necks swearing it was his fault to begin with.

But it wasn’t—at least that’s what he figured—he had followed all the steps: he had gotten great grades in high school, participated in all of the after school programs he could, got into a great college, majored in management, taken on numerous internships throughout his college career, worked a job, and ended the whole damn thing with a 3.8 GPA. His parents were proud, he was proud, his roommates were proud, the only person that seemed to not be proud were the employers that looked up and down his frame and the swarms of people that scattered around him prodding him with questions as he worked a dead-end job as a sales associate for your run-of-the-mill retail store. 

Hannah didn’t have it much easier either; she was a fantastic baker and an insanely intelligent individual. She had a knack for numbers and figures, and she could run everything just as smooth functioning as possible. She was a people person, a real charmer, someone that you just loved to be around, but after about the fourth month of work she started to realize that you couldn’t support yourself off of just icing cupcakes and pastries, that no one considered that a “real job” either, and that there wasn’t exactly a high demand for bakers in the current economic climate.

Hannah had wondered, like he did, what exactly a “real job” was anyway. She had heard that her whole life, they both had: people always would tell them about the real world and the real this and they’d always just sit back and nod their heads—grateful for all the advice and wisdom they’d been given. Now she didn’t know what any of it meant; when she followed the steps they led her to failure, she couldn’t imagine what would have happened to those who didn’t follow the steps. What would befall those that didn’t fit in? That couldn’t fit into the current system as well as she did? Would they simply vanish, would they ever become anything? Would they be thirty-five before they even got to start their life, was that even a possibility for them anymore?

They had friend Ben who liked to talk about this sort of thing. He wasn’t one of those traditionalist either; he didn’t fit into the mechanisms of the world the way that Hannah and he did, he was much more out on the fringe of society. That’s where he thrived, that’s where he survived really. He was brilliant—or so they thought—he was able to talk about anything, to make all sorts of connections where others couldn’t find them; he would talk for hours and hours about politics and government,art and music, books and writing; that’s what he always loved to do. He had taken an English major with a minor in sociology, and halfway through his sophomore year at college he realized that he had enough credit hours from high school that all he would have to do to double major would be to take a few summer classes and he’d be on his way. So he double majored in English and Anthropology—his focus being on cultural anthropology—and ended up graduating with a 3.6 GPA. 

Despite all his success he always used to ramble on about the way that society had built us up. He would talk about the Baby Boomers, and talk about how selfish they were, “The thing is,” he’d say “the Baby Boomers created this society, they created the legislation to help themselves, to insure themselves benefits and retirement plans; they created the college systems, the education systems, the loan-payment systems all to benefit them. But when the time came to benefit their children, they said ‘fuck them, they’re just a bunch of selfish brats who don’t know the value of hard work.’ and left us all to starve. They got fucking big-headed, they sat there and thought they created the whole world and so they deserved it, and now what are we left with: a series of never ending wars, poverty through the roof, and the only thing we’ve got to look forward to is economic ruin by the time we’re twenty-five all while they just sit around and wait for death to erase their mark on the Earth. It’s a fucking sham, a giant fucking sham.”

Before he had tossed it all off as just gibberish and angry rants but with every failed application, with every new week of wondering how he’d pay his rent, with every snicker or article written about how today’s generation was selfish and unwilling to work, he felt the burning core of resentment building up inside of him. Why should he have to suffer? Why should he be belittled? He worked hard, he studied hard. He spent every day studying, cramming, reading, writing, working. He spent hours going over notes, researching, understanding. Hell there were some days he didn’t even get to sleep till the morning time! He knew more facts, understood more figures, political events, artistic expressions, and cultural practices than his parents ever could have dreamed of knowing. Sure he didn’t have the work experience, but that much was a given, that’s something you’ve got to get based upon work and if he couldn’t even work then how were they expecting him to get any damn experience? It’s not like he wanted anything easy, it’s not like he expected anything to be handed to him. No, no one did. He wanted what everyone else wanted, what is parents had wanted and their parents had wanted, he wanted to live in some suburban house with someone that he loved, work a job he off and on hated to help pay for his children which he loved, he wanted to cut the grass on Sundays and lounge around on Saturdays. He wanted to go on vacations and take cute little photos of his daughter or son in Mickey Mouse ears, he wanted to be stressed and tired and angry, and just, just live. He didn’t expect anything different, he didn’t expect anything special, he just wanted to be happy. Was that so wrong?

Hannah let out a sigh and then wiped the chocolate from the corners of her mouth, “Oh well,” she said ” Que Sera, Sera, right?” and he looked over at her and nodded his head “Yeah,” he said “Que Sera, Sera.” 

“I can’t don’t you see: I just can’t.” Tears were flowing down his red hot cheeks and to the ground below him. The dry oceans of his face filling up with water and then overflowing, drying out, filling up, and overflowing again. The cycle repeated itself as red splotches found their way across his forehead and his lips began to convulse. His knees were shaking and his chest felt heavy; he was disappearing, he was sure of it, he was falling into the great expansion of nothingness that was always in front of him; the vastness of the future that seemed so ill-defined to him. It was pulling him now, the wretched dark hands of the future dragging their way across his naked body; tearing red-marks and cuts into his pale skin. His throat was dry and horse, his body was bruised and bleeding, his heart was on fire and kept thumping loud against his chest. “I can’t but I want to—I want to live!” He screamed to the world around him and he felt so ashamed. So ashamed that he would let those words slip from his mouth—that he’d have to—that he’d ever have to utter to himself about his desire to live, that he’d have to make his mind up about something so simple. Wasn’t it what everyone wanted? Wasn’t it what was just natural: to want to live? Wasn’t that the need that above all other things was a staple of society? And if so, how then could he, so young and unhurt, how could he ever have thought any differently? 

He wanted to live. That’s what he had said, but he had no idea what it meant. Was living as simple as living? Was there a way to live right? Could you wake up one morning half-way through your life and realize you haven’t lived a minute of it? Or was living not your responsibility—is that what he meant? Was living something that should be thrust upon you? Was there someone out there who should walk up to you and demand that you live; look you straight in the eye and help you through it—through all the dark patches and weeds and thorns that pricked you and forced you to bleed. Through the dark nights and the light mornings, through the swamps and thickets were alligators waited. Through the fantasy lands where the fairies lived. Through the mountains; the rivers; the seas; the cities; the towns; the houses; the beaches. Wasn’t there something more to living than to just living? Wasn’t there something else out there that superseded that? Wasn’t there some form of life—some form of being that found its way past the mechanical nature of breathing and planted itself in the very soul of the person?

Who was that, he thought, who was it, or what was it that could make him feel so alive; that could make him feel as if for the first time he was living—that he was truly alive. “I want to live!” He screamed and the tears were still streaming down his face and falling to the ground, the words were still echoing in the vast expansion of land before him—still vibrating further and further into the all knowing nothingness. “Please just let me live, just let me live.” And the nature of things was relentless; his mind would not pause and his body gave way to the torrential flood of chaos that made its way out of his darkened soul and into the nothingness around him, leaving him, for the time being, absolutely alone.

Utter Despair | Fragment

“I think there’s this feeling then,” he said “this displacement of sorts that stops you from remembering what’s real and what isn’t. It’s this feeling that sort of wraps around you, that swallows you or chokes you till you can’t breathe right. It’s this feeling that no matter where you go and life, no matter who you go with, you’ll never understand what’s really there. As if the whole of reality is far too above your understanding, as if you’re too insignificant, ill-wanted, or undesirable for the world at large. It’s this feeling of weightlessness though—like you’re whole life is spiraling out of your control and there’s no way to really stop it. That you’ve just got to let it go. And…I don’t want to let it go…I just want it to notice me. I just want to be significant.” 

She looked into his eyes and couldn’t see the boy she used to know; the late-night talks with the one she thought was so brave and strong—the one she could always count on—those were gone. They’ve been replaced by something else, something awful and horrible, something that man-kind makes, that’s embedded into the heads of all of those around us. Something that kills men, something that cripples the strong and forces them to weakness. It was something she couldn’t put her finger on, some sort of super-strength that day in and day out he was forced to deal with. Something that had eroded his brain, had pushed at his mental condition till there was nothing left. She wanted to help—but she couldn’t. No one like her could; it would take someone stronger than she was to fix someone like him, and the strongest person she knew was standing in front of her—weak. “It’s utter despair”, she thought, “absolute utter despair”. 

Samuel the Keeper of Cards (The King of Hearts Dies)

I

                Samuel was a mystic nomad by nature—his choice of words, not mine. If I were to describe him It’d be something more spectacular, something separated from words—something that transcended the bare basic bones of the human condition.

                I first met him outside of the humanities building, sitting peacefully against a tree and shuffling a half-empty deck of blue-backed playing cards in his hands. Long white earbuds hung down from his ears and draped down his bright red shirt that was dotted with little pinkish floral patterns and rolled up in a lazy fashion to his elbows. His shoes were kicked off and his legs stretched out against the grass; I sat next to him—a tree or two over—pulled out a book and started to read, penning the occasional note in the margins and enjoying the first-few-fresh-springs before the Texas heat overtook this expansion of land and made it unbearable to sit and do anything but stew in your own filth.

                He took out his earbuds and made his way over to me; I tried to ignore his approach, assuming that it was just some fabricated fiction that my mind had conjured up in an anxious heat. He sat down right next to me, crossed his legs and shuffled the deck. “Pick one” he said, and I looked baffled but drew a card anyway. “So what’d you get?” he asked and I flipped the card around to show him; a small smile creased over his sun-spotted face, “King of Hearts” he said, “Lucky you.”

II

                Samuel told me once how there was some mystical place that we couldn’t reach, some place the ancient Aztecs or maybe their Mexican ancestors would call the Inframundo. He said this place was the space between worlds, the area of the dead—the underworld. He told me how across cultures there was always some form of Inframundo. How the Irish…or was it Scottish? How one of them had this legend that there were doorways to the land of the dead hidden and scattered throughout the globe; tiny little holes in the center of hills or on the ground that, once entered, would take you to the underworld, to the great beyond; the Inframundo. He told me how he’d always been searching for those, since the first day he was born he came out of his mother searching for the Inframundo, for the land between lands.

                “That’s where I’d be at home.” He always said, “That’s where I’d prosper.”

                He said he could predict a person’s fate by the card they drew but he always concluded that it was a dependent sort of thing. He said that once a card was drawn it couldn’t be placed back in the deck, that from the very first moment he drew his card his fate would be intertwined with all of those who were to draw from his deck. 52 people, that’s what he always said. There are 52 people that our lives are interlocked with, even if we don’t know it, “52 souls—“ he said, “—wandering around the world that don’t yet understand how they’re connected.”

                He wore his card as a badge of honor, right on his shirt, sometimes in his wallet—he always kept it close by. He advised me to do the same. He had pulled the Ace of Diamonds when he drew. He always asserted that the Ace of Diamonds was someone mystical; someone that could understand and see through the ways of the world. “The Ace of Diamonds—“ He’d say, “—they’re the ones with the best chance of getting to Inframundo, they’re the ones that are able to cross over. They’re the saviors of this world.”

                When I asked him what mine meant, he laughed. Two months ago I had drawn the King of Hearts and since that day he hasn’t spoken another word about it aside from his advice “to always keep it on you.” So now that we were both lounging out in the sun together, on the bank of this river, I kept pressuring him to tell me what it means. He told me that it didn’t work that way, that you had to figure out what your card meant for yourself but that he could give me his best guess.

                “The King of Hearts” he began, “Do you have the card on you.” and I smiled, of course I did, I thought; I would never leave the card, I’d always keep it with me. “He’s a tricky one. Some people get caught up with the whole King thing, they think that because they’ve pulled the king they’re the best: the King of Spades, the King of Diamonds; they both believe they’re near God-like. Both the people that pulled those cards were high-powered people: one a bouncing muscular frat boy and the other a high-end-lawyer I ran into on the street—“   

                “Did they keep their cards.” I interrupted and he smiled, “I’ve yet to meet someone who has thrown theirs away.”

                “—the problem is.” He continued “as I see it The King of Hearts is a man of good-temper, a well meaning individual with passion in his heart.” He felt the card between his thumb and forefinger, closed his eyes as if he was searching for something, and then continued on. “The King of Hearts is the true king.” He said and I begged him to continue, “The King of Hearts is the king that should rule, the one with compassion, the one with care, the one who can see the truth, but…”his voice became tight and strict, he seemed somber.

                “but…what?!” I asked, “What’s wrong.” He looked down in horror at the card, and then back up to me. I could see tears forming in his eyes, “what…what’s the problem?” I asked and he cleared his throat in a ghost like wake he replied, “…but” he continued, “The King of Hearts kills himself.”

III

                Samuel left a week after his encounter with me by the river. He had told me before where he was going; he called me on the phone to let me know where it was he was going—to assure me that he’d be back—that he wouldn’t leave me but he had to go do something, that he had to chase a lead.

                He had talked about it before, the one portal to the inbetween he knew of: Rouen Cathedral. He had got it in his mind ever since his Survey of Modern Art class that Rouen Cathedral held the key to the area of the inbetween. He had told me how he thought Monet must have understood that too, how his series of paintings depicted the brief moments where the worlds overlapped—the times when the world of the inbetween was available. He told me the Cathedral was calling to him—that he had to visit it, no questions asked.

                So he took off and I think he expected to find something beautiful. I think he expected to walk into the cathedral courtyard and witness it changing before his eyes. I have this image of Samuel sitting there, shuffling the last bits of that blue-backed-deck in his hands while gazing at the sun as it bounced off of Rouen. I think he thought he’d see something different—something Monet missed—or maybe something Monet saw; that he’d be connected to him from across the spectrum of time. I think he expected the Cathedral to change colors, I think he wished it would. I know he did.

                When he returned home he wasn’t the same. He was more depressed; his deck of cards only had three left in it. He would spend hours upon hours shuffling the three cards in his hands, trying his hardest not to look at which ones were left. “He didn’t want to contaminate fate.” He told me once before, he could never see the cards before they were pulled. “That way,” He’d say, “it’s always random, it’s always fate.”

                I tried to talk to him about what had happened in Rouen but he didn’t budge. I figured he’d never found the area of the inbetween; that he’d never crossed over into the land of the underworld. That he’d failed. I knew it—I knew from the moment I met him that there was no such thing as magic, as mysticism, or as fate. I wanted to believe. I wanted to believe that the boy sitting next to me held the key to the universe, that the great Ace of Diamonds could break apart the world and enter into the next one. I wanted to believe there was something left to believe in, but now, seeing him like this: a withered boyish-man wearing flashy clothing and hanging on to ritualistic playing cards, it almost seemed…pathetic.

                I met with him one last time before we parted ways. I was off to another state to teach for a little while at a local college—a guest lecturer as it stood. They were trying this new program where they got a bunch of individuals to teach creative writing; they called it “a creative writing sampler” and they included famous as well as soon-to-be-famous names in the literary world. Samuel always saw that in me, from the first moment we met he called me “the soon to be famous.” Or “the rising star”. He said he always saw potential in me—that it’s the reason I drew the King of Hearts in the first place: that I was the only one who could have, that I was the only one could take on the responsibility.

                Samuel told me about the first time we met. He told me how he saw me sit down by the tree next to him and how beautiful he thought I was. He told me something else; how he tried to find a way to talk to me, something to start a conversation. He told me how he made it up, all of it: the cards, the inframundo, everything. How it was just a ruse to get close to me—how it worked. He wasn’t crying as he said this, he was just stern, ghost-like; in a trance. He said it all monochromatically and then he sat in silence for a long time afterwards—both of us did.

                “Tell me one thing.” I asked       
                “What?”
                “What did you see; what did you leave out?”
                “When?” He asked
                “When you were telling me about the King of Hearts, about him killing himself—there was something else wasn’t there?” he stirred around for a while before answering; his mouth opened several times as if he was going to say something, but then froze again.
                “The King of Hearts—“ he finally said,
                “He doesn’t kill himself…he’s…he’s…”
                “Just say it!”
                “He’s killed.”

                Samuel broke down into tears and I got up and walked away. I pulled the card from my wallet and stared at it for a while—Samuel crying in the background. I felt the image between my fingers, flipped it around in my hands. The card was now worn—the corners curling up, the back smudged with brown and black; the image on the front—the king—smudged and insecure. It was just a card, I thought; it’s always just been a card. I dropped the card and Samuel watched from behind me as I walked away, never turning back, and my card—The almighty King of Hearts—floats to the ground and is lost in the endless façade of faces floating around the city of the living.

Inaudible.

This crumbled and cornered apartment building gives rise to noise of machine and man; the dishwasher roaring over the sounds of college-kids dashing above—two presumably lovely women who seem to get into bitter fights with each other live above me. Across the way from my opened door apartment 3211 is housed; recently occupied, it remained vacant for months at a time as its previous occupants were ushered out of the establishment for violating the rules of no-liquor on school property.

                The police had come banging on their door—RA in hand—explaining to them that they were only knocking as a privilege, that they had every right to enter the room at any time they wanted. According to my roommate, whose room is directly adjacent to the theirs, they fumbled in a rush to pour their liquor down the sink; a real waste of a fine drink if you ask me. Then again, I don’t drink. They had the most unusual habit of knocking on the door and making cawing sounds to denote their presence. Me—in my glorious conspirator mindset—always assumed it was in reference to some sort of drug deal or illicit activity. I figured that they would make the caw and a friend would poke his blue eye through the peep hole, look the people over, and then invite them in to buy any number of things. I think it’s something I picked up from watching one too many TV shows—where everyone has a secret and hidden agenda, everyone’s got something to hide.

                I met my new neighbors only once as I was leaving my apartment to throw away my trash, talking to my brother on the phone. They were just moving in, door wide open filing different trinkets and what-have-yous into the apartment across from me. My RA was helping them and being my luck I ran into him and was forced to give the pleasant sort of upper nod that in male culture denotes a sense of approval.

                My RA of course seems a super-sort of man. A heavy natured individual, he knocks in patterns on doors and is consistently  inviting people to participate in any number of apartment-sponsored activities designed to engage the college populace in new and exciting ways of co-mingling. I, of course, don’t follow through;  a self-prescribed introvert I’ve become keen on assuring the world that I don’t need any form of social interaction to make my life more complete. It’s become a crucial mechanism of my reality to sit inside and watch movie after movie, read book after book, and type story after story, all in the hopes of garnishing some form of interaction with the outside world—interaction that could easily be stimulated by participating in these sort of group activities that the rest of the world seems keen on.

                In such I am nothing of an extrovert. I find myself geared towards the shadowed and hallowed places in the world as if there was some sort of sacred magic to solitude. I am perpetually at arms with myself over the socialized concepts of partying and drinking ever since that faithful day that I was forced to attend my high-school prom and neared a nervous breakdown on the floor as some red-neck dressed in all white felt it necessary for him and his girlfriend to invade my personalized space. It was at that moment that I was aware of my unfolding loneliness; as couples paired up and danced to the seeming industrialized beating of popular culture, I stood on the literal fringe looking inwards at the massive clump of sociality, trying to uncover the secrets that it held.

                I pondered for sometime after that what made me different than those individuals, was it a general lack of substance or desire? Or was it something uniquely of my own making that had become the means of my destruction. I still struggle with that of course, the introvert inside of me wanting to scream that it’s societies fault; the literal social-conflict theorist in me that screams of the massive inequality that’s extended between those introverted and extroverted. But the symbolic-interaction theorist in me still denotes that what I choose to do, is belittle myself under the guise of others; the looking-glass-me becoming a twisted and demented form of ancestral goo piled up to create the great mess that which is called me.

                These  feelings aren’t things you can push away; they exist within the fabric of the noise surrounding you, part of the dishwashers’ hum and the noisy neighbors’ fights. These things are the crucial aspects of time and space that bend and twist around each other creating the safety net of anxiety that holds the human race afloat. They’re our life-jackets, the final factor that pushes into our mind and tells us what we are and aren’t. That compares us to the bubbly and energetic RA and denotes those things as normalized and worthy of attention.

                Still my mind goes over the lives of others with a fine tooth comb. It peers into the seeming-absolute-relationships my friends and family engage in. It looks into the other experiences of my now college-bound friends and sees a different approach; a near idealistic, free spirited sort of roaming that I believe should be called freedom—perhaps by a different standard. It sees the attachments they make and the relationships they hold and factors them into an endless form and function of my own reality; considers those things to be holy and worth pursuing, but near impossible—trap-like in design.  It wraps around the image of other men I’ve met—gay men, who seem almost unbearably happy by design. Stoic and strong individuals who break and rip through the seams of life and with their tattered hands suck the very marrow of what it means to exist. It makes me wonder if I’m doing that too; if I’m seen similarly by these people as some sort of heroic gladiator stomping upon the axis of established truth and applying my own definition. It makes me wonder if any see me as the strong-willed individual who they wish to be—to emulate and become—to learn from and observe with a keen eye the akin feelings and euphoric understandings that seem to burst from my every pore. It makes me wonder if that form of self-confidence is radiated off of me or I sit alone and aloof a testament to the failings of man-kind; the inner demons that control and morph a man into something as lamed as I: the never paired patron of empty promises.

                Those thoughts swoop around me and enter into my lungs, they fill me with air and enrich my blood with oxygen, perpetuating my life-force to the next moment and the next moment in which I might engage in the subtle acts of understanding that calculate our life. Still I sit barren and disillusioned in a noisy two bedroom apartment that’s penetrated at night by glaring flood lights that blankets simply can’t block out. I look for any form of answer, but all things are blocked by the rumbling of the machine and the roaring of fighting overhead; muffled by the ticks and clinks of the pipes rushing around, the rustle of trees, and the noise of drunken-party boys. All answers are lost to the void of the noise, all answers are inaudible.

Such as It Is

It’s four AM and I’m staring out the window of this two-story brick house on the outskirts of town, smack dab in the middle of suburbia and treading on boundaries of this ten thousand population town which has started to feel a prison to me. The night is awake and full of life. Trees rustle in the wind and animals dart around the front lawn that’s turning slow to yellow—dead grass overtaking the once lush green that felt good between the toes.

When I was younger I would stay out in the lawn and roll around; the grass felt good against my skin, it grew everywhere in big clumps and coats, it never seemed to dry. The night air would approach and I’d be ushered into the house to eat dinner or to take a bath and get ready for bed. The grass would still be on my clothes, I’d brush it off before going inside and it would fall in fluttering waves off my shoulder and down the cobblestone path that winded up to my house. 

My mother would be waiting at the door, she’d open it and move me to our round wooden table where I would sit to the left of my twin brother and we would dine. The room was bright white and cherries dotted the wallpaper of our kitchen. Our mother with her dark brown-near-black hair would sit around a sauce pot and stir up the spaghetti sauce or noodles. She’d dump the spaghetti through the strainer and steam would rise in neat little columns up into her smiling and tired face. Drops of sweat would fall over the head and my grandmother would pace around fiddling her fingers and stirring the last of a meal or taking yet another course from the oven. She’d place it down on the table and say, “such as it is.” and we’d all laugh at the concept of a four-course-four-star-meal being “such as it is.”

Things pass and change though. Over time our house began to resemble less and less of its former self and more of our future selves. The walls turned from wallpapered cherries to brown beige fauxpaint and the once tiled countertops were replaced by green-brown granite. Our old fashioned white oven was replaced with a streamlined stainless steel oven—two to be exact: one laying to the left of the sink, on the north most wall from the back door, and another one laying underneath the microwave to the right of our now glass table complete with metal chairs. Our refrigerator and microwave changed in step, then our sink, and then the cabinets were all repainted in a fresh new white coat and outfitted with the finest steel handles you could find. 

I began to see it switch and shape: our old wooden table replaced and housed in the garage till my older brother could get of age and take it to his college house. It now rests in the main room of his house, right before the entrance of his small run-down kitchen, in-front of a number of couches that decorate the room—three and counting.

My grandmother too began to change, first from the vibrate loving person she was then to this graying and pale mask of a person; smile lined across her face as if through the gray and green she could some how still arrive at a smile, still—sans tastebuds—create a three course meal, sigh and say, “Such as it is.” before sitting down at the head of the table to enjoy another meal. She would—on occasion—balloon up into this great big mess of swelling. Her hands would be the size of grapefruits and her face would get all big and swollen as if she had gained a thousand pounds. She would rest in the room that is now my mother’s home-office; turn her TV on and sit in her bed in a white cloth or purple silken rope, bald headed flipping through the stations as the glow of the television illuminated her face and gave picture to the tubes which ran from her nose to the oxygen tank behind her bed.

She would never stop smiling; even in those troubled and tired situations she would continue to smile. I remember the only time I ever saw her seem strange and stressed was when I was over at her house, past the Gallery furniture store that every christmas was adorned with a towering festive tree. The flood had gotten bad, she had waded through her own water-damaged house across the street to where my father’s parents lived to make sure they were okay; she stood and looked at the remains of her house and home, the water damaged facade that stood in front of her house—the once vibrant place that I would spend weekends at, see during Halloween decorated with floating ghosts and skeleton cut-outs, the place where I would have banana splits and breakfast cereal markets in the morning. The place with that tiny driveway that I always feared backing out in; that place where we would drive in my grandmother’s old gray Lincoln, down the road and too the snow-cone shop where I would order Rainbow or Strawberry and put a quarter in the vending machine to get a toy ninja. She sat outside on the raised edge of her neighbors carport and smoked a single cigarette. 

My mother said she always knew she smoked, that she could smell it on our clothes when we came back, but me I never knew. Then again my mother always seemed to know everything. It was as if she could see before I could; like she was looking into the future and was picking out the isolated moments of time in which I would be great and happy. It was a quality she got from her mother I believe, she seemed to me to have the power to sort through the madness of a person’s character and come clean out on the other side. My grandmother, Georgia, she always seemed to have the uncanny ability to see what wasn’t there; a puzzle lover by nature, she’d pick apart the negative spaces, flip over the tiles and reveal on the other side the picture that was always there: the beautiful image of the people inside. She was an inspiration.

And so things faded and changed and my grandmother moved out to my aunt’s house in Bellaire where she lived on the second story in the guest room. It was there that she died, there that I said my last words to her, that I kissed her on the forehead and ushered her into the land of the unknown, fearful and frightened. My last conversation with her she had discussed how the medicine was making her loopy; she was smiling and talking about how the glimmer off the shades would turn into bunnies and dance around the room, something along those lines. We sat and listened for a long while, it’s all lost what she said fully in those days; her words of wisdom cascaded through time and space—her most prominent assessments of my character belonging not to her dying bed but what she figured would be: the hospital room in Houston where she spent a great deal of time. I remember she had taken a bath the day before, I believe she knew she was approaching her time, she said she wanted every part of her to be completely clean when she ventured on to the next realm. She said it with a smile, a sort of notion that things were great: an acceptance of the life she had lived: the beautiful legacy she had left behind in the form of her children who stood towering above me, my mother, the woman who could peek into the future and see the resolution. The great woman who would crumble and cry at the thought of losing her mother, the woman that too will force my stoic sternness to shake and crumble into a pit of muffled tears when she ventures on into the great unknown.

It’s four AM and I’m thinking of all these things that move and form, that change and grow tired with age. I think of how my room only a year ago was dotted with cut out images from national geographic, hung multicolored blankets, Christmas lights, and trinkets from affectionate friends. I look out into the dark as my neighbors’ flood light shines into my eyes. The sun is near peaking, in due time it will break across the horizon and empty out onto the world, shedding light on to the once benevolent green grass that now is matted and yellowed. A voice from the distance will reach across the plane though, will transcend both time and space and place itself on this terrestrial plane. I hear it now ringing in my ears as I peek into the darkness that surrounds me, “Such as it is, Such as it is.” and with a smile, I begin to cry. 

Chronicles in Living

There are ten ways to live your life:

1.

You wake up before your alarm clock goes off. You stretch your arms before switching it to the off position, step each foot down onto the bad-brown carpet, walk to the bathroom, piss, wash your hands, then start getting dressed. You’ll pick out a light blue shirt with darker blue lines running vertically down it, a pair of nice worn jeans, a brown belt, a royal blue undershirt, and a pair of crimson red converse. You’ll tuck your shirts into your pants, tighten your belt, run your fingers through your hair, wash your face, brush your teeth, and then throw your backpack across your shoulders, flip your keys in your hand and hurry out to greet another new exciting day. You’ll enjoy the walk. You’ll smile. You’ll learn to love the now.

2.

You wake up to an alarm clock blaring—twenty minutes late. You throw together anything you’ve got on the ground. You don’t tuck anything into anything; you run a comb through your hair and you curse yourself as you try and find where your textbook is. You don’t find it and choose to go to class anyway. You walk in the rain. It’s cold. Your heart sinks as you realize you forgot your earphones at home. You walk in silence, in the cold, in the rain. You try to fight back tears. It doesn’t work.

3.

You wake up an hour or two early and try and force yourself to back to sleep. It doesn’t work. You decide to get up. You turn on your computer and look over a shitty blog or two. You decide to try and write something. You can’t write anything. You go to the kitchen and try and find something to eat but you don’t have anything. You contemplate going to the store but realize you don’t have enough time. Your stomach rumbles. You ignore it. You get dressed, try to feign accomplishment; put on a half-smile, embrace the day. Figure nothing can go wrong, it’ll all be fine. You find you’re right. You start to smile a bit more, your stomach still rumbles but you ignore it.

4.

You wake up late, decide you don’t want to go to class today; roll over and fall back asleep. You wake up later, decide you don’t want to go to that class either. You roll back over. You fall asleep. You dream.

5.

You’re asleep but you keep dreaming. In your dreams everything is fading and floating away. In your dreams you’re alone. Your mother dies, your brothers die, your father dies. In your dreams you’re at their funeral. In your dreams you’re watching from far away, trying to give a speech. In your dreams you’re trying to scream as people run away from you, as they approach danger, as they’re about to be killed. In your dreams a man sneaks up in your room but you’re paralyzed, you can’t move, you’re stuck right there. He draws his knife and you can’t scream. You want to yell, you want to get help, you’re shaking, you’re cold. You’re terrified. He approaches you with the knife, he thrusts it up then down. You wake up. You’re crying.

6.

You don’t wake up.

7.

You wake up and something feels like it’s missing. You can’t put your finger on what it is. It’s something non-material, something fleeting and metaphysical almost. It’s as if it’s there but gone—as if you know what it is but don’t have the words to express it. It’s as if you’ve gone dumb and can’t find the right way to convey your sense of feeling. It’s as if you’ve never known this feeling. You run your hands over your iphone too see if there are any new messages; it flashes back at you with nothing. You get dressed and walk outside, enjoy the walk and try and push the feeling to the back of your brain. In class there are twelve people that showed up. The professor is bored and apathetic, he tells you to turn to page two-hundred-and-fifty-seven in your text-book and have a conversation, en Español, with your neighbor. You chat for a little while, you say basic answers to basic questions, and then you turn away and face the front of the class. You do this twelve more times and then he dismisses you. 

You walk home in the cold. You enjoy the walk but still feel like there’s something missing; something odd that doesn’t add up, something that just doesn’t make sense—something lost—something never known. You get home. You go back to sleep.

8.

You wake up from your dream and try to fall back asleep. In your dreams he is there and you hate him. You can’t stand why he appears, how he’s become a symbol for all the fucked up parts of your life. You can’t stand how his face appears in your dreams: mocking you. Staring at you with some sort of pseudo image of niceness. He morphs into one face and then another; he’s changing into all these different faces and you can’t understand which one is the real one. Everything’s moving around you; everyone’s changing and morphing and no one seems to be who they are—but he—he changes the most. He forms into all of those faces you once knew; he becomes each of them: your friends, your family, your loves, your lusts. He’s all of them at once. He stands above you and then beside you, he holds his hand out, he ushers you into him, he begs you to come, to join him. He smiles. You wake up. You try and fall back asleep. You need to fall back asleep.

9.

You wake up and go through the motions but nothing feels real. Everything feels as if it’s layered in a dream. You feel as if at any moment you will wake up again. You feel as if each person you meet, each step you take, and each motion you make is nothing more than an endless mechanism in the scheme of a dream. You stop half-way down the sidewalk and you’re in the past, then present, then past again. You keep wondering what’s happening; why your mind is jumping back and forth between events, you wonder if you’re going crazy but you don’t know if it’s possible to go crazy in a dream.

You’re everywhere at once, you’re in all planes of existence without trying to. You’re there at every moment that’s ever been crucial in your life. Her death; meeting her; meeting him; the almost; the near-chance; the moment where he turns and walks away; the conversation with him; history class with him; prom; graduation; moving; the first night; the fifth night; the twenty-second night; coming back home; the first day; the party; the brick wall; the look. You’re in all of these times at once and your brain can’t figure out which one is now, which one is here. You don’t understand what’s wrong, you don’t understand how everything could be so wrong—why everything feels so fake. You cry and you cry and you cry and you just keep hoping you’ll wake up soon.

10.

You wake up to your alarm clock. You step out of bed and stretch your arms, give a slight yawn and scurry into the bathroom. You piss, wash your hands, get dressed. You throw on a red and black flannel shirt with a pair of broken-in jeans, no undershirt, and crimson red converse. You tuck your shirt into your pants, fasten your belt, comb your hair, brush your teeth, place your earphones into your ear and turn on The Black Keys, El Camino. You flip your keys in your hand, toss your backpack across your shoulder, step outside and then lock the door. You go to class, you talk, you laugh, some girl mentions that you should “totally try and take Spanish together next year” you agree. 

Things go as expected. You walk home, it’s cold and rainy but it’s no big deal. You’ve got a jacket in your backpack, you throw it on and flip up the hood. You put on thee oh sees. You walk home in the drizzle. Everything goes as expected. Everything just goes. 

Satan’s Tongue

                Both Sidney and Trevor sit at the edge of pure understanding—looking over. From where they are situated all can be seen in the vast expansion of true knowledge, but nothing can be seen straight down. There’s a word for this that lingers just outside of their scope of understanding; some word that has described all of these conditions before—the way human bodies interact to their surroundings—are overwhellemed by the pure sense of wonder that comes from the small plastic voice in the back of their brains telling them to jump and find out.

                The biological components don’t allow for that; it’s a fundamental construct to want to survive. All animals which to survive; all animals wish to flourish and keep their livelihoods for as long as they possibly can; there are few that would willingly choose death.

“Perhaps that’s what makes us human.” Sidney says  breaking their respective trains of thought.
“What?”
“The fact that we don’t jump from this cliff right now.”

               Trevor’s not surprised that Sidney managed to understand things and voice them so concrete. It was always like him—even when they were young—to explain in concrete words what they were thinking. He was the talker, the one who would find his way out of situations by spinning a dazzling web of wordplay. His many girlfriends in the past said his tongue was of many uses; that he had the slim ability to manipulate situations at any given moment—that somehow they had all come out the bad one: the slut, the harlot, the whore. Trevor new there was something else to describe that; stories that had been told and read to him when he was young and in church. Stories of serpents who could talk you straight to hell before you knew it—if your strength in God wasn’t there.  Trevor’s never was. He considered himself on the path to hell already. He never knew what that meant.

“I don’t think you could consider common sense a humanistic trait” Trevor says, “animals wouldn’t jump either. They’d want to live.”

                Sidney’s eyes spark up again, chess board lined up: pieces where they’re supposed to go. He readies himself for the next attack; already you can see his tongue flickering in the background, his teeth gleaming with excitement, the rush of air pushing into his lungs and moving his chest up in the natural rhythm of life. Trevor bows his head and waits for the on-coming assault.

“Ah”, he starts, “but it’s not that we want to survive, it’s that we choose to forgo the unknown under the guise of our lives.”

                Trevor pushes the dirt around with his shoe, he scuffs up the ground and makes a giant smiley face in the dirt. Sidney rambles on as he fishes his phone out of his pocket and replies to a text from David:

How’s it going

Eh. You?

What’s wrong?

Same old same old.

:c

                The air catches him on the face and sends a shiver down his spine causing him to shake miraculously for a moment or two. He steps towards the cliff and then steps back, thanks God that he didn’t fall off. Sidney looks over at him and gives a sort of shrug before motioning towards him.

“You understand what I mean?” He asks.

 “Sure.” Trevor replies.

                The light from his phone pierces through the air again:

Don’t be sad, cheer up please.

I’m okay, I’m not sad. Just bored.

You could come over we could make some excitement c;

Hahaha.

                Trevor remembers what his bible-study teachers used to tell him about God and Satan. He used to go to Sunday school every Sunday; they’d hold it in this building just outside and to the left o f the church building and the teachers—mostly parents volunteering—would talk about God and Jesus and Satan; they’d bring snacks and stickers and activity books and you’d write in them something like: I love God because he’s good to me underneath the blank that asked: “who do you love most in life.” Then everyone would smile and laugh and he’d leave feeling afraid of hell and promising to do better.

Come on just for tonight, me and you, plz.

Idk.

I’ll let you be top c;

Ha.

                Sidney’s still in the background chattering on about the human spirit and the condition between us and animals. He’s factoring in all sorts of things; making connections that don’t exist, trying his hardest to impress—to be right.

“The thing is,” he says, “We are just animals and like animals we have basic needs that we should fulfill you know. Like sex. We need sex in life. It’s foolish to think we don’t. It’s a primal need, a basic instinct: to fornicate!”

Come on. You know you want to.

“And it’s foolish that we should try to dissect that any further you know? Of course you know. It’s what makes us different from basic animals. It’s what makes us special. It’s what makes us so strange—“

It’ll be fun

“—We refuse to go into the night. We refuse to jump off that cliff—“

Don’t be such a prude

“—because we fear the unknown, because we choose life instead of death; because we know it’s valuable.”

I need you tonight bby c;

Trevor looks over across the vast expansion of truth and through the pinnacle of understanding. He looks over at Sidney flashing his teeth in the night, down to his phone’s light that cuts through the black fabric of the night. He sees the flicking tongue appear and chase him around, hears the words of his Sunday school teachers—warning him of Satan. They all become jumbled up; they all flow into one another—one becomes two and so forth. He can’t distinguish the past from the future, he can’t distinguish hell from heaven from earth. All he sees in front of him is an endless stretch of blackness known as truth. He steps off the cliff.

Distance

The area between two bodies is the greatest measure of our own sense of desires. A strong distance can tell the tragic tale of star-crossed lovers who are forced apart by the faith of man; there the two stand far from each other and examine every inch, grow infatuated by the body, idolize it, and then—when forced together—fall apart. Then we have the short distances, the bad long distances, the medium distances, and the range of all distances from short to long till we’re left with the most passionate and sought after distance of all time: the no-distance. In this distance people cease to be apart, there is no physical misunderstanding; here all things are visible, present, part of each other. It is at this moment that time cannot reach; it stands still, frozen, near stone like as the two trace back their distances: flirt with the different distances and end up back at the no distance point. Here is the creation of the universe—the single point from which all matter has expanded. Here is life.