Prelude to a Little Death.
by Rewired
They're wrapped up in everything, even the night I had sex.
And if they are not what they seem, and they are instead some manifestation of my Jungian Shadow, and I am the Ego, than that night --and in many ways before and since -- Anne was a manifestation of my Jungian Anima, to give me tips on how to slay the Gray Dragon; on how to
align with my Self. On how to make my Self. On how to make hope in a world that seemed incapable of manufacturing it for me.
Yet I suppose it started a bit before that night, actually. Anne had finally returned home in late September, 1999. It was an autumn as many autumns have been, before and since -- a time of death, a time of change. Shortly before she'd returned from Korea, were she was stationed, I'd moved back to my parent's house for the first time. I was in the process of saving money to move back into that apartment with Sandra and Nick.
Seeing her again was strange. Last time I had seen this girl, we had held each other in arms, cried together in her old room in her parent's house. The previous evening, we had stayed up all night, talking on my little micro-cassette recorder, chain-smoking cigarettes together, smoking sugar-tipped cigars with some strange guy named Steve, drank every known combination of the 7-Up, Coca-cola, Vodka and Peppermint Schnapps she had on her floor. The next thing I remember is waking up seeing nothing but white. It was the interior of a white bucket. I was puking my guts out, the smell of peppermint and puke filling my nostrils, as that beautiful woman massaged my back and took care of me. I puked so hard that night I burst a blood vessel in my eye. Mint-chocolate chip used to be my favorite ice cream; now I cannot even smell mint without feeling that gagging sensation at the back of my throat.
I woke up on her bed and it was evening again. I was sweaty, I felt as if every muscle in my body had been pushed to the max, my mouth tasted horrible -- but I felt somewhat cleansed. She came up to me, and asked me how I felt. I said better, and that I think I was through with drinking for awhile. We went into the darkness of her kitchen, were she made me coffee and we smoked cigarettes.
Those last few days we had a lot of important conversation, but much of it now has faded from memory. I do remember her mentioning again, as she had before, that things would be changing after she left. As honest as she seemed, as naked as I thought I was before her and everyone else, I knew there was more unspoken words between her and I than we could ever say. Much on both sides, I am certain, were brutal, but beneath all that there was a river of importance -- an important connection that justified the brutality that, for now, remained concealed. Her and I really cared for each other. Undefined in nature, and perhaps all the more precious due to that.
Between that night and the following morning, I reflected a bit on how I'd met her. It was all thanks to my cousin, who lived right next door to her. I used to only see my cousins on the holidays, but she had wanted to get together more often and invited me to go to a water park the summer of 1994. That was just around the time things were starting to become weird for me, too: I'd been getting these weird memories of interacting with strange creatures all throughout my life since a bit earlier in the year. Anne had come with us because she was sort of a friend my both my cousins and their martial arts teacher had ditched out on them last minute. At first, Anne seemed very dismissive of me, but by the end of the day we had our arms around each other and were talking and straying behind the rest of them.
It came to be that I had finally found a beautiful girl who seemed to be interested in me -- and as the cliché goes, at the wrong time. I pushed myself away. My mind was becoming this black hole that went about sucking me in, and I simply let it take me over. Instead of running from it, I plunged right into it – and away from everything else. With her I had my first date, and even when I told her I didn't want anything serious we still talked and wrote. I learned she wrote poetry like I did and wrote short stories, too.
As the weirdness in my life escalated, I eventually told my cousin what had been happening to me. To my dismay, she'd told Anne. she wrote to me, asking me if I was okay, telling me that I wasn't insane. When I talked to her on the phone, she asked me if I remembered her talking about her friend, Emma.
"Yeah," I said. We had hung out with her and her boyfriend back in the previous November, before the four of us had gone to her high school dance. She was a short, blond-haired girl with strange eyes.
"She's an alien," she said.
When I asked her to repeat herself, she did. She attested that Emma had told her numerous times that she wasn't from here, that she was an alien from somewhere else. Anne had never probed the issue, but Emma seemed quite serious about it.
To be quite honest, I wasn’t certain how to react to that, and I don’t believe I did. I asked Anne if she believed her friend.
"Why not? Anything's possible. We’ve all experienced strange things in our lives," she told me. "I’m not saying it is true, but I’ve got no reason to think that she’d ever lie to me.”
I told Anne a bit about what I’d seen, but it’s hard telling people that story. I don’t know how I’d react to that story if I were in their position, but I always assumed she felt the same way about me as she did about Emma: she’s not saying what I believe is true, but she believes I believe it, because she has no reason to believe I’d ever lie to her.
"If you want,” Anne said, “I'm sure Emma would talk to you about it…"
The world had gotten weird enough, I didn’t want to know what she might know. I’d experienced terror deeper than I’d ever been able to conceive of beforehand, but the thought that she might recall a desert planet where the people lived underground and war machines and strange insects roamed the surface was something I certainly did not want to venture into. What if, like me, she felt she was one of those people? What if she were to remember, unlike myself, what those people looked like? What if they were short, gray, and had big, black slanted eyes? What might that mean? What might I be forced to seriously consider? I shook my head quickly and very sheepishly.
"No," was all I said.
Fast forward to the summer of 1998.
I got a letter from Anne in the mail. By that summer, Anne and I had known each other for four years, and I hadn’t spoken to her in months. It was a short and vague letter, and only said that I should call her for there was something important she wanted to ask me. She wanted to know if I could do her a favor, but said she’d rather ask me over the phone. If she was trying to peak my curiosity, it was working.
I actually called her that time – admittedly, a rarity. She told me that she was breaking up with her short, buff, long-held, live-in boyfriend and needed a date to the prom. She asked me if I’d go, and I said yes, so long as the date didn’t collide with the date of Sandra’s prom, a friend of mine who also had no date and wanted me to go. It was weird, never having gone to either of my proms, and the year after I graduate I'm going with two different girls from two different schools to two different proms.
Then it came.
“One more thing,” she told me that day over the phone. “I’m going in the Army.”
Is there an echo in my life? I thought. Is this the punch line of some Cosmic joke? Sometimes things occur and they seem to have connections your logical mind insists they cannot have. Still, they’re there. You feel them, dream them, think them, see these invisible connections everywhere, interconnecting all of existence in this invisible, multidimensional web work. When two women who have been inarguably the most important women in your teenage life both confront you in the same year that they’re joining the high ranks of the society you want so much to change; joining, as a matter of fact, the very heart of the problem, the government, the enemy – you can’t help but feel a little cheated, a little hurt, a little confused. Even a bit enraged. In the synchronicity, you smell a psychic conspiracy. Not some wimpy government conspiracy; we’re talking conspiracy of a higher order here. Some immaterial force in the universe is fucking with you. As it continued to happen girl after girl, friend after friend over the years, it became sort of a running joke – my joke, that is – and I ran it into the ground. I got bitter about it.
Now Anne, like Claire, was entering the Army: and there dates were a month or so apart. By memory, I can count six important people in my life who have chosen the military since, and only one never made it to basic. Not only that, but there were startling coincidences linking them all.
When both Sandra and Anne’s proms came that June of 1998, I’d been smoking cigarettes for awhile in secret. Prom itself fucked. Anne insisted I shouldn’t wear a tux, which I really didn’t want to do anyway, because she wasn’t dressing up super-fancy and she didn’t want me to out dress her. I was nervous the entire time, I broke my corsage. I drew on a napkin, too, I think. I got that familiar feeling I always had during high school: everyone’s watching, you know your strange and out of place. The heightened awareness, clammy hands, cold sweat, narrow throat, clenched teeth – all of which convinces me that even if I was initially reacting to nothing at all, my growing nervousness was attracting attention. You try and talk yourself out of freaking out, but it doesn’t work. It’s a constant cycle of reinforcement – a negative cycle – and not by far the only one present in my life.
I made it through prom alive, and we even got our picture taken. I’m slouching, of course.
I don’t remember what happened between then and after prom, but we eventually got bored at after prom – or at least I did – and decided to go sit in the car. We talked here and there, smoking out cigarettes, but the silences between our comments grew longer. It wasn’t’ an uncomfortable silence, but there was certainly an underlying intensity. I worked my way closer and asked if I could kiss her. She laughed and said yes, I didn’t have to ask. I stopped kissing her for a second to explain why I had asked, but she cut me off.
Sandra’s prom was a mess, and after prom was pure hell – and it had nothing to do with her, either, so quit thinking I’m an asshole. My friends didn’t know of my nicotine habit at the time, and I was around them constantly. It was then that I experienced the symptoms of nicotine withdrawal for the first time in my life. The withdrawal as only part of it, however. At Sandra’s party, most of the songs were fast songs, and I, as a rule, can only slow dance. With a person with my level of anxiety, it’s hard for me to fathom I could even slow dance. I was therefore King Grump the entire night, going from wallflower to nervous sit in the chair boy. I stared out the window, thinking how nervous I was, how guilty I felt, and how I was fucking dying for a goddamned cigarette. Maybe I could sneak outside. I never did, though. I felt pathetic, and I felt bad that I looked and felt apathetic and that I made Sandra look and feel pathetic and the kinds of things everyone was saying to her out on the dance floor.
“What’s his problem?”
“Why did you even bring him?”
Even worse was my imagining them sighing and shaking their heads. Then, we were at a water park for after prom. I wanted to sneak a cigarette when we went to the bathroom half way through the day, and I sighed a relief as I made my way to the bathroom stall. It was then that I discovered my pack of cigarettes had gotten soaked on one of the rides. I was cold, wet, pissed and standing in a stall in a crowded bathroom at a water park with a massive case of nicotine withdrawal and nothing but a pack of soggy cigarettes. That day was all about me being pathetic.
I ended up seeing both Anne and Sandra interchangeably. I told them both were I stood: I wasn’t committing, because I was all about Claire. I wanted Claire back. I really cared for them, I told them, but I wouldn’t commit myself and I wouldn’t have sex with anyone because getting Claire back was my goal. you got to have goals to give you meaning, give you purpose, give you excuse, right? It keeps you focused. It gives life a plot. It makes things interesting. It gives and keeps and makes you everything that I was lacking.
So I fooled around with both of them and for awhile it was fun. Within my set boundaries my instinctual, animal part had some free reign. The boundaries, like years before, I had sworn were moral boundaries – but, as always, it was truly fear. Fear of commitment, of sex, of feeling and sensation. Somewhere deep down in the pit of me, I knew all this, but I wouldn’t say it, I wouldn’t even write it, I wouldn’t even verbalize it or recognize it in my head.
The animal didn’t get to play in the boundaries for long, either, until I was faced with a true moral challenge for me. It was there all along, and I figured the natural course of things would work it’s way out. I argued all along that I wasn’t in the wrong here. No one else seemed to agree, though Sandra played like she did.
I often put it in this way: it wasn’t as if I was getting my dick wet with both of them or leading them on to believe that I was exclusive with either of them. To the contrary, from the very beginning I’d told them the situation – but the fact that Sandra knew I was screwing around with Anne but not the other way around began toe eat away at me.
I thought it would be easy to tell her, convincing myself that she would think it was no more of a big thing than I had convinced myself it was to me – but I just couldn’t’ say it to her. I threw out hints, telling myself she already knew, had to know. Did she know? Who knows? I still don’t know. All I know is that I was absolutely terrified of telling her, and that only proved to me again and again how immoral I truly considered myself in this situation deep down in the pits of my being.
I tried desperately to weigh things: did I like Sandra or Anne? Truth be known, I liked them both. As I tried to weight this issue, I notice correlations between them that became a secret obsession of mine. They were totally different beings, no doubt – but their like aspects hinted to me that I was chasing after something else. It was something that could partially be found in either of them, perhaps, and of which some aspects could be found in both. it was something binding them, but beyond them. Something of myself that I was projecting upon them, something from someone else that I was projecting on both of them, or perhaps I was projecting stuff from one of them onto the other. Whatever.
Then came the night that Duncan stepped in. A monumental occasion, to be sure.
I had been at Nathan’s, lying on the couch with Anne. Duncan was in a chair nearby,. and he suddenly turned to me and said, “Tim, wasn’t there something you wanted to say to Anne?”
Adrenaline rose, and I turned and shot him a glare. I then ignored him, but he repeated it.
“Not now, Duncan,” I shot at him, but he pressed. In all my years of knowing him, I’ve never wanted to hurt him more than I did in that moment. I couldn’t believe the nerve he had. Sure, he couldn’t tell how hard I’d been trying, how often this had been on my mind, how delicate I wanted to be with this. Wrong as all of that was, as much as I felt I should tell her, it was not his right to step in and push it like that. It was non of his damn business, as a matter of fact; it wasn’t his fucking place. No hard feeling remain today, but damn I was pissed.
She questioned what he had been referring to, but I tried to throw out hints that indicated anything but what he was referring to and the then played it down. Now there was no way in the fiery blazes of the hell I ceased to believe in that I could tell her.
Duncan and I talked outside Nathan’s front door a few days later. Another heated debate, this time on ethics – something we haven’t brushed upon, really, since I’d thrown out my pro-choice views in his face some time back and we eventually had to stop talking about it. Argument on the matter brought us nowhere.
As the date for Anne’s departure came ever-closer, we began hanging out more often. I had to ask her why she chose the military, and she told me that she could use the money, her parents needed the money, and she didn’t want to end up like her siblings. What about her writing, I asked her? It would take years, she told me, to get it as a profession. She’d need a side job, and anyway, she enjoyed it, she didn’t want to make it a job. Job would kill her passion for it.
In the end it wasn’t about me agreeing, or even understanding – it was just about accepting. I know I couldn’t change her mind, and I( didn’t try to – it was her life, her path. If she wanted to take some camouflage bus ride through hell to gain her paradise, so be it. Far be it from me to intervene with protests or otherwise.
I came to like yet another thing about her in that period: I could talk with her in depth about important things, higher things – spirituality, the cosmos, the Big Questions – while we were fooling around. It was the perfect mixture of the primitive and the higher, the spiritual and material. Things often got heated, and I’d be on the edge of giving it, to saying the hell with it – but she’d stop me.
“You don’t want that,” she’d say to me, echoing the summation of all the things I’d been preaching about my desire for Claire that summer; things I’d said in a less-heated state of mind. “You love Claire, remember?”
And I feared everything: Claire, Anne, sex, love. Truth and lie.
So back to that morning right before Anne left for the Army, right after I vomited my guts out, fell asleep, and Anne and I had coffee.
That morning was horror. I don't know if either of us slept. All I remember is lying in her room and feeling that strange feeling I haven't had before or since and tried to capture in elaborate versions of a short story ever since: a short story I entitled `death at the door'. I must have rewrote that story a dozen times since that day in 1998.
But we hugged each other, we kissed, we cried, and as it got closer to the hour we spoke less and less. I remembered reading these posters on her wall that has a religious slant to them. believe I went off on that a little; if I couldn't bitch about the military, I'd go for the other type of organization I distained, and that was religion.
Eventually they came to the door of her room, took her bags, we hugged and she got in the car and drove away. I watched them leave a trail of dust behind them. Her mother asked if I could stay for dinner; I thanked her but declined. I had to get home. I didn't really. I drove off and cussed and cried and screamed until my throat was sore.
She returned, as I said, in the Fall of 1999. We hung out, drank coffee at local restaurants and talked. The girl I knew was still there, but she had certainly underwent a transformation. There were things I could pinpoint: her attitude, her general approach to life, her values. But there was something more -- something undefined that tried it's best to hide behind her eyes.
With her money from the Army, she’d bought a thick collection of CDs – which, it seems, is mandatory for Army people – and a brand spanking new bright fucking red car. Every weekend that month we'd hang out, usually just drinking coffee and smoking and talking like the old days. It almost seemed as if she was back completely -- no change at all.
Then there was the day she came over and began to talk with my mother in our front yard. I felt pathetic, betrayed and almost abandoned as I stood there with my hands deep in my pockets and my feet kicking at the grass. I was pushed off to the side with nothing to do but try and think up some subtle strategy that would allow me to weasel in on the conversation. Not only were they talking fluently, but my mother was giving her that look of respect I was never given.
She began telling my mother all about her experiences where she was presently stationed in Korea. My mother was amazed at how she'd jumped on the Army bandwagon and would be set for life when she got out. She was awed by Anne's posture, eye contact and confidence. She even liked Anne's brand spanking new bright fucking red car. Then mom said it.
"I'm proud of you -- it's good that someone’s getting it together and doing something with their life."
I just stood there in disbelief of what my mother had said -- specifically, the less-than-subtle emphasis she placed on `someone' and the notably less-than-subtle indication in her voice that that someone was me. I was confused by Anne's lack of reaction. Initially, I thought maybe Anne's lack of response was because she hadn't caught what my mother had said. That I knew to be a load of shit, though, for Anne is a very bright girl.
I now know what should’ve been obvious then, and it was part of that `undefined something' that was residing behind Anne's eyes since her return: they had an unspoken agreement as to how hopeless I was. Since birth mom had played a significant role in nurturing the pathetic son that stood beside her. For years Anne had waited for me to break out of the mould; to die and be reborn, as she had finally done. Even in the metaphorical sense, though, I feared death as much as sex.
One evening in October we went over to the house of Anne's sister, Janice. We saw an elderly face greet us at Janice’s door – this woman, I was told, looked after Shelly’s kids. I believe she had two of them, though I don’t remember actually having seen them. Shelly was Janice’s roommate. Neither were home, so we were alone with the old lady.
I looked around as they talked, glancing at furniture, and then came to the pictures. On some coffee table or mantle I saw a picture that I found immediately interesting – a photo of three babies laid side by side, all looking identical. It stuck in the back of my mind, but I didn’t think about it all that much at the time.
The lady soon left and we watched part of Anne’s video, which depicted some scenes from her time in Korea and Raul. As we were at the kitchen table talking and drinking coffee, a tall, skinny, blond-haired girl walked in. I didn’t know why, but she immediately gave me a creepy feeling. I felt very anxious around her – especially anxious. I couldn’t quite place it at first, but there was something about this girl that didn’t settle well with me. She had a odd energy about her; she gave off a strange vibe. It seemed as if there was something missing from her, something vital, something fundamentally different. I was soon formally introduced who I had, by that time, determined to be Shelly.
Later on I’d learn that Shelly was quite the pot-head, and was known for sleeping around and for being a bit “out there.” I somehow convinced myself that this was why she’d made me feel so awkward, but it still just didn’t seem to explain it. I was `out there', I smoked pot, I had friends who were incredibly sexually active and did a vast array of drugs. I had nothing against any of these things. What the hell was it about this girl?
It was only after Anne, Janice and I went to a nearby mall that I came to stare dead into the eyes of what seemed to be the answer.
All I heard as we walked into a store was Janice saying, “Anne, you should by this, put it on and scared the hell out of Shelly.” Anne let out a slight laugh, Janice was giggling up a storm and even I, before determining what the hell they were talking about, laughed a little. Then I looked up, almost bumping into someone -- or so I had thought.
I found myself staring into big, black, slanted eyes and a gray-white chalky face. I looked up staring dead into the face of an alien.
Every nerve on edge, every alarm system going off in my body, flight or flight reflex oscillating between two options and leaving me frozen in my tracks, it took me a few moments before I realized that we had walked into a costume store and I was staring into a plastic mask.
Adrenalin still rushing through my system with my eyes wide and mouth agape, I stepped back and looked down. I looked at Janice, who met my eyes and seemed rather confused about the look on my face. I then tried to play it all down.
After it seemed appropriate to question what she’d been talking about when we first came into the store – as I said, sometimes I catch whiff of the fact that my brain makes correlations that aren’t there – I found out that Janice thought it was hilarious that Shelly had repeated nightmares about aliens coming into her room and abducting her aboard their “flying saucers.”
"Your kidding," I said.
"Yeah," Janice said, "she’s weird. She can’t even look at their faces it freaks her out so much."
Something around that time began to strike me as intriguing: Anne knew three separate persons that I knew of who had associations with what they presumed to be extraterrestrials. I believed I’d seen them, Shelly apparently thought she’d seen them, and Emma believed that she was one of them. Twice is a coincidence; three times and you begin to wonder if there’s a deeper meaning to it all.
One late October evening as Janice, Anne and I were at the table sipping coffee and talking, I was doodling, and sketched some images of the aliens. Janice laughed and said I should leave it on the fridge for Shelly when she got home. In actuality, I knew Shelly was coming home soon and had drawn it for the purposes of catching Shelly’s attention so that it might inspire conversation on the topic. I took the suggestion of Janice and put it on the fridge.
Shelly eventually came in, went to get something out of the fridge and notice it immediately. She asked if I was the artist. I said yes and worked the conversation to a point where I could ask whether she’d seen anything without it seeming too obvious. She went on to tell me how she had been on the porch of her former residence when she saw a light object, not a plane, hovering in the sky. Then another came and flew beside the first one. Then another. Then another. Her boyfriend at the time witnessed the event as well.
It was getting good, but then someone made an off comment and she got engaged in a conversation with Janice and never made it back to the topic, which it seemed to me she was uncomfortable talking about anyway. She did eventually claim that’s all she ever saw. She never mentioned the dreams Janice mentioned. Then she left for her room.
Janice, Anne and I played a game that involved only dye and sat at the table drinking coffee and talking for a few hours. We brushed atop many subjects -- the military, growing up, life and society, the government, sex. I told Janice a bit about my bizarre experiences. At least verbally she suspended judgment. We got to talking about government conspiracy, and that's where Anne stepped in.
Anne boldly proclaimed that the military could hardly organize putting in a light bulb let alone wage a global conspiracy against the American public spanning over half a century to cover up the existence of extraterrestrial life. I laughed a little. Conspiracy was a common practice used everyday in human social circles, I told her. I saw it in high school, at home, at work, amongst friends, between couples – why the fuck wouldn’t it happen in government?
“But you can’t know any of this for sure,” she told me. "Maybe these aren't extraterrestrials. Maybe it's something else. That's all really irrelevant, though -- ask yourself what you'd do if you did know what it was for certain."
"I'd know I'm not crazy, at least not completely," I told her. "And I'd know to prepare for the day that these creatures are done with whatever they're doing. And I think they're up to no good, to be honest."
"If you're right and the world is going to end, why waste your time mulling over it?" She said. "Try to change it, or simply enjoy life as it is while it's still here. Smell the roses."
Then she tried to explain Dizzy's No Thought philosophy to me. How I should just shut up the mind and focus on feeling, on emotion, on sensation. I told her that I’d certainly tried, but it just doesn’t work that way for me. It seemed impossible for me to keep it simple; to stop and smell the roses. I drown in my complexities and mow the roses to mulch. My mind won’t shut up, and the mystery won’t leave me alone.
She shook her head and looked at me quizzically, almost frustratingly. "Can't you just feel?"
Shortly thereafter, Shelly’s guy friend showed up and we all tried going to a few bars. They were closed by that time, and so were all grocery stores, so we finally gave up and went home.
It was fairly late by the time we got back to her sister's place, and though I wanted to go home, Anne convinced me to stay. I had no car to drive home with, as she had driven me to her sister's place, and she told me it was too late for driving. She promised she’d take me back in the morning, and pushed me to call my parents to tell them where I was. I really didn't want to do so, but I did, just to satisfy her. I ended up waking them up only to tell them what they would've known had they any sense at all: that I wouldn't be home until probably noon tomorrow.
We pulled out mattresses from the kid's room for us to sleep on the floor. Janice took the couch by the window, and Shelley went in her room with the green light, along with her friend. Anne and I pulled out mattresses from the kid's room for us to sleep on the floor. Anne's sister took the couch by the window. Anne and I lay on the mattress, with her head at my feet. I looked down at her closed eyes and sighed. There was no way I could sleep. I wouldn’t get to sleep for hours.
My mind couldn't help but fixate on Shelly and the strange feeling she gave me. I looked over at her door, and saw that she had replaced the normal light bulb you'd have in your room with a green light bulb. It gave her room and the hallway an eerie glow. The way the light crept out of the crack at the bottom of the door when she closed it with her boy inside didn't make it seem any less strange.
I wondered what they wanted, and why they were here. In the back of my mind I thought I knew the reason, but I needed to verify it some way, and the few people I had come across in the past, and the many more between then and when I write this now would seemingly do so. The only problem was I could never be sure if the correlations I made in my mind were truly reflections of reality or whether my perceptions were merely reflecting my deeply-held, ultimately delusional fears. There seemed to be no sure road to truth, and even if I knew that truth for certain -- and if it what I thought was true was true, that would one day be inevitable -- Anne was right, there wasn't a damn thing I could do about it. I could hardly help myself or bring out a change in myself. How could I steer a world away from this, a people against this? How could I stand before `them' and bring `them' down?
Damn truth, Anne seemed to say. Stare at it right in the face of that poison, that death, that futility, that nihilism, that hand that constantly beats you black and blue, that "foot stomping on the human face -- forever", say `No' to it's grip on you, turn towards life and say yes. Life is more important than knowledge -- especially when true knowledge can never be ultimately determined, and life is standing right in front of your face, waiting to fill the empty cups you called eyes and quench your thirst for meaning, to runneth your cup over. The secret, Anne said, echoing the Dizzy character I'd heard so much about but never meant, was to stop thinking and start living, to travel the distance to Here, Right Now.
And she taught me that night. With a step towards my horrors for the future lying bathed in green light just down the hall, on the mattress of that living room floor she brought me back to Now, to life, through a primitive ritual turned sacred.
by Rewired
They're wrapped up in everything, even the night I had sex.
And if they are not what they seem, and they are instead some manifestation of my Jungian Shadow, and I am the Ego, than that night --and in many ways before and since -- Anne was a manifestation of my Jungian Anima, to give me tips on how to slay the Gray Dragon; on how to
align with my Self. On how to make my Self. On how to make hope in a world that seemed incapable of manufacturing it for me.
Yet I suppose it started a bit before that night, actually. Anne had finally returned home in late September, 1999. It was an autumn as many autumns have been, before and since -- a time of death, a time of change. Shortly before she'd returned from Korea, were she was stationed, I'd moved back to my parent's house for the first time. I was in the process of saving money to move back into that apartment with Sandra and Nick.
Seeing her again was strange. Last time I had seen this girl, we had held each other in arms, cried together in her old room in her parent's house. The previous evening, we had stayed up all night, talking on my little micro-cassette recorder, chain-smoking cigarettes together, smoking sugar-tipped cigars with some strange guy named Steve, drank every known combination of the 7-Up, Coca-cola, Vodka and Peppermint Schnapps she had on her floor. The next thing I remember is waking up seeing nothing but white. It was the interior of a white bucket. I was puking my guts out, the smell of peppermint and puke filling my nostrils, as that beautiful woman massaged my back and took care of me. I puked so hard that night I burst a blood vessel in my eye. Mint-chocolate chip used to be my favorite ice cream; now I cannot even smell mint without feeling that gagging sensation at the back of my throat.
I woke up on her bed and it was evening again. I was sweaty, I felt as if every muscle in my body had been pushed to the max, my mouth tasted horrible -- but I felt somewhat cleansed. She came up to me, and asked me how I felt. I said better, and that I think I was through with drinking for awhile. We went into the darkness of her kitchen, were she made me coffee and we smoked cigarettes.
Those last few days we had a lot of important conversation, but much of it now has faded from memory. I do remember her mentioning again, as she had before, that things would be changing after she left. As honest as she seemed, as naked as I thought I was before her and everyone else, I knew there was more unspoken words between her and I than we could ever say. Much on both sides, I am certain, were brutal, but beneath all that there was a river of importance -- an important connection that justified the brutality that, for now, remained concealed. Her and I really cared for each other. Undefined in nature, and perhaps all the more precious due to that.
Between that night and the following morning, I reflected a bit on how I'd met her. It was all thanks to my cousin, who lived right next door to her. I used to only see my cousins on the holidays, but she had wanted to get together more often and invited me to go to a water park the summer of 1994. That was just around the time things were starting to become weird for me, too: I'd been getting these weird memories of interacting with strange creatures all throughout my life since a bit earlier in the year. Anne had come with us because she was sort of a friend my both my cousins and their martial arts teacher had ditched out on them last minute. At first, Anne seemed very dismissive of me, but by the end of the day we had our arms around each other and were talking and straying behind the rest of them.
It came to be that I had finally found a beautiful girl who seemed to be interested in me -- and as the cliché goes, at the wrong time. I pushed myself away. My mind was becoming this black hole that went about sucking me in, and I simply let it take me over. Instead of running from it, I plunged right into it – and away from everything else. With her I had my first date, and even when I told her I didn't want anything serious we still talked and wrote. I learned she wrote poetry like I did and wrote short stories, too.
As the weirdness in my life escalated, I eventually told my cousin what had been happening to me. To my dismay, she'd told Anne. she wrote to me, asking me if I was okay, telling me that I wasn't insane. When I talked to her on the phone, she asked me if I remembered her talking about her friend, Emma.
"Yeah," I said. We had hung out with her and her boyfriend back in the previous November, before the four of us had gone to her high school dance. She was a short, blond-haired girl with strange eyes.
"She's an alien," she said.
When I asked her to repeat herself, she did. She attested that Emma had told her numerous times that she wasn't from here, that she was an alien from somewhere else. Anne had never probed the issue, but Emma seemed quite serious about it.
To be quite honest, I wasn’t certain how to react to that, and I don’t believe I did. I asked Anne if she believed her friend.
"Why not? Anything's possible. We’ve all experienced strange things in our lives," she told me. "I’m not saying it is true, but I’ve got no reason to think that she’d ever lie to me.”
I told Anne a bit about what I’d seen, but it’s hard telling people that story. I don’t know how I’d react to that story if I were in their position, but I always assumed she felt the same way about me as she did about Emma: she’s not saying what I believe is true, but she believes I believe it, because she has no reason to believe I’d ever lie to her.
"If you want,” Anne said, “I'm sure Emma would talk to you about it…"
The world had gotten weird enough, I didn’t want to know what she might know. I’d experienced terror deeper than I’d ever been able to conceive of beforehand, but the thought that she might recall a desert planet where the people lived underground and war machines and strange insects roamed the surface was something I certainly did not want to venture into. What if, like me, she felt she was one of those people? What if she were to remember, unlike myself, what those people looked like? What if they were short, gray, and had big, black slanted eyes? What might that mean? What might I be forced to seriously consider? I shook my head quickly and very sheepishly.
"No," was all I said.
Fast forward to the summer of 1998.
I got a letter from Anne in the mail. By that summer, Anne and I had known each other for four years, and I hadn’t spoken to her in months. It was a short and vague letter, and only said that I should call her for there was something important she wanted to ask me. She wanted to know if I could do her a favor, but said she’d rather ask me over the phone. If she was trying to peak my curiosity, it was working.
I actually called her that time – admittedly, a rarity. She told me that she was breaking up with her short, buff, long-held, live-in boyfriend and needed a date to the prom. She asked me if I’d go, and I said yes, so long as the date didn’t collide with the date of Sandra’s prom, a friend of mine who also had no date and wanted me to go. It was weird, never having gone to either of my proms, and the year after I graduate I'm going with two different girls from two different schools to two different proms.
Then it came.
“One more thing,” she told me that day over the phone. “I’m going in the Army.”
Is there an echo in my life? I thought. Is this the punch line of some Cosmic joke? Sometimes things occur and they seem to have connections your logical mind insists they cannot have. Still, they’re there. You feel them, dream them, think them, see these invisible connections everywhere, interconnecting all of existence in this invisible, multidimensional web work. When two women who have been inarguably the most important women in your teenage life both confront you in the same year that they’re joining the high ranks of the society you want so much to change; joining, as a matter of fact, the very heart of the problem, the government, the enemy – you can’t help but feel a little cheated, a little hurt, a little confused. Even a bit enraged. In the synchronicity, you smell a psychic conspiracy. Not some wimpy government conspiracy; we’re talking conspiracy of a higher order here. Some immaterial force in the universe is fucking with you. As it continued to happen girl after girl, friend after friend over the years, it became sort of a running joke – my joke, that is – and I ran it into the ground. I got bitter about it.
Now Anne, like Claire, was entering the Army: and there dates were a month or so apart. By memory, I can count six important people in my life who have chosen the military since, and only one never made it to basic. Not only that, but there were startling coincidences linking them all.
When both Sandra and Anne’s proms came that June of 1998, I’d been smoking cigarettes for awhile in secret. Prom itself fucked. Anne insisted I shouldn’t wear a tux, which I really didn’t want to do anyway, because she wasn’t dressing up super-fancy and she didn’t want me to out dress her. I was nervous the entire time, I broke my corsage. I drew on a napkin, too, I think. I got that familiar feeling I always had during high school: everyone’s watching, you know your strange and out of place. The heightened awareness, clammy hands, cold sweat, narrow throat, clenched teeth – all of which convinces me that even if I was initially reacting to nothing at all, my growing nervousness was attracting attention. You try and talk yourself out of freaking out, but it doesn’t work. It’s a constant cycle of reinforcement – a negative cycle – and not by far the only one present in my life.
I made it through prom alive, and we even got our picture taken. I’m slouching, of course.
I don’t remember what happened between then and after prom, but we eventually got bored at after prom – or at least I did – and decided to go sit in the car. We talked here and there, smoking out cigarettes, but the silences between our comments grew longer. It wasn’t’ an uncomfortable silence, but there was certainly an underlying intensity. I worked my way closer and asked if I could kiss her. She laughed and said yes, I didn’t have to ask. I stopped kissing her for a second to explain why I had asked, but she cut me off.
Sandra’s prom was a mess, and after prom was pure hell – and it had nothing to do with her, either, so quit thinking I’m an asshole. My friends didn’t know of my nicotine habit at the time, and I was around them constantly. It was then that I experienced the symptoms of nicotine withdrawal for the first time in my life. The withdrawal as only part of it, however. At Sandra’s party, most of the songs were fast songs, and I, as a rule, can only slow dance. With a person with my level of anxiety, it’s hard for me to fathom I could even slow dance. I was therefore King Grump the entire night, going from wallflower to nervous sit in the chair boy. I stared out the window, thinking how nervous I was, how guilty I felt, and how I was fucking dying for a goddamned cigarette. Maybe I could sneak outside. I never did, though. I felt pathetic, and I felt bad that I looked and felt apathetic and that I made Sandra look and feel pathetic and the kinds of things everyone was saying to her out on the dance floor.
“What’s his problem?”
“Why did you even bring him?”
Even worse was my imagining them sighing and shaking their heads. Then, we were at a water park for after prom. I wanted to sneak a cigarette when we went to the bathroom half way through the day, and I sighed a relief as I made my way to the bathroom stall. It was then that I discovered my pack of cigarettes had gotten soaked on one of the rides. I was cold, wet, pissed and standing in a stall in a crowded bathroom at a water park with a massive case of nicotine withdrawal and nothing but a pack of soggy cigarettes. That day was all about me being pathetic.
I ended up seeing both Anne and Sandra interchangeably. I told them both were I stood: I wasn’t committing, because I was all about Claire. I wanted Claire back. I really cared for them, I told them, but I wouldn’t commit myself and I wouldn’t have sex with anyone because getting Claire back was my goal. you got to have goals to give you meaning, give you purpose, give you excuse, right? It keeps you focused. It gives life a plot. It makes things interesting. It gives and keeps and makes you everything that I was lacking.
So I fooled around with both of them and for awhile it was fun. Within my set boundaries my instinctual, animal part had some free reign. The boundaries, like years before, I had sworn were moral boundaries – but, as always, it was truly fear. Fear of commitment, of sex, of feeling and sensation. Somewhere deep down in the pit of me, I knew all this, but I wouldn’t say it, I wouldn’t even write it, I wouldn’t even verbalize it or recognize it in my head.
The animal didn’t get to play in the boundaries for long, either, until I was faced with a true moral challenge for me. It was there all along, and I figured the natural course of things would work it’s way out. I argued all along that I wasn’t in the wrong here. No one else seemed to agree, though Sandra played like she did.
I often put it in this way: it wasn’t as if I was getting my dick wet with both of them or leading them on to believe that I was exclusive with either of them. To the contrary, from the very beginning I’d told them the situation – but the fact that Sandra knew I was screwing around with Anne but not the other way around began toe eat away at me.
I thought it would be easy to tell her, convincing myself that she would think it was no more of a big thing than I had convinced myself it was to me – but I just couldn’t’ say it to her. I threw out hints, telling myself she already knew, had to know. Did she know? Who knows? I still don’t know. All I know is that I was absolutely terrified of telling her, and that only proved to me again and again how immoral I truly considered myself in this situation deep down in the pits of my being.
I tried desperately to weigh things: did I like Sandra or Anne? Truth be known, I liked them both. As I tried to weight this issue, I notice correlations between them that became a secret obsession of mine. They were totally different beings, no doubt – but their like aspects hinted to me that I was chasing after something else. It was something that could partially be found in either of them, perhaps, and of which some aspects could be found in both. it was something binding them, but beyond them. Something of myself that I was projecting upon them, something from someone else that I was projecting on both of them, or perhaps I was projecting stuff from one of them onto the other. Whatever.
Then came the night that Duncan stepped in. A monumental occasion, to be sure.
I had been at Nathan’s, lying on the couch with Anne. Duncan was in a chair nearby,. and he suddenly turned to me and said, “Tim, wasn’t there something you wanted to say to Anne?”
Adrenaline rose, and I turned and shot him a glare. I then ignored him, but he repeated it.
“Not now, Duncan,” I shot at him, but he pressed. In all my years of knowing him, I’ve never wanted to hurt him more than I did in that moment. I couldn’t believe the nerve he had. Sure, he couldn’t tell how hard I’d been trying, how often this had been on my mind, how delicate I wanted to be with this. Wrong as all of that was, as much as I felt I should tell her, it was not his right to step in and push it like that. It was non of his damn business, as a matter of fact; it wasn’t his fucking place. No hard feeling remain today, but damn I was pissed.
She questioned what he had been referring to, but I tried to throw out hints that indicated anything but what he was referring to and the then played it down. Now there was no way in the fiery blazes of the hell I ceased to believe in that I could tell her.
Duncan and I talked outside Nathan’s front door a few days later. Another heated debate, this time on ethics – something we haven’t brushed upon, really, since I’d thrown out my pro-choice views in his face some time back and we eventually had to stop talking about it. Argument on the matter brought us nowhere.
As the date for Anne’s departure came ever-closer, we began hanging out more often. I had to ask her why she chose the military, and she told me that she could use the money, her parents needed the money, and she didn’t want to end up like her siblings. What about her writing, I asked her? It would take years, she told me, to get it as a profession. She’d need a side job, and anyway, she enjoyed it, she didn’t want to make it a job. Job would kill her passion for it.
In the end it wasn’t about me agreeing, or even understanding – it was just about accepting. I know I couldn’t change her mind, and I( didn’t try to – it was her life, her path. If she wanted to take some camouflage bus ride through hell to gain her paradise, so be it. Far be it from me to intervene with protests or otherwise.
I came to like yet another thing about her in that period: I could talk with her in depth about important things, higher things – spirituality, the cosmos, the Big Questions – while we were fooling around. It was the perfect mixture of the primitive and the higher, the spiritual and material. Things often got heated, and I’d be on the edge of giving it, to saying the hell with it – but she’d stop me.
“You don’t want that,” she’d say to me, echoing the summation of all the things I’d been preaching about my desire for Claire that summer; things I’d said in a less-heated state of mind. “You love Claire, remember?”
And I feared everything: Claire, Anne, sex, love. Truth and lie.
So back to that morning right before Anne left for the Army, right after I vomited my guts out, fell asleep, and Anne and I had coffee.
That morning was horror. I don't know if either of us slept. All I remember is lying in her room and feeling that strange feeling I haven't had before or since and tried to capture in elaborate versions of a short story ever since: a short story I entitled `death at the door'. I must have rewrote that story a dozen times since that day in 1998.
But we hugged each other, we kissed, we cried, and as it got closer to the hour we spoke less and less. I remembered reading these posters on her wall that has a religious slant to them. believe I went off on that a little; if I couldn't bitch about the military, I'd go for the other type of organization I distained, and that was religion.
Eventually they came to the door of her room, took her bags, we hugged and she got in the car and drove away. I watched them leave a trail of dust behind them. Her mother asked if I could stay for dinner; I thanked her but declined. I had to get home. I didn't really. I drove off and cussed and cried and screamed until my throat was sore.
She returned, as I said, in the Fall of 1999. We hung out, drank coffee at local restaurants and talked. The girl I knew was still there, but she had certainly underwent a transformation. There were things I could pinpoint: her attitude, her general approach to life, her values. But there was something more -- something undefined that tried it's best to hide behind her eyes.
With her money from the Army, she’d bought a thick collection of CDs – which, it seems, is mandatory for Army people – and a brand spanking new bright fucking red car. Every weekend that month we'd hang out, usually just drinking coffee and smoking and talking like the old days. It almost seemed as if she was back completely -- no change at all.
Then there was the day she came over and began to talk with my mother in our front yard. I felt pathetic, betrayed and almost abandoned as I stood there with my hands deep in my pockets and my feet kicking at the grass. I was pushed off to the side with nothing to do but try and think up some subtle strategy that would allow me to weasel in on the conversation. Not only were they talking fluently, but my mother was giving her that look of respect I was never given.
She began telling my mother all about her experiences where she was presently stationed in Korea. My mother was amazed at how she'd jumped on the Army bandwagon and would be set for life when she got out. She was awed by Anne's posture, eye contact and confidence. She even liked Anne's brand spanking new bright fucking red car. Then mom said it.
"I'm proud of you -- it's good that someone’s getting it together and doing something with their life."
I just stood there in disbelief of what my mother had said -- specifically, the less-than-subtle emphasis she placed on `someone' and the notably less-than-subtle indication in her voice that that someone was me. I was confused by Anne's lack of reaction. Initially, I thought maybe Anne's lack of response was because she hadn't caught what my mother had said. That I knew to be a load of shit, though, for Anne is a very bright girl.
I now know what should’ve been obvious then, and it was part of that `undefined something' that was residing behind Anne's eyes since her return: they had an unspoken agreement as to how hopeless I was. Since birth mom had played a significant role in nurturing the pathetic son that stood beside her. For years Anne had waited for me to break out of the mould; to die and be reborn, as she had finally done. Even in the metaphorical sense, though, I feared death as much as sex.
One evening in October we went over to the house of Anne's sister, Janice. We saw an elderly face greet us at Janice’s door – this woman, I was told, looked after Shelly’s kids. I believe she had two of them, though I don’t remember actually having seen them. Shelly was Janice’s roommate. Neither were home, so we were alone with the old lady.
I looked around as they talked, glancing at furniture, and then came to the pictures. On some coffee table or mantle I saw a picture that I found immediately interesting – a photo of three babies laid side by side, all looking identical. It stuck in the back of my mind, but I didn’t think about it all that much at the time.
The lady soon left and we watched part of Anne’s video, which depicted some scenes from her time in Korea and Raul. As we were at the kitchen table talking and drinking coffee, a tall, skinny, blond-haired girl walked in. I didn’t know why, but she immediately gave me a creepy feeling. I felt very anxious around her – especially anxious. I couldn’t quite place it at first, but there was something about this girl that didn’t settle well with me. She had a odd energy about her; she gave off a strange vibe. It seemed as if there was something missing from her, something vital, something fundamentally different. I was soon formally introduced who I had, by that time, determined to be Shelly.
Later on I’d learn that Shelly was quite the pot-head, and was known for sleeping around and for being a bit “out there.” I somehow convinced myself that this was why she’d made me feel so awkward, but it still just didn’t seem to explain it. I was `out there', I smoked pot, I had friends who were incredibly sexually active and did a vast array of drugs. I had nothing against any of these things. What the hell was it about this girl?
It was only after Anne, Janice and I went to a nearby mall that I came to stare dead into the eyes of what seemed to be the answer.
All I heard as we walked into a store was Janice saying, “Anne, you should by this, put it on and scared the hell out of Shelly.” Anne let out a slight laugh, Janice was giggling up a storm and even I, before determining what the hell they were talking about, laughed a little. Then I looked up, almost bumping into someone -- or so I had thought.
I found myself staring into big, black, slanted eyes and a gray-white chalky face. I looked up staring dead into the face of an alien.
Every nerve on edge, every alarm system going off in my body, flight or flight reflex oscillating between two options and leaving me frozen in my tracks, it took me a few moments before I realized that we had walked into a costume store and I was staring into a plastic mask.
Adrenalin still rushing through my system with my eyes wide and mouth agape, I stepped back and looked down. I looked at Janice, who met my eyes and seemed rather confused about the look on my face. I then tried to play it all down.
After it seemed appropriate to question what she’d been talking about when we first came into the store – as I said, sometimes I catch whiff of the fact that my brain makes correlations that aren’t there – I found out that Janice thought it was hilarious that Shelly had repeated nightmares about aliens coming into her room and abducting her aboard their “flying saucers.”
"Your kidding," I said.
"Yeah," Janice said, "she’s weird. She can’t even look at their faces it freaks her out so much."
Something around that time began to strike me as intriguing: Anne knew three separate persons that I knew of who had associations with what they presumed to be extraterrestrials. I believed I’d seen them, Shelly apparently thought she’d seen them, and Emma believed that she was one of them. Twice is a coincidence; three times and you begin to wonder if there’s a deeper meaning to it all.
One late October evening as Janice, Anne and I were at the table sipping coffee and talking, I was doodling, and sketched some images of the aliens. Janice laughed and said I should leave it on the fridge for Shelly when she got home. In actuality, I knew Shelly was coming home soon and had drawn it for the purposes of catching Shelly’s attention so that it might inspire conversation on the topic. I took the suggestion of Janice and put it on the fridge.
Shelly eventually came in, went to get something out of the fridge and notice it immediately. She asked if I was the artist. I said yes and worked the conversation to a point where I could ask whether she’d seen anything without it seeming too obvious. She went on to tell me how she had been on the porch of her former residence when she saw a light object, not a plane, hovering in the sky. Then another came and flew beside the first one. Then another. Then another. Her boyfriend at the time witnessed the event as well.
It was getting good, but then someone made an off comment and she got engaged in a conversation with Janice and never made it back to the topic, which it seemed to me she was uncomfortable talking about anyway. She did eventually claim that’s all she ever saw. She never mentioned the dreams Janice mentioned. Then she left for her room.
Janice, Anne and I played a game that involved only dye and sat at the table drinking coffee and talking for a few hours. We brushed atop many subjects -- the military, growing up, life and society, the government, sex. I told Janice a bit about my bizarre experiences. At least verbally she suspended judgment. We got to talking about government conspiracy, and that's where Anne stepped in.
Anne boldly proclaimed that the military could hardly organize putting in a light bulb let alone wage a global conspiracy against the American public spanning over half a century to cover up the existence of extraterrestrial life. I laughed a little. Conspiracy was a common practice used everyday in human social circles, I told her. I saw it in high school, at home, at work, amongst friends, between couples – why the fuck wouldn’t it happen in government?
“But you can’t know any of this for sure,” she told me. "Maybe these aren't extraterrestrials. Maybe it's something else. That's all really irrelevant, though -- ask yourself what you'd do if you did know what it was for certain."
"I'd know I'm not crazy, at least not completely," I told her. "And I'd know to prepare for the day that these creatures are done with whatever they're doing. And I think they're up to no good, to be honest."
"If you're right and the world is going to end, why waste your time mulling over it?" She said. "Try to change it, or simply enjoy life as it is while it's still here. Smell the roses."
Then she tried to explain Dizzy's No Thought philosophy to me. How I should just shut up the mind and focus on feeling, on emotion, on sensation. I told her that I’d certainly tried, but it just doesn’t work that way for me. It seemed impossible for me to keep it simple; to stop and smell the roses. I drown in my complexities and mow the roses to mulch. My mind won’t shut up, and the mystery won’t leave me alone.
She shook her head and looked at me quizzically, almost frustratingly. "Can't you just feel?"
Shortly thereafter, Shelly’s guy friend showed up and we all tried going to a few bars. They were closed by that time, and so were all grocery stores, so we finally gave up and went home.
It was fairly late by the time we got back to her sister's place, and though I wanted to go home, Anne convinced me to stay. I had no car to drive home with, as she had driven me to her sister's place, and she told me it was too late for driving. She promised she’d take me back in the morning, and pushed me to call my parents to tell them where I was. I really didn't want to do so, but I did, just to satisfy her. I ended up waking them up only to tell them what they would've known had they any sense at all: that I wouldn't be home until probably noon tomorrow.
We pulled out mattresses from the kid's room for us to sleep on the floor. Janice took the couch by the window, and Shelley went in her room with the green light, along with her friend. Anne and I pulled out mattresses from the kid's room for us to sleep on the floor. Anne's sister took the couch by the window. Anne and I lay on the mattress, with her head at my feet. I looked down at her closed eyes and sighed. There was no way I could sleep. I wouldn’t get to sleep for hours.
My mind couldn't help but fixate on Shelly and the strange feeling she gave me. I looked over at her door, and saw that she had replaced the normal light bulb you'd have in your room with a green light bulb. It gave her room and the hallway an eerie glow. The way the light crept out of the crack at the bottom of the door when she closed it with her boy inside didn't make it seem any less strange.
I wondered what they wanted, and why they were here. In the back of my mind I thought I knew the reason, but I needed to verify it some way, and the few people I had come across in the past, and the many more between then and when I write this now would seemingly do so. The only problem was I could never be sure if the correlations I made in my mind were truly reflections of reality or whether my perceptions were merely reflecting my deeply-held, ultimately delusional fears. There seemed to be no sure road to truth, and even if I knew that truth for certain -- and if it what I thought was true was true, that would one day be inevitable -- Anne was right, there wasn't a damn thing I could do about it. I could hardly help myself or bring out a change in myself. How could I steer a world away from this, a people against this? How could I stand before `them' and bring `them' down?
Damn truth, Anne seemed to say. Stare at it right in the face of that poison, that death, that futility, that nihilism, that hand that constantly beats you black and blue, that "foot stomping on the human face -- forever", say `No' to it's grip on you, turn towards life and say yes. Life is more important than knowledge -- especially when true knowledge can never be ultimately determined, and life is standing right in front of your face, waiting to fill the empty cups you called eyes and quench your thirst for meaning, to runneth your cup over. The secret, Anne said, echoing the Dizzy character I'd heard so much about but never meant, was to stop thinking and start living, to travel the distance to Here, Right Now.
And she taught me that night. With a step towards my horrors for the future lying bathed in green light just down the hall, on the mattress of that living room floor she brought me back to Now, to life, through a primitive ritual turned sacred.
