"I see you cause you won't get out of my way
I hear you cause you won't quit screaming my name
I feel you cause you won't stop touching my skin
I need you, they're coming to take you away."
-- BREAKING BENJAMIN, `Away'.

ANIMATORIAL.
by Rewired,
12/04/04,
4:55 AM.

Something strange is going on.

Over the years I have noted remarkable similarities in the girls I found myself attracted to. Some of these were blatantly obvious things that could be easily explainable by the instincts that make sense now thanks to my growing knowledge of evolutionary psychology. It is certainly incomplete as an explanation, however, because unlike animals we have a complex psychology. Our nervous system has the ability to `learn’, to be conditioned and imprinted, to absorb complex patterns that make us distinct as individuals. And due to our programmability (by variables of intensity and repetition, it seems) our genetically hardwired instinctual programs become flexible to a degree; we can even wage a war against them. Lost in the depths of thought, we forget to eat and sleep. Morals can inhibit the drive for sex.

And the unique patterns each of us aquires also makes human relations, and certainly our sex life, very different and much more complicated than other species who reproduce sexually. Why? Because we don't only look for a mate who fits the criteria demanded by our instincts, but by the criteria demanded by our society and culture as well as our own, unique personalities.

And in our personalities we find the real mystery.

Though not all of the qualities consistent in the girls I've been insatiably attracted to were initially `hidden' ones, enough of them were for me to note the parallels and begin wondering about it all. By `hidden’ qualities I mean to say things I didn't discover, at least consciously, until well after I was attracted to them and had engaged in lengthy conversations and interactions with them. Not everyone on my list of previous fixations or relationships have all the same things in common, hidden or otherwise, but so many strange things seem to tie them together that it becomes harder and harder to ignore as time goes on. It's like certain groups of them hold pieces to a puzzle, and if you put the pieces together you find a personality binding all of them together. It's as if through these women, I've been chasing some invisible girl -- some girl that in a more psychological and less occult sense, `possesses’ them and perhaps obscures my sight, disabling me from perceiving these specific women as they really are. She has a dark side and a light side, too. And with her, she brings not only the puzzle-pieces of a personality, but of a story, a circumstance, a situation.

Anyway, I call this girl my Phantom Girl.

Many men I know seem to be haunted by their very own Phantom Girl, and many women I know also certainly have their Phantom Boys. I've been possessed as one every now and again. People, I have noticed, tend to not only be attracted to the same personality types, but the nature of their relationships with these `significant others' tend to have remarkable similarities as well. For either sex, it's as if there's some continuity error in life; as if aspects of the same story are being played over and over with slight modifications. You find yourself falling for similar Others with similar histories, and between you and the Other there develops familiar situations, often with predictable beginnings and endings. It is predictable, in the very least, from those outside of the relationship; it is often more difficult for one to see from the inside. (And as a side note, here might be a reason why working with Johari's Window can be of great aide.)

How is it possible, though, that we are attracted to people with remarkably similar personalities and lives, even when we do not know their personalities and lives until long after we find ourselves attracted to them? Part of this might be explained by the apparent fact that on an unconscious level, we can often profile a person by sight alone.

Take, as evidence, a repeated experiment conducted at the Institute of Family Therapy in the UK on their new recruits. Before they get to know anyone else, they are asked to walk around a room full of people and, without talking with anyone, pick out a person who they think could be a missing member of their family. This couple then picks out two others, making a family of four, and then they go in to talk with a psychiatrist. They soon discover that they all have remarkable similarities in family background.

The explanation given to us by these psychiatrists is that in childhood we learn to give specific reactions in a given situation and over time these stimulus-responses get `fixed’ into a system of habit patterns; they become unconscious and automatic responses to our own internal conditions. So just as the body itself betrays the nature of the genes that produced it (as evidenced by evolutionary psychology), the way in which we use the body -- the gestures, the expressions, the tone of voice, the `body language’ -- betrays our subjective nature by reflecting it. In the gestures of a person lies the reflection of the emotional, the intellectual, the historical. And just as our own body language is `spoken' without our awareness of it, we can `hear’ and translate the body language of others just as unconsciously and automatically.

So perhaps to be drawn to someone before talking to them -- just by watching them, just by looking at them -- does not necessarily mean you are a shallow, materialistic, superficial fool with nothing but a hunger for the skin and primitive instincts aimed at procreation with which to justify yourself. Darwin doesn’t explain everything. Alchemy fills the gap in their expression `as above, so below; as within, so without.’

It may be difficult to accept that you do this, but we can see it take place with much more ease between other people. Again, it's easier to see from the outside looking in. Go to a bar and watch people. Watch them on the street, or at work. Close, receptive `people-watching' (which is analogous to bird-watching, but much more entertaining in my opinion) betrays these silent, unconscious, wordless conversations between people.

Then, however, another question arises. Evolutionary psychology indicates that physical attraction serves some genetic, evolutionary goal -- genetic survival, through the child. Could attraction to specific personality types serve some psychological, even spiritual goal? The psychologist Carl Jung thought so.

Jung explored, among other things, the masculine and feminine principals of the human psyche. To provide context: he believed that while growing up, as an adaptive measure, we emphasized certain portions of our internal personality, which he called the Ego, while the portions of our internal personality which we failed to actualize collected in the personal unconscious in sort of anti-ego, which he referred to as the Shadow. The Shadow therefore compensates for what the ego refuses or fails to manifest in conscious recognition, and we tended to project the Shadow onto others of the same sex. In every Jekyll, then, there resides a Hyde; in every Banner there is a Hulk. In every Dorothy, a Witch. In every top-dog, an under-dog. In every submissive, a dominatrix. When exploring oneself, the Shadow is usually the first figure to be wrestled with and integrated.

I think I’ve spent a good many years wrestling with my Shadow in his various projections and his manifestations in my artwork, poetry, and writing. Read my story Again, as an example.

Once one has journeyed far enough into the Shadow, one comes across another `personality’ -- the sygzy. Specifically, for a woman this would be her Animus, or the male aspect of her female psyche that she projects onto man; in a man's case, this would be his Anima, the female aspect in man that he projects onto woman.

Our construction and identification with the inner Ego gave rise to the compensatory Shadow, so it makes sense that the Anima developed to maintain psychic balance out of our construction and identification with the outer Persona, another conscious portion of our personality. The Persona is that conscious portion which is involved in the external world, the social personality which Jung viewed as a `mask' or medium for the ego. The Ego is our self image; the Persona is our public or social image -- the mask we wear for the herd. We may hold back quite a bit with other people that we do not hold back from ourselves; we may even forge a personality among some people.

The Anima compensates for the Persona, so that the more intellectual a man is, for instance, the more emotional his Anima becomes. And the more we stress our male persona, the more we project our anima onto the significant women in our lives.

With the Animus and Anima come many misconceptions, however, as it has come to be with a lot of Jung’s work -- mostly, I assume, because the guy was often very vague and his concepts tended to evolve throughout his writings. To clear up one misconception among many: the existence of the Anima and Animus would not imply that deep down every woman wants some lesbian action (oh, how I wish it were true) or that every man, deep down, in the words of Kevin Smith, really `love the cock’. Girls with an animus can be `strictly dickly’, and guys with an anima can have an exit-only pooper. All Jung’s concept of the sygzy really means is this: that in every culture the male is expected to play a certain defined role, and the woman is expected to play another. Obviously, being a man involves something universal, as does being a woman -- and this obviousness comes down to plumbing. But when we think of what it means to be a man, we don’t just think a human with a penis and an Adam’s apple, we find particular personality characteristics associated with man as well. And for the most part, this isn’t species-specific, this is cultural.

We are all born with the characteristic qualities society designates as masculine and feminine, but society teaches the individual to associate certain qualities with the male and other qualities to the female and to identify with the qualities assigned to a person’s sex-type and disown the other. And as, for instance, a man associates these buried qualities with a female, when his instincts drive him towards the female of the species in general he will specifically gravitate towards females who have the greatest amount of his buried `feminine’ qualities -- the socially-acceptable method of achieving wholeness.

Somtimes, however, `socially acceptable' isn't an option.

This I discovered when I had moved from my parent's house in the sticks to a college town full of diverse individuals. Up until this point in time, I had pretty much bought Jung’s concept of the sygzy. But among those diverse college-town characters were homosexuals. Right away, I had doubt that Jung’s concept would work with them, and I was suprised Jung had never considered this. I decided that the concept of the sygzy must therefore be inaccurate -- but upon closer inspection, I found I was wrong, and it was due to one of those common misconceptions. Here's why: put simply, homosexuals are born with a sexual drive aimed at the same physiological sex. This, however, is put too simply, as homosexuals can either have a psychological sex at odds with their physiological sex or one which is atune with it. You can have, then, an individual with a female physiology and a feminine psychology who desires women (the femme lesbian), or you can have an individual with a female physiology and a masculine psychology who desires women (the butch lesbian). Jung’s concept works because in, for instance, a lesbian relationship one always takes the masculine role of butch and the other always takes the feminine role of femme. They are both still seeking their `other half’. The femme finds her animus in the butch, the butch finds her anima in the femme.

This just emphasizes that what Jung was talking about were the roles we are culturally conditioned to associate with the male and female sex, and that it is these roles, not the sexes themselves, which give rise to the Persona and the compensating Anima or Animus. If the female is straight, she desires males. If the male is straight, he desires females. If the female is gay, she desires females. If the male is gay, he desires males. But either way you slice it, if the persona is male, there is an anima; if the persona is female, there is an animus. There is always that duality to be reconciled.

What are these qualities that we assign to the masculine and feminine, however? Typically, in our patriarchal culture, to be a man means to be in control, to be less emotional and more rational, to be competitive and aggressive as opposed to cooperative and empathic, to drink our beer and scratch our balls and belch and fart as we watch football. The qualities our culture has assigned to women, on the other hand, may include such things as tenderness, patience, sensitivity, receptivity, gentleness, the emotional, closeness to nature.

And granted, times are changing -- my Anima is certainty evidence of that -- for the roles aren’t as strict and distinct as they used to be in our world. This becomes evident when we look at the feminist movement and women in the workforce, when we see a metal band like Metallica embracing male bonding and taking hug-breaks between head-banging, screaming and thrashing on electric guitars. I’m not saying this is necessarily bad. My beliefs, in fact, are to the contrary. All this really means, though, is that we have numerous different choices as individuals as to what we expect from the opposite sex and how we perceive them; it doesn’t eliminate the dualism at all, it just gives us the cultural thumbs-up to choose into which category we can throw certain qualities. And if we define our masculine persona as cooperative, then we are bound to see woman as aggressive.

The Anima’s influence on a male resides behind his emotions, ideas and attitudes. She is the force behind relations with others, especially the opposite sex, and tends to falsify and intensify his reactions. As a whole, there are negative and positive aspects to the Anima -- she can be a beauty as well as a bitch.

As a female figure, she can be, in dreams, visions and projections, everything from the mother, to the crone, to the lover, to the seductress or spiritual guide. As an inner, subjective experience she can give rise to what has been referred to as `anima moods' which can manifest as: irritation, depression, insecurity, touchiness, uncertainty, nihilism, pessimism, boredom, fear of death, disease and accidents, and full-fledged all-around bitchiness. Possessed by anima qualities, the man makes brutal remarks in which he devalues nearly everything in life, finding morose satisfaction in twisting the truth cheaply. He is never spontaneous. He dwells over things dead and gone, reflecting on his life so much that he finds no time to actually live it. He has gone from an active participant to a passive witness in life. His relationships with others are rather childish.

For those who know me: sound familiar?

The development of a man's Anima is reflected in how he relates to women in general; how well he can note and pierce through his projections onto the women in his life and his situations with them. Jung believed there were four stages in the development of the Anima, which he personified as Eve, Helen, Mary and Sophia.

The Eve stage is molded by the personal mother and his relationship with her; if a male grew up not knowing a mother, the image is still present there -- the image of the mother as the one who provides nurture and security. He is dependent on a female and without her he cannot function; when with her, he is easily controlled by her.

The second stage is expressed by Helen of Troy; here, the Anima is an image of the sexual ideal, and man is caught up in her spell. He is prone to elaborate sexual and romantic fantasies. Even if he is looking for a long-term relationship, they will always be short-lived affairs or sexual escapades, because no real woman can live up to his idealistic expectations.

Stage three is Mary, and this is where he has genuine feelings of devotion to a particular woman and there is good potential for long-term relationships. It is at this point that he can pierce through his projections and see a woman as she is, independent of his positive and negative emotions. Sexuality is not an autonomous, instinctual function that drives him, but is integrated into his life in a healthy manner: he knows of the difference between love and lust, cooperation and dependence.

Sophia is the fourth and final stage, and here the Anima is raised up to unbelievable spiritual heights. She functions as a guide to internal life, acting as a mediator between the conscious and unconscious, cooperating in the search for meaning, motivating one to work through philosophical issues, pointing the way out of nihilism, becoming the creative muse. And sex? Here, it is spiritual.

According to Jung, the Anima in man should grow in development from stage one to four as he grows older and exhausts the possibilities inherent in each. We naturally integrate the anima, then, through a kind of catharsis. This is not to ignore the fact that some men never escape the grips of Eve, however. How does one evolve the Anima if one gets stuck, then -- and how can one speed up the evolution if he has the inclination to do so?

According to Jung, the goal here is to integrate the denied contents and qualities he has stored within the Anima into consciousness, not to embody her. It is not the goal to become the other any more than it is to deny the other -- its the goal to blend with the other; to be 360 degrees, to be complete. The route toward evolving and integrating the Anima and becoming whole again is to confront her squarely, not by running away. He must learn to take her seriously and express her contents creatively, but at the same time to be careful not to follow her blindly -- he should create an environment oriented towards cooperation and honest consideration as opposed to battles based on the unwillingness to compromise. True, honest communication must be achieved. As we exhaust and reclaim the elements in one stage, we move onto the next.

Elsewere, it has been warned that if the transition from one stage to another happens at all, it rarely occurs without great struggle. The reason is that the human mind is so naturally ambivalent to change, associating it with a kind of death: as much as one's mind wishes to grow, it is also very frightened of the unfamiliar and unpredictable and therefore resistant to change. A psychological crisis is often the answer, as it thrusts us into chaos, into the unknown in a way that is inescapable. This goes well in accordance with what Campbell explained; that is, that ritual, specifically rites of passage (of separation, initiation, and return) are the means by which we are born for the second time, out of the womb of dependency and into the world of self-dependency or self-responsibility.

And this fact may shed light on sex, too. Though sex is an act that is instinctual and for the purposes of creating a child and continuing the species, it is not only this in regards to human beings with their developed minds. Sex becomes not only an instinctual structure, but one to be filled. As with any ritual, sex is characterized with the intent or emotions behind it. If we were only animals, having sex with one member of the opposite sex would be the same as any other. In my experience, at least, this is not the case. Instinct demands the structure of the act; psychology demands the substance behind it. With the right person, sex can be a ritual that brings about an experience of unity, the experience of being whole or complete again. Between sweat and skin, we can touch the soul. It’s a shame some major religions look down upon sex.

Where am I? At what stage is my Anima, my Phantom Girl? I don’t know exactly. I look around and I see faces of Eve, but I can see the rest of them as well. None the less, I believe this concept is worth exploring and experimenting with. What seems clear to me is that Phantom Girl continues to haunt me in horrible and beautiful ways, and I need to see beyond her. Whatever I have stored within Phantom Girl, perhaps once I receive from her -- once I read the message in the bottle, so-to-speak -- she will disappear, and the control she has over my mind will become a distant memory.

It’s worth a shot.

"Sex ought to be a wholly satisfying link between two affectionate people from which they emerge
unanxious, rewarded, and ready for more."
-- Alex Comfort.

"I want to tell you a terrific story about oral contraception. I asked this girl to sleep with me and she said `no.'"
-- Woody Allen.

"Procrastination is like masturbation, they both feel great until you realize you’re just fucking yourself."
-- TheCritic.

SEX, MORE THAN SEX & MY LIFE AS MASTURBATION.
by Rewired,
12/28/03.

I used to really like parties. Now I just want them all to just shut the fuck up sometimes, you know? I like Vern, but he can be a piss-raving lunatic sometimes. And Terra? She's too fucking sexy and she knows it. It pisses me off when she turns to Vern and the dynamic between them gets working so well. And I know it'll never happen between her and I. Fucking goth girl. But that's not the point.

"Isn't any sex better than no sex?" She asks, as I sit down in the living room, happening upon a conversation I was not paying attention to.

I shake me head. "No." And that's a slap in my own face. Yeah, that's right, it's not just sex. Wow, that might indicate I'm not just a fucking pervert and I want something more. Like a dynamic or something.

"Really?" She seems surprised. Surprised I see a fucking difference. A fucking difference between just sex and more than sex.

"Yeah, the first girl I had sex with, I don't regret it," I told her. "The second girl, the one were I didn't finish... it just wasn't the same."

"Why not?" She said. "Was she a dirty whore?"

I cringed. I almost got a bit pissed off there. "No," I said, "it just wasn't right. It was all about... convenience."

It's pointless, though. She just doesn’t get it. Her or Sandra. It’s discomforting to have friends who are supposed to be this close to you provide evidence that they’ve hardly taken the time to scrape the surface of your soul.

Other evidence of their ignorance came through two evenings previous. It was on our way home. Sandra, Terra and I had gone to a bar to watch a punk band do covers and some drunken man with no front teeth tell really bad jokes. I had a Smirnoff and didn't even finish it. I smoked a billion cigarettes. I eyed attractive women. So anyway, we were on our way home and had just pulled up to that long red light at the five-way intersection. Terra was in the back, Sandra driving, me, shotgun. Sandra and I began arguing about something trivial. Then she started that patronizing, `calm down' thing, where she acts as if I over-reacted way more than she had, which translates to way more than I should have. She told me how I was so tense. So intense. How I couldn't just relax. I was so aggressive. She started massaging my shoulder, because she knows my weaknesses. A woman who can do that can own me. My head dropped, she massaged my neck and back with one hand. Terra echoed Sandra's comment, how I'm always so intense all the time, how I should just relax and calm down. Same bullshit she'd said in the cubby hole. Then, the familiar sentence.

"You need to get laid."

I'll take NO SHIT for 500, Alex.

So here's the thing, which I would've hoped to have been obvious: I'd like to get laid, I'd like to fuck like a madman, but I don't want to just fuck anyone. I'd like to fuck someone I have a deep connection with, as anything else seems cold, mechanical, empty. And I've been trying. Ironic it is, that the `you need to get laid' comment came out of Terra's mouth. Not that she's alone in this opinion, mind you.

During the party at the Kent house, someone had taken the magnet-letters on the refrigerator and spelled out my name. Then Sandra and Nick had decided that `needs to get laid' should be added. It's like they can see the HELP WANTED sign hanging over my fly but they can't see the SELECTIVE ENTRY ONLY written in fine print below it, or the neon VACANCY sign flashing on my shirt around the chest area. And as for any hope of actually being understood down the road: I should've noted the DEAD END sign years ago.

Sandra's getting laid by her boy. Terra? She doesn't say much about it, but I have the feeling that she's getting some from her ex. She wouldn't consider me, but she'd let the jerk-off in her again. Me? Twice, the same evening and morning, a little over four years ago now. Last century. Fucking pathetic. I mean, I can't even talk with a girl. Can't talk to strangers in a bar. I need to be comfortable around a person first. So I meet people I know through people I already knew. At the base are the group of people who originally approached me.

Convenience. Won't take the challenge or initiative.

Sandra recommends I use the device bought for me, for 50$ by a friend, at our Spice of Life Party. You know those candle parties and Tupperware parties that girls are always throwing? Well, a Spice of Life party is kind of like that, only they sell sex toys and things of that nature. Vern -- out of some form of guilt, I think, for going after Terra the Goth Girl, who he knew I was interested in -- bought me the sex toy as some sort of compensation. I was okay with the him-and-Terra thing, really. She's obviously not interested in me for one reason or another, even though she was in the past, even though she tortured me with my desires and her act of feeding them through being allowed to do tiny things but not the Great Deed that night so long ago in the cubby hole. So I was okay. No real grudge. But he still felt a bit guilty, I think, so he bought me the whacking-off-device. I opened it a few days ago. But it was in the wrapper, not clean, I was sure, so I cleaned it. In the process, I also cleaned off all the lube. I don't have any lube on hand. So I stuck with manual labor.

I tell Sandra, she says I can use soap or anything. Yeah, I know, rub my hands together and build up a lather, I said. Whatever.

Masturbate your mind with books and ideas never put to the test. Masturbate your heart with hopes that can never be fulfilled. Masturbate your yearnings with sexual fantasies of every deranged form and flavor. Masturbate your nether regions.

Masturbation is substitution for the real thing. Like watching a movie instead of living a life. Taking a drug to be happy instead of making yourself happy. Jacking off is what our lives are all about, I wanted to tell them.

Our callused lives. De-sensitized. Lubeless.

Our so-called lives are masturbation.

I'd kill my ego sometimes for something real.

"Why is the cat sleeping in my underwear drawer?"
-- My Wobbly Roommate, in an e-mail, 7/26/04.

AFRAID.
by Ninex,
7/26/04

I find myself being torn
between my two greatest fears
My mind drives away
grinding at the gears
Something that I long for
that I'm scared to go without
But why am I still scared
as this fear leads to doubt
There are two roads before me
and signs showing the way
But I stand here looking forward
choosing neither one today
To my left lies a dark forest
and a path to take alone
To my right is the sunlight
happiness I'm being shown
But I’m afraid to make a choice
I procrastinate once again
I lean towards my left
the path with nothing to gain
For five years I've put this off
I'm more afraid to choose
But why can't I turn the other way
knowing I have nothing left to lose
My true fear draws closer
yet I still walk this way
Why can't I turn around
and find something to say
I told myself to wait
until I thought I was ready
I have waited long enough
but my legs become unsteady
My second greatest fear
is this choice I have to make
But now my mind is made up
it's a chance I have to take

"In us the will to live and the will to die should be equally strong and free, should be recognized as complements of each other, neither complete in itself; and the antithesis between them a device invented for our own amusement. All energy implies vibration. Man is miserable in the last analysis because he fancies that when what gives him pleasure is destroyed, as he knows it must be sooner or later, the loss is irreparable; so he shores up his crumbling walls instead of building himself a better house. We all cling to outworn customs of every kind and lie to ourselves about love when we know in our hearts that there is no more oil in the lamp, and that the best thing we can do is to look for a new one. We are afraid to lose whatever we have. We have not the sense to see that whatever it may be, it is bound to go sooner or later, that when it does its place will be filled by something just as good, and nothing is more stupid than to try to set back the sun upon the dial of Ahaz. As soon as we learn that everything is only half, that it implies its opposite, we can let ourselves go with a light heart, finding just as much fun in the red leaves of autumn as in the green leaves of spring. What is interesting is the complete cycle. Life itself would be deplorably petty were it not consecrated by the fact of its incomprehensibility and dignified by the certainty that however petty, futile, baroque and contemptible its career may be, it must close in the sublime sacrament of death.
As it is written in The Book of the Law, 'death is the crown of all.'"
-- Aleister Crowley, Confessions.

“I need a sunny day.”
-- Igby Goes Down.

RISE & FALL OF A CALIFORNIA SUN.
9/14/04

I had seen her come into the fast food restaurant where I work a few times. She was my favorite customer to watch, and I was always eyeing her. She came in her work uniform, so I knew off the bat that she worked at the fast food place right across the street, and I assumed she had developed the habit of coming over to our fine palace of grease on her break. Through word of mouth, I learned soon thereafter that her name was Kate and that she also worked at the same place I did, only she was part time and worked mornings, whereas I was full time and worked nights. I obsessed over her. I didn't do a damn thing about it, and sure, I thought of other girls, but the spotlight in my mind was hogged by her from the moment I first laid eyes upon her.

Then I came in one day to work, early as I usually do. On routine, I come in about an hour early, get my free coffee and chill outside, usually reading or writing for an hour and a half or so before my shift began. Well, on this particular day we were having an inspection: all the big-wigs, higher-ups and corporate shitheads were coming, and so they had everyone working. The shifts kind of crashed; worlds collided. So when I went up to get my usual coffee, there Kate was, on register.

Her eyes were vivid, penetrating, maddeningly beautiful. I was paralyzed when I went to order. I literally couldn't talk, I couldn't move for a second. I was like a deer caught in headlights. She had her red-dyed hair in pig-tails, and her hair was wet. With her hair up as it was, I could see, as she turned around, that there was a tattoo on the back of her neck. It was of a sun. I was vaguely reminded of the large sun tattooed on Claire’s back, the emblem from the Sublime band. The one on Kate’s back as small, however, and it resembled the Celtic sun that was an emblem from another band I really liked, GODSMACK. In short, everything about her screamed at me, grabbed my attention. Somehow I managed to make out the words, "just a large coffee" and I nervously handed her my money and moved to the side to await my order. And that did it. That was that. My mind was now focused whole-heartdly on her. It wouldn't waver. And like some high-school mother-fucking moron, I couldn't talk to her, couldn't tell her how amazing I felt when she looked at me. So what did I do?

I did the natural thing: I told everyone else.

I'd make a comment here and there, or I'd come up to someone every few days and say something to them, ensuring before or after I said it that it would `stay between us' and they shouldn't tell her or spread it around. Fun fact: every ear is a microphone for the herd. But I knew that. Unconsciously -- maybe higher, maybe closer to consciousness; maybe semiconsciously -- I knew it was bound to get back to her, and that, deep down, is what I intended. It was what I counted on. Why? Simple: it's the shy guy's only means of communicating things he feels rather threatened by. I had learned from my previous mistakes, though. You see, some shy guys make the mistake of just telling one, singular person -- one member of the herd -- that he likes this girl, for instance. But that's just stupid. Why? Because by the time the message gets back to the girl you want it to get to, the message gets stained with the noise of every brain and mouth and ear it's traveled through. It's edited and translated. Horrendously abridged. At best the end product is an exaggerated truth; at worst, a garbled myth. It's a lot like the game of telephone, where you sit in a big circle of people and you whisper something into one person's ear and they whisper what they heard into the next person's ear and by the time it gets back to you, the original sender, it's something so far removed from what you originally said that you burst out laughing, stand confused, or simply shudder in disgust.

So if you tell just one person, the message will get garbled and stained with the noise by the time it gets to her -- it's the telephone game effect. But if you tell many different people independently, there's a greater chance of more genuine information making it to the intended target. It's not as genuine as it would be if the target would hear it straight from the horse's mouth, so-to-speak, but the general message can be distinguished by the target from the noise it acquired on the long road to her ears. The target can, in other words, decode the myth and get the general gist of it.

And of course the people I'd told said that they hadn't talked, that I could trust them, but I knew it was only a matter of time. In the herd, there are no secrets. In the meantime, I didn't get my hopes up as to what she'd think about it all once she knew. I just obsessed in solitude, kicking myself in the ass for being some sophomoric shy guy trying to reach out to a girl through some rather high-school technique.

After a rather long period of obsessing, Mitch approached me one night in the back kitchen. Mitch is one of those personalities you cannot help but develop an interest in after only a conversation or two. His head is crammed with endless nuggets of diverse information that would make him virtually untouchable in almost any game of trivia. He calls cigarettes `squares’ and atomic bombs `dirty bombs’, and sometimes after you say something that he’s apparently supposed to fill him with sympathy or a sense of obligation he’ll pull out the empty white insides of his pockets with his hands, take a look at them, shrug, look back up at you and say, “sorry, I’m all out of give-a-shits.” He is republican in his political views and certainly an alpha male, but I've caught that he is not as `might-makes-right' and as `bullet-is-the-answer-to-everything' as he often tries to make himself out to be. It's just that this man -- a year younger than I, a part-time cop and a full-time McDonalds manager -- is dedicated to projecting this tough, confident, endlessly competitive male image. He prides himself on his intelligence and on his particular in-born talent for applying strategy -- and, I must say, for good reason. But along with this stereotypical male persona one finds, soon enough, a coexisting antithesis in him as well: truly unique and independent qualities that differentiate him from the macho masses. He even has some undeniably feminine qualities, none of which he makes any effort to conceal. He is very confident and self-reliant, and to me that makes him an admirable individual (and an intriguing subject of study).

In place of our usual political and ethical discussions -- and the theological debates we would, and not too far in the future, unavoidably find ourselves entwined in -- he brought up a rather simple question that night, straight up and out of the blue.

"Are you into Goth chicks?"

Instantly I was reminded of the insatiable Terra, who had subjected me to torture only a day or two earlier, and I answered with a resounding: "Yes."

He then went on to quickly explain that he had spoken to Kate during the inspection. A mixture of anger and fear immediately swept over me, but, having expected such a reaction, he quickly added that I need not worry, for he had not revealed to her that she was a subject of my interest. He did, however, do a bit of reconnaissance work for me, he told me.

Apparently she revealed that she was often categorized by others as `gothic', that she had a tongue ring, that she was almost 20 years of age. Was she single? She had a live-in boyfriend but that they were having problems. She also had several tattoos, and she was -- and I nearly fell over when he said this -- a refuge from California. The fact that she was gothic-like reminded me of Terra, and the fact that she was from California reminded me of Claire. What was it with the striking similarities with all the women I find myself attracted to? I wondered if there were any more. I quickly asked Mitch an important question, but she was not, as far as he new, employed in any branch of the military.

He asked me if I was going to go for her, and I told him that she was probably out of my league. As much as I wanted to get to know her and do nasty things to her, I told him, I would most likely continue obsessing for some time, but it was a fixation that would pass. He offered help, he offered to set me up, to be a medium between her and I, but I flat out told him no. If anything was going to happen, her or I, or her and I, had to initiate it. I wanted to do this myself, if I did it at all. And I told him that knowing me, I probably wouldn't do anything about it at all, so nothing would happen.

He asked me what I was so worried about, and I told him that I was simply a nervous guy. I was also a very `me' person; I was quite the isolationist. I liked my free time, and there wasn't enough of it as it presently stood -- a relationship involved the investment of time, energy and attention, which I already had invested in solitary pursuits, as well as money, which I was also endlessly short on.

And that's when Mitch stepped with this his, "fuck `em and leave `em" philosophy -- treating women as sex objects, using them as instruments of pleasure until boredom presented itself and then dropping them like bags of sand and moving on towards the next one. Mitch seemed to share this philosophy with Ron -- another manager, a hyper-sexed, sexist black man who just about everyone in the place liked. He said he liked me, he respected me, because -- and I quote -- I "wasn't one-a them punk-ass white boys". I wondered, then, what kind of punk-ass white boy I really was. Though I didn't always agree with him, especially in his more sexist, black supremacist moods, I admired him as much as I admired Mitch, which was a great deal. And though Ron shared Mitch's "fuck `em and leave `em" philosophy, overall Ron seemed to me to be more of a romantic. He seemed to view sex as a spiritual experience, as did I, whereas Mitch seemed to often see it as just another area to apply strategy, to use a girl for her resources under the law of `might makes right'. And that may sound unfair, but that's how it often came across to me with him.

Overall, for a Christian, Mitch had beliefs pretty influenced by evolution and `survival of the fittest', and I could say the same about Ron. Not that I fit the stereotypical atheist profile or anything.

I told him I couldn't do that, though. The "fuck `em and leave `em" philosophy just didn't settle well with me at all; I wasn't like that. This attitude, apparently unheard of, just fueled a fire already blazing, giving both him and Ogre (who is a rather feminine, elitist manager) further justification for categorizing me as a "pacifist" and a "humanist" and to continue referring to me by the little nickname they'd given me: "Gandhi."

And the attitude of Ron and Mitch, their general perspective, made me want to classify them as primitives: treating women as bodies to fuck until a better body came along. And maybe my instinct to discriminate against them on that basis revealed a lot of fear in me -- specifically, that this whole drive for intimate partnership really was nothing more than a product of evolution, and that our concept of love was, as I had once so persistently attested, nothing more than a fictitious, romantic drape constructed by our higher cortex so that we can preserve and justify to our highly-evolved human brains the instincts that are necessary for our species survival and at the same time feel higher, more moral and more sufficiently-advanced then, for instance, two butt-sniffing dogs who want nothing more than to `get it on' and `do it like they do on the Discovery Channel'.

Yet I still told myself that Ron and Mitch's philosophy was faulty -- that we saw more in a girl than just the desire for sex. Perhaps love was not just about evolution and sex and animalistic impulses geared towards biological survival. Perhaps instinct was part of it, but not all of it. Perhaps love, relationship, companionship really was something more. Perhaps I could really try and have something with this girl; something meaningful. My feeble and continuing attempts with Terra had certainly failed.

Even if that were true, though -- even if I were to accept that my motives in desiring Kate were as spiritual as they were biological -- so much as walking up to her and saying `hi' seemed to be the most difficult thing in the world.

The long, hard road towards saying `hi' was undoubtedly aided by two friends and co-workers of mine, Rena and Mary. I had directly told Mary about my insatiable attraction towards Kate, but my means of communicating this to Rena was a bit different. One day, right after Kate had left, I grabbed Rena, pulled her aside, dry humped her leg and growled into her ear that I wanted to do wonderfully nasty things to that girl.

It turned out that everyone wanted to set us up. More than two people had come up to me, and in what seemed sincere honesty, said to me: "I can definitely see you two together." That felt good, but it sounded weird. Someone can see me with a girlfriend, let alone a girl so maddeningly beautiful? I wasn't sure I could even see me with a girlfriend. I again told everyone that there would be no setting up -- this, I said, I have to do on my own, if at all. Rena kept pushing me to say `hi' to her in the very least. It took me another week and a half, but I finally said `hi' to her. I just looked at her and said it as I was walking passed her, and I wasn't even sure if she heard me. I felt so immature. Why hadn't I talked to her directly from the beginning? This was so high school, and I was 25 years old. I was pathetic. This was never going to happen, I was dead certain. Until the day Kate came in after her shift, handed Rena a piece of paper and said to deliver it, so I was told, to `Bob'. Rena handed it to me, I opened it up, and there was her name and number.

Now I thought at first perhaps the number was not meant for me, for I am, of course, not named Bob. Only later on would I discover what this truly meant -- you see, it was not `Bob' she had called me, but BOB: an acronym for `Boy On Back-line.' This meant, of course, that she was kind of weird, too, which made me feel a whole lot better.

After Rena handed me the number, though, I was feeling even more nervous. What the hell was I supposed to do? Call her. Yeah. Call her, obviously.

Now, somewhere in the back of my mind a random little piece of advice, locked away in there from years ago, just happened to pop up. I once knew this very gothic fellow, (a transvestite, I later was told) who was a magnet for women. He told me quite specifically that a guy should never call a girl the day or day after he gets her phone number, for then you seem too eager, too obsessed, too concerned. Girls don't go for guys ready to jump and go. Take it easy, he told me, wait two days or so. Don't make her think your desperate. Maybe wait three days, even. That was just stupid, I thought. This was no big deal. The longer I wait the bigger the deal its going to feel. I should just call her. But I decided to hold off a day, just so I wouldn't seem too eager.

The next day she again came in on my shift, and Mitch said, "there's your woman." I shook my head. She wasn't my woman; hell, I had just coughed up the courage to say hi to her. Even if her and I were going out, which seemed light-years away from probable, it wasn't as if she was some material possession of `mine'. Later on, Ken, some kid who reminds me of the crazy looking images that used to be on those Garbage Patch cards kids used to trade each other when I was in elementary school, came up to me and said, as he nodded towards the lobby: "Hey, due, your chicks out there." She's not a chick, and I have not assumed ownership. She's a beautiful Goth girl from California and I'm a nervous child trapped in the body of a 25-year-old from the slums of Ohio, give me a fucking break, will you?

Mitch came back up to me and said I could go out, have a smoke, and talk with her. So I went out into the lobby, where she was talking with someone. Her hair was wet, her eyes intense, and she wore a red shirt that read `Leave Me Alone.' I walked by her and I forget what I said exactly, but implied that she should come outside with me as I had a smoke.

Outside, we both sat down. She said she'd heard that I liked her or something, and I nodded, and she asked why. I simply told her the truth, that I found her extremely attractive and it seemed like we were two people that might get along.

She asked if I was an insomniac. That's what she'd heard, she said. I told her yes, it was true, I don't sleep well at all. She asked me why and, in my desire to keep the deep end of my numerous insanities to myself for the moment, I said it was a long story. So she went on. She seemed to have an endless array of interesting questions for me. "What's your favorite flower?" She'd ask, or, "What's your favorite food?" And there were so many things I wanted to ask her. I wanted to know damned near everything about her, but when it came down to having her there beside me, or later on, in the passenger seat of my car, with her and I alone in the dark on the way to my house, my mind went blank. The brain freeze. The brain fart. Most of the time I just echoed the questions she asked me. Her favorite flower? The daffodil. Mine? The rose. Her favorite ice cream? Rocky road. Mine? Strawberry, I think. What was my birthday? November 12. Her birthday? August 31st.

August 31st?

And I slapped my head: she was a Virgo. From California. Claire was a Virgo. From California.

By the time my cigarette was out, and I smoked it slowly and let it burn to the filter, I had gotten to know her a little. I'd gotten far beyond a `hi'. In a short time we had evolved into sentences; into whole paragraphs, even. And we decided to hang out that night and talk some more.

So that evening, after close, we talked outside at the front tables. She told me how her boyfriend was away on vacation, how he'd be back in a few days. He was a problem, she told me. It seemed sex was the only thing on his mind, he was irresponsible, he didn't have a job, he played video games all day, he never wanted to take her out anywhere. He wouldn't even let her borrow the car. He was negligent to say the very least. The way she was talking, she was on the brink of breaking up with him. She told me she was trying to work it out, but if he didn't shape up, it would be over.

Prior to him, she went on to tell me, she was engaged to a guy. She had lived in California with him, and they decided to move to Ohio. Once they had began living here, though, he suddenly got very controlling and wouldn't let her see her friends. He wanted her to sleep when he slept, but she was an insomniac -- sometimes, sleeping was next to impossible for her. And she was sick of spending the nights alone. There were other things that got between them, too: he worked a shift opposing hers and they hardly ever saw each other, he kept putting off the marriage they had planned on three previous occasions but never did anything about, he started getting heavy into drugs, began drinking a lot. She was a pothead, she smoked the shit everyday -- but pot was one thing, she told me, excessive drug use was another.

So she left him. One day while he was at work she wrote him a letter and moved out. Then I think she moved in with her current boyfriend. So she had basically admitted to cheating on one boyfriend with a guy who would be her future boyfriend. I struck me that it was Terra and the Monkey Bars all over again.

As we were talking, Rena and a few others from work rolled up in a car. We ended up hanging out with them for the remainder of the night. In the back seat of that car, Kate and I began tickling each other. I'm not sure how it started, but it felt good. I felt something blossoming there in the air around us that night. Something that went beneath conversation and flirtatious behavior, something that enveloped both of us. Something I hadn't felt in a really long time: potential of a very special kind.

A day or two later she came over to my house, looking great as she always does, with that beautifully intense look in her eyes. We hung around a bit with Sandra and Nick and Terra downstairs, watching a very strange movie. Vern was there, too. Later on, he'd tell me that he thought she looked like Claire Danes. That bothered me a bit. Not that I thought she looked like her, but because I had thought Claire looked like her -- which eventually led to me substituting her real name for `Claire' when I wrote about her. Were eerie coincidences ranking pretty damned high here, or was it just me?

Eventually the crowd dispersed, and it cut down to Nick. The three of us went on to watching another movie, and eventually the tickling and pushing and flirting between Kate and I turned into kissing. It's hard to tell who starts what, but the desire was quite obviously mutual, so it's basically irrelevant. Which of course means she probably kissed me first. Anyway, Nick finally got the hint after awhile and left. It took long enough. The making out got so heated, though, so fucking heated. I can't ever remember feeling like that -- maybe close, with Anne. Either way, Kate was simply amazing. I felt so calm and natural and passionate kissing her, like it was exactly where I belonged. And every time I would kiss her afterwards -- the last time I kissed her -- it felt just as natural, just as passionate, just as liberating.

Soon she had broken up with her boyfriend, and her and I were officially a couple. Something that had not occurred in a long time, since high school, six years ago -- with Claire -- if that even counts. And then something else happened that hadn't happened in awhile.

Though twenty-five years of age, I'd only had sex twice, and it was with the same girl, the same late night and early morning in the Autumn of 1999. Well, admittedly, depending on one's choice of interpretation, that figure may not be entirely accurate. You see, there was also an incident in May of 2001, I think it was, with another girl, Lena, though I'm not entirely certain that counts as we didn't really get to finish. So as to not exclude this third occasion as an act of sex and at the same time not include it entirely, I've usually found myself stating that I'd had sex two-and-a-half times. Part of that might be the reaction that statement tended to elicit from people, though. I mean, when you tell someone you've had sex two and a half times, they always get that one eyebrow crawling up their forehead in this amusing arch, and they tilt their head like a confused dog, and, I don’t know, it makes me laugh. But, yeah, whatever.

Anyway, it was the second or third night of being with Kate in ever-more heated situations that she asked me if I wanted to have sex. It was then when I got what I've come to call the `threshold fear': you want something or someone so much and you finally get nanometers away from achieving it and suddenly this tremendous terror sets in. Fear of the unknown is behind it, perhaps; the fear of change, the fear of foreign territory. The fear of having a desire finally satisfied is also a possibility, as that is all-too-often, in my world, foreign territory. I told her we should take things as they come.

We began fooling around, and things got intense again. We were heated, sweating -- and it almost happened. "Is that a yes?" She said. I thought I'd done something bad; I felt guilty. She offered some added information and asked if I was sure. I was suddenly very hesitant again. I wasn't aware her monthly visitor was present, so-to-speak -- the idea of going forward with this wasn't sounding all that good of an idea all of a sudden, but I still intensely, incredibly, undeniably wanted this. I asked her if she wanted to. She said yes in undeniable certainty and nodded frantically in an extreme affirmative. I voiced by hesitation. It was finally her that said we should wait -- and that in the meantime, I should do some shopping. So as it had happened before, I was left hungry again -- the difference being that this time, with this wonderful girl, there was a certain promise of resolution.

There was, of course, an issue. You see, this was a type of shopping I had never done before. A kind of shopping that I'd never had reason to do. And I didn't know where exactly I might purchase, um, raincoats for junior. I assumed a drug store, perhaps even a grocery store in the drug section, but I looked all over the grocery store one evening and couldn't find any. I finally asked Nick, who informed me I could probably pick them up at any gas station. Mentioning it to Sandra, she said that she had a whole bunch that she wouldn't be using and would be happy to throw them my way. I decided just to wait on those.

So Kate came over again. Things got heated again one night. In the midst of it, I was informed by her that her monthly visitor had left. Suprise. I said that I hadn't done my shopping -- and she said, well, then you’d better go do it.

Um, okay.

So I put on my cloths, grabbed my keys, told her I'd be back, and left. I hadn't had that kind of motivation in years. I pulled into the gas station a hop, jump and skip away from home. I looked a while, and amongst the chap-stick and tooth-brushes and breath mints. A shaft of light shone down from the sky an onto a little package of Durex. `Hallelujah' played in the background. I grabbed the box and handed the very masculine lady behind the counter the money. I was nervous as hell. I felt I should've bought something else, so it didn't seem to the lady at the register that this was my sole reason for coming into the gas station, because for some reason that made me feel all guilty and stuff. I didn't understand why I felt that way, and I couldn't think of anything to buy, anyway. Would it make a difference if I threw in a burrito and Pepsi beside the little box of raincoats on the counter? Why should I care what anybody else thinks? I could hardly think. My head and blood and chest was pounding and racing so quickly I could hardly keep up with it. I was in a heightened state, every nanometric inch of me.

"Have a good night," she said after handing me my change.

"You, too."

I drove home, and stepping into my room I saw the most beautiful sight, and I fail to see how I could ever forget it: candles were all about the room, flickering, giving off that spiritual kind of atmosphere. The bed, an altar. The ritual, long anticipated. She sat at the center of my bed, playing with her hands, and looking up at me shyly and sweetly, her beautiful, deep eyes poking up at me just below her lowered forehead. Nothing else existed but me and her in this moment, right now. And nothing else mattered. All else was background. What was once the loud static of my life lowered in volume until it was a fading hum. This was a dream, it had to be. This was too ideal. She was too ideal. Too incredibly beautiful. She really made me feel as if everything was really going to be okay with me, as if everything, after all the bullshit in the past years, was going to be all right. That this, that her, that everything we would share from soul to skin was the payoff. That she would bring an end to the war within me.

I placed the package on the pillow. After foreplay had reached it's pique, I reached for it with a bit of fear. She asked if I was sure. I nodded enthusiastically. You? Yes, she said with certainty. And sex with her was absolutely amazing. That night, Anne's philosophy, which had for years echoed in my mind, became for the first time my practice: focus on the feeling, cease all thought, cease all speaking, be in the now, live in the moment here, be receptive to your senses, be vulnerable, be one with the sacred experience of the present moment.

I felt so free with Kate, so liberated within her. I couldn't share the whole of my mind, I couldn't spiritually merge with her, but with nothing but skin and sweat between us I was one step closer to feeling complete. With Kate, there was no ambivalence. No hesitance. No questions. No uncertainty. I wanted to be with this girl, to have a long-term relationship with her, to develop something meaningful out of all of this. I felt so comfortable with her so naturally, so trusting of her so quickly and easily, all of which was very unlike me. Kate and I seemed to be what I considered a perfect match, both emotionally, mentally, and sexually. She seemed to harbor the same kind of dark curiosity about sexual possibilities as I did, and her desire for ever-increasing intensity in that category suited my tastes to a tee. These things seemed to appeal to both of us. I didn't feel ashamed or guilty of these desires with her, and didn't have the kind of reservations I'd always imagined I'd have. But sex sort of became an obsession or fixation. My mind was teeming with ways to apply creativity: what else could be done to intensify the experience?

Granted, the curiosity most likely grew out of my limited experience in the area, but it became a playground of curioisities. One curiosity was how ambigious the lines between pleasure and pain seemed to be; how they distorted, blurred, and disappeared. Especially at their heights, where they seemed to mix and merge, were the opposites blended, where dualities were reconciled in the moment of climax. I’m not implying psuedomasochism, but the physical, sexual and emotional sensations we shared, the reactions we had, the facial expressions, the sounds -- all of them seemed to be pleasure and pain simultaneously; `good pain’.

Another curiosity: I had imagined that sex, perhaps even meaningless sex, might satisfy my hunger -- but here, in what was more, in what was very meaningful sex, I found sex just fed the hunger more hunger. Desire feeds desire, as the Buddhists claimed. I found that I wanted closer. I wanted more intensity. I wanted to dig deeper, as deep as I could go into this experience, be as receptive as I could be to the sensation, the emotion, the feeling. I wanted to experience this as completely as I could, to be as honest and open and free and naked with her as one could possibly get on all existing levels and get all the feedback to let me know that she felt the same exact way.

After awhile, I began to worry that she might think that's all I wanted out of it. It wasn't. In the beginning, I had told her I didn't know where this was going, that we should just stand back and watch as this unfolds, but a lot of that was said because I didn't know if I was just a rebound. I said that we shouldn't worry about the future and where this was going, but just enjoy this as it was in the here and now. We both seemed to agree to take this at it came. Later on, though, our feelings had both changed, and they seemed to be the same: this was something we wanted to keep going. And I could see it as something long-lasting. Even my roommate, Nick, noted that this girl seemed to be the perfect, ideal mixture of everything I wanted.

And she really seemed to be, from soul to skin. It was my recognition that it was so ideal -- perhaps too ideal -- that caused me to preserve some resistances, though; to disallow myself to give myself up to her completely. So far life has only shown that nightmares seemed to be the only permanence, a voice in my head reminded me, but all dreams always ended the same way: with a rude awakening. I was fully aware of my trust issue here; of my reluctance to stand before her in total, naked vulnerability. I was still such an infant, it seemed -- I was such a child in all this. The difference was that this time, unlike all the others, I was trying. I really did want her and I to be together. I could've never imagined such a beautiful thing as this bond I felt we shared. I wanted to explore this foreign territory in all possible directions. I wanted to spiral out of my circles and cycles as far as was possible, push the thresholds passed my known universe. It was an eye-opening experience -- she was an eye-opening experience. Finally, I thought, I have something true, something real. I wanted to grow, to crack through the ceiling and reach for the stars, bathe in the sun, let the hells of my reality roll off me like rain and laugh at life in spite of it all -- laugh to the universe for the fact that in all the shit it had thrown on me over the years, I had finally found my candle light in the darkness, I had found a vibrant, new California sun rising and breaking through the dark clouds of my sick Ohio sky.

One thing that bothered me, one thing that made me be wary of my trust, at least at first, was that she was still living with her ex-boyfriend and his family. Now there was a fucked-up situation. I never would come to step inside that house. Apparently she was friends with his family first; she used to work with the mother while she worked at the fast food place across the street. While she was with her previous boyfriend and looking for a place to live, the lady offered Kate a room in her house, and she eventually took it. Then she just ended up having a relationship with her son. After they broke up, both the father and mother told her she was welcome to stay. The reasons were quite obvious, too, and they told her it quite clearly: unlike their son, she was responsible, contributed money to the house, and even held down two jobs for awhile. Now she was working full time at the same place I worked. If anyone should be kicked out, it would be their son.

And yet with him being her ex-boyfriend and all, it couldn't have been easy for her to live there. Getting back to Terra and the Monkeybars, I was wondering if she was expecting to move in with me. She wasn't on the lease, obviously, so I couldn't really ask her to move in until October when it would renew, anyway. I mean, I could, but it'd be risky. So I accepted the situation, with her living there. I didn't say much about it, nor did she. Then in conversation, shortly before she left for her vacation, she briefly stated that they still shared the same room, but he was pretty good about letting her have the bed when she actually slept there and not at my place. Pretty good? I wondered what that was supposed to mean, but coughed it up to over-analysis. So they shared a room anyway. Fucked up situation.

More discomfort arose out of that whole situation with her ex-boyfriend's family, however. The feeling that struck me when she wanted to spend time with her ex-boyfriend's family, or when I'd feel uncomfortable about her living there, or when I thought about her leaving for those three weeks for her parent's house in California -- was how incredibly wrong it was for me to be so fucking jealous and untrusting of her. And to feel as if I owned her, as if she was some sort of possession. That's what I hated so much about human relationships, especially intimate ones -- this instinct to act as if you own another person like some piece of property. I acted as if she was mine, and I hated myself for the instinctual delusion that caused me to feel that I owned her. I rebelled against it. She had even spoken about how controlling her ex-fiancee had gotten after they had come together down to Ohio, which only served to increase my resistance towards this possessive instinct. I wasn't going to be another controlling boyfriend. An intimate relationship, I was sure, was not about possession or ownership of another, as if the other were an item -- it's about trust, mutual respect, understanding, and a sense of value in one another. It was about nurturing a bond, giving it the appropriate conditions in which to grow.

I'd damn near seen her every day; usually we took a few days off a week. That was good, because I needed my alone time. She worked mornings and I worked nights. She'd walk up from where she was living at her ex-boyfriend's house to work, maybe a ten minute walk, and wait for me until I got off around midnight. I'd smoke a cigarette, talk with her a bit, hold her, then sometimes we'd go somewhere, then we'd go home. And when I didn't have to take her home early in the morning so she could go to work -- on those nights when I got to `keep her' -- life seemed to take on a new light.

Seeing someone this often was strange for me. Usually, as a rule, I need a good amount of time alone to think to myself. Always in my life I had been the nucleus I always returned to -- I was my own home base. Now it was her I returned to, her I revolved around. It was her I looked forward to seeing, not the reflection of myself in my deluded mind. Prior to her, days around people were days of waiting to be alone -- now, my days of being alone and days of being with people other than her were days of waiting to be around her. Now when I went into my isolation for a day or so, or even on break at work when she wasn't waiting for me outside, all I could think about was her. I would have a horrible day in the back kitchen, I would get ready to go at the end of the day filled with my usual anger or depression, and I'd walk outside to find her there, by my place on the patio beside the garage can, her knees pulled up to her chin, her arms wrapped around her legs, looking up and into me with those beautiful eyes of hers. Her presence made all the negativity just dissipate; the world I carried on my shoulders was left to be held by the fabric of space, and with her at my side I could step into the world and feel connected with life again. Still, nothing was enough. No amount of her could satisfy -- but I soaked up every moment for all I could.

The inevitable finally came, and one night I gave her a brief overview of the weird stuff I'd experienced over the course of my life. I was quick to point out that I didn't know if `they' were really what they seemed to be, that I felt an attitude of uncertainty was the safest approach to these experiences. I explained that what I once so fervently believed were out-of-body experiences into some otherworld or `astral plane', as some have called it, could be nothing more than waking dreams during periods of sleep paralysis; what seemed to be aliens and hybrid children could very well be convincing hallucinations, autonomous archetypal manifestations of my unconscious. It could just be split-off parts of my mind, perhaps equally conscious as myself but not at the `wheel' of my brain with any regularity, that utilized personal memories and cultural metaphors as a means of achieving some form of communication or contact with me in the hopes that a psychological integration might occur that would make my personality 360 degrees again. I told her in many ways it seemed as if I fit the title of a schizophrenic, but that there were some things that caused me to hesitate to come to that conclusion; that the doc said my brain was likely to be abnormal in some sense, and that I simply experienced the world and myself differently than the majority.

We talked about it a bit, and we both explained ourselves as spiritual as opposed to religious. We both meditated regularly. She said that she had grown up Mormon, but had since drifted from it and began feeding her curiosity towards other religions. She mentioned Catholicism, at which point I had to hold my tongue so hard with my teeth that I feared I might draw blood. She also mentioned Wicca, which I had a more positive than negative reaction to. She seemed drawn to it for the same reasons that I had a more positive than negative reaction to it, too: Wicca is very nature-oriented, and she is as well.

She went into detailed explanation about something else, however, that I found incredibly interesting. She explained to me that she often practiced what she referred to as `candle magick', and she had done so since as far back as she could remember. She had never read any of the books I had over the years, but her solitary practice with candle magick echoed exactly as those books suggested. She utilized this practice to heal and help herself and others, to let go of anger and depression, to signify the end of chapters of her life and everything else that my half-assed research on ritual as rites of passage has helped me understand bit by bit over the years. Again, she does this as a natural instinct, having grown up in an environment with no obvious neo-`pagan' persuasion. Some time later, she explained the specifics of her practice: she first rubs the candle, cleansing it of `excess energy' and fueling it with intent. She then would carve something symbolic or referent to her intent onto the candle, such as a name of a person she was angry at, a person she wanted to help, or something of the like. She would then light the candle and focus on it, meditate on it, and watch it melt and burn down passed the name. She said she would never use that specific candle twice, she would never use it again for any other purpose. I don't recall if she said she threw it away or buried it or simply let it burn down to nothingness -- but it was disposed of. I found this interesting, not only because of my intense interest in the use of ritual a year or so back, but because this habit, this system, this way or path developed in her naturally and seemed to work so well for her.

There was so much about her I adored. She was so calm and controlled; still on the surface, but intense deep beneath. She had no reservations. She had no time for regrets, second guesses, grudges. She had a beautiful simplicity about her, the kind I associate with Claire now that I think of it. And she knew when to hold on and how to let go so she could do what she had to do without any excess baggage. She never fought, she never argued, but she had her opinions and observations -- she was certainly no pushover. She was for give-and-take, she was for cooperation, she was for time share. She was fair, peaceful and tranquil. She had a love of freedom, it seemed to me, a love of independence, and she had a sense of responsibility. She knew who she was: she wasn’t trying to be someone to impress anyone else, she didn’t change around the people she hung around with. Physically, mentally, emotionally, sexually, she was beautiful.

Then there was how she made me feel; who she inspired me be when I was around her. I had a purpose with her, a drive, a meaning. I felt so focused with her. With Kate, I didn’t have my attention going in five thousand different directions, secretly drooling over this girl or that girl -- I was passed all that. I had achieved my goal. I was totally satisfied. I didn’t have to feel guilty about my urge, I could itch my scratch with her in a meaningful way.

I wanted to take her places and do the boyfriend thing, and I did all I could think of with the little cash I had. It didn’t add up to much, admittedly. One of the things I like about living in a college town is that so many things are in walking distance -- restaurants, grocery stores, all-night gas stations. Since Kate liked to walk and I did as well, this worked out perfectly. We once walked down to the ice-cream place nearby and I got her some Rocky Road. Another time, I took her to a movie. Not much creativity in that choice, I know, but it was memorable.

We walked our way to the theater, which wasn't far from the house. After I bought the tickets, we had some time to kill, so we sat on the bench in the lobby and watched some kids playing video games as we talked. She told me a lot about her family and about the small town of Barstow, California, where she grew up. She told me how, to her ears, we talked funny here in Ohio -- how she had never before heard the terms "my bad" or "it's all good." She told me about her first kiss, when she first tried pot, and the boyfriends she'd had since high school. Like Claire, apparently, high school relationships didn't count with her.

It was strange being there on that bench with us talking so casually, with her in my arms. It was unspeakably odd, feeling the way I did right then and with it seeming so natural. I actually felt as if I was a boyfriend. That I was mature. That I was real. That I was humanized. I felt as if I was really part of something special. I never felt that way before.

It kind of worried me. And no matter how often I tried to ignore it, I couldn’t seem to muffle this part of me, this tiny voice, that kept warning me to be careful. I didn't want to be made a fool, as I'd seen happen to so many others in the past in regards to relationships. So as much as I wanted to trust, I tried to keep myself away from blind faith or premature certitude. You see, whenever others confide in me regarding their newly-acquired significant others, I always warn them against falling too deep, too fast. I tell them that there's a certain danger in rushing into things. That plunging in the deep end, especially so early, is dangerous; one must beware of those treacherous waters too soon, one must ease oneself into them. When someone stimulates emotions like Kate does, it's easy for one to get addicted, and if the drug then leaves you the withdrawal symptoms, they can destroy you. I was down in the dumps before she met me, but if she lifts me this high up off the ground and then just drops me... well, the higher you’re lifted, the harder you fall when your support is taken away, you know what I mean? Gravity is the enemy. The strong climb themselves, or they grow their own wings. I was weak and wingless, and for those like me, perhaps its safer at the bottom. I could gain strength eventually, I could transform alone. The thing was, I had wanted to do this all myself. I had wanted to cure myself, but I found her to be the antidote. An addictive healing agent. I kept telling myself: I can't use her as a crutch, I have to heal myself. I promised myself that with Kate I wouldn't forget that it’s dangerous to fall too deep, too fast. I wouldn't be one of those people who expect others to do what they say, not what they do. I would lead by example. Very consciously, I tried to take my own advice. I tried my damnedest not to be the biggest fucking hypocrite in the world.

But all of this felt so right. I remember thinking then, as we both sat on that bench: make this feeling last. Let this feeling grow.

So I fell too deep, too fast -- like a sumo wrestler in the deepest of gravity wells.

It seemed as if she fell deep, too, though one can never be certain about his perceptions. You never really know for sure what's going on inside people's heads, save for those rare instances where you end up inside them. Never mind that. The reason I wonder if she fell as deep for me as I did with her was due to something she said one day, a few weeks after we'd met. It was just after we'd had sex, and she had said something that I thought I'd heard wrong -- that I hoped, in a way, that I'd heard wrong. And I closed my eyes, and I took a deep breath, and I forced out the question just to make sure I was hearing things. Tell me, I said, tell me I'm hearing things.

"I love you," she said.

"No, no," I thought, remaining silent and looking away from her. "Not that word, Kate. We've talked about that word. That's a bad word. A bad, four-letter word. You hate the word fuck, I hate the word love. Fuck sounds cold to you, love sounds insane to me."

"It's just a word," she says.

"No, its not just a word," I thought to her. "Its a powerful word. It signifies something with unique, undeniable depth of emotion and spirit and meaning. Sex becomes a vehicle for meaning when it serves as a metaphor, a ritual signifying something deeper than the act itself. Love is not just a word to me. To other people, love is a word: they love ice cream, they love long walks in the park, they love this thing or that person for this long or in this way. Love, I'm sorry to say, has been thrown around so much by some people its meaning has become void. Use it all the time for everything or say it to everyone and it turns out loosing its depth. It becomes a word that means nothing. Love has become a whore of a word. Behind it, I place a lot of thought, a lot of caution, oceans of emotion, an inconceivable amount of spirit, because the next time I use it I want to make sure that I had to, because there is no other choice. That's how it was the first time I used it. The first time I said it to a girl."

"You don't have to say anything," she told me, and she meant it. "I'm not trying to make you feel uncomfortable. I'm sorry."

"Don't be," I said.

"I love you."

I didn't say anything.

She eventually asked me if I knew that she was going to visit her family in California for three weeks. I told her I'd heard about it some time ago in passing, but she herself had never mentioned it to me. In a half-joking fashion, I asked her if she was intending to stay. She said that she had been considering it awhile back, but that she had decided against it. Still, I shuddered. For her to be gone for three weeks was inconceivable. I refused to even think about it. I had embraced that delusion from childhood: “if you ignore it, maybe it didn't happen; if you don't acknowledge it's existence, maybe it'll go away and you won't have to deal with it. You don't have to see what you refuse to see, and what you don't see can't hurt you.” But on a higher level I knew all that to be bullshit. What you refuse to see are the things that can hurt you the most in the long run, when you’re inevitably forced to face them.

The night before she left for California to visit her parents, we walked around town, down back roads and the beneath street lights. The college town seemed like a ghost town, at least in memory, without a person in sight, with perhaps only the occasional, passing car. We walked and talked, she told me more about her parents and their house, about how she loved the snow in Ohio but missed the California sky and the beautiful, multicolored sunset and sunrise. Her words painted an almost mythic place in my mind: a desert of silence, a desert of beautiful, open skies where on long walks to the straight horizon you'd only happen upon a passing tumble weed, a scorpion crossing your path, or some other wanderlust soul. More than once as we walked, we would stop on the sidewalk and hold each other, kiss each other. The me I hated -- the dark, dreary, nihilistic, pessimistic, fatalistic me -- he seemed to be miles away in memory as I stood there embracing her.

A few times, I half-jokingly asked her not to go, but she brushed it off by saying it was only three weeks. I was half-inclined to ask her if I could go with her, but I knew that would be crazy.

When I dropped her off at her house the next night, we kissed in the car. We kissed goodbye. I gave her a look. She told me then, as she would many times on the phone after she'd left, that I had no need to worry: she was coming back. And for weeks, I kept telling myself that. For awhile there while she was gone, I'd call her or she'd call me -- not a day went by when we wouldn't speak to each other. She'd even called me two times at while work; they didn't care, they thought it was so sweet, so cute. It was on the first of those occasions that she had called me at work when, as was usual, she said at the end of the phone conversation those three words: “I love you.”. It always made me feel uncomfortable before, but it felt right when she said it then, and before I realized it I said, "I love you, too." So naturally. So honestly. And there was a long, charged silence before we said our usual good-byes.

No regrets. It’s all good.

The routine phone calls back and fourth continued for another week or so, and then I suddenly didn't hear from her for two days. I wondered: should I call, should I not call? I called once. She had gone on a walk. A day went by. I called again: she was at her friends house, her sister said. I called again: still not home. It wasn't just the lack of contact or the distance in space, I think, but something else was bothering me. I had this horrific feeling in my gut, in my chest, in my head. It was physical. I woke up one morning after a considerable amount of sleep (for me, anyway) and I was dizzy all morning, even after going in to work. I just felt fucked up, like I was on something. I'd drank a bit at the party the night before, but not nearly enough for a hangover, and alcohol never made me feel like this. Never. Something was gnawing at me. Was this psychosomatic, I wondered?

"Aw, you're love-struck," a girl at work said. I was confused. Does she mean I'm addicted to Kate and these are withdrawal symptoms or something?

I went over our conversations in my mind. Since she'd gone down there, one major thing had horrified me: her parents wanted her to move back to California to stay with them. Her father even said he could get her a position in this job at a plant where he worked. She looked into it, she had told me, but just to satisfy him -- she wasn't serious about it, not at all. Eventually she'd like to move down there, she said, maybe, just maybe, but not yet. Not yet. I saw through it like glass. I knew damned well it had been in her head as serious option, not for later, not as a future possibility, but as a present, immediate option. And something in me told me she was swaying towards staying in Cali. Call it paranoia; I did. But I wasn't really letting emotions get in the way. What I was doing was walking in her shoes, looking through her eyes, and thinking how I would think if I were her in the circumstance she was in. I mean, what did she have here in Ohio? Some amateur boyfriend with a lousy job and a lousy car who’s twenty-five and not really going anywhere in life, some uncomfortable household with an ex-boyfriend, some job at a fast food restaurant? What did she have down there? Family support, a good job just waiting for her, a beautiful California sun in the expansive desert sky of Barstow...

When she finally called me a few days later, something seemed wrong. Something unspoken, something buried there beneath the surface. A day lapsed again. I couldn’t help but notice that the calls were getting fewer and farther between. Then she called me late one evening, it was about three AM for me. I already knew it was coming, I could smell the stench of the truth in the air, taste it's bitter flavor in my mouth, and it had literally been twisting in my stomach. I saw it as she spoke, as she tried to beat around the bush. I asked the right questions in the attempts to make it as easy as possible for her to say it. I asked what had been going on, and she told me about her parents -- about her father's back hurting, the fact that her mother had been in the hospital a few times while she was down here in Ohio and not told her, how she still wasn't doing all that well. Then I asked what had been on her mind as of late; if there was anything new. I think I let out a bit of fear or even anger in my voice, if only because I said it so cold and casual, so acted. She revealed that there had been something, and that it dealt with what her parents had been talking about -- that’s how she said it. That wasn’t enough. I asked her what it was specifically, and she said it was in regards to her staying there in California to live. I asked her if she was coming back. She said she didn't think so.

And I heard a sob. Then another.

The first was hers; the second, mine.

She never verbally stated she was staying. We never officially said that we were breaking up. There was no real closure. It was simply discontinued. It was like that great television show that’s just suddenly canceled, or a great book you’re reading that you have to return to the library before you’ve finished reading it. It was clear that she wasn't coming back. The finality was too powerful to me to ignore. I was yet again forced to face my fear of extinction, and I think this was behind the thought that popped up one evening about a week later while I was on a walk alone and thinking of Kate.

The thought seemed to have just come out of nowhere, and it was this: there is no selfless reason to mourn the dead. The only cause of such mourning can be greed. So too is it with phases or moments in life that we look back on with this morose nostalgia. We want more. That everything in life has an expiration date, whether the exact date is known or not, should be a given. We fancy these illusions of immortality, however. Even if you live it up, however, as I feel I did with her, it doesn't matter. No matter how long you had, no matter how many chances you were given to really live it up or get to know the person at a greater depth, no matter how many of those chances you took, no matter how much you actually got to know the person, in their death we always feel we could've done more, gotten more, been more to or for the person. And its greed. It’s the inability to accept the changing seasons; the inability to let go and move on with life. The anger that comes over a significant death or change stems from the fact that we’re forced to confront the fact that we really have no control over the conditions of life. In the face of that inevitabilty, our only means of defense against these facts, which we cannot accept as a natural course of our existence, is to depress ourselves, to hate ourselves and others, to dwell on the past and fear the future as the present slips by us.

"I still want to call you," she said to me.

Instantly, it reminded me of the line every guy like me has heard from high school: `I still want to be friends.’ And as recognition of the situation as it would be from this point on began to sink in, of us `just being friends’ and still calling each other, all I could think about was how I had felt for Claire all those years. All I could think about was how it would absolutely kill me when we talked every three months and she'd tell me she'd be moving to a different state, how she'd met a different guy, got engaged again, got married again, got pregnant again, got divorced again. I caught brief, short echoes of all my jealousy in that situation with Claire; of all my hurt, my rage, my constant wondering just what she feels for me on the surface or deep down. I recalled not wanting to cut off my friendship with Claire simply because I had stronger feelings for her, and therefore maintaining it, and therefore allowing myself to be subjected to the emotional torture as I was drug through the mud of hell after hell, bearing shit-storm after shit-storm.

I wondered if I’d ever see her again, and it terrified me. I remembered what would happen every time I'd think I was over Claire; every single time I had decided that I was just happy with her and I being friends. I would suddenly be faced with seeing her again face to face, and in an instant all those emotions I’d thought were dead and gone would flood back. I would find myself caught in between the land of once-was and coulda-been and forced to ride the wave of the question: `could it ever be again?’ And I could still feel how it would kill every piece of my being, how it would evaporate every drop of hope I had for ever being over her. I saw how hope could kill a man -- perpetually murder a man. I saw how very easily my situation with Claire could happen all over again with Kate, and all I could think of was: no, I'm not ready for all that bullshit again. To hell with this.

But even if I never saw her again and we just talked, I wondered, how bad would that be? It would be just a different flavor of hell, I knew. In my personal opinion, talking on the phone absolutely kills; I hate the phone. It's just bearable when you'll see the person you're talking to in a few hours or the next day, or even in a week or two or three. But to be around her every day, then have to bear her being gone on a vacation for three weeks, it was torture enough talking to her over the phone and not being able to hold her. And then to have the vacation extend indefinitely? It was too fucking much.

The phone is a tease for real interaction, real communication. And now I had gone from the closest closeness to the farthest distance. The real life to mental masturbation. Living life actively to becoming, yet again, the passive witness to life as it trails by. Only now made worse by the memory, by the knowledge, that there is a way of living so far removed from this death-like, zombie existence I perpetually lead. The higher you climb, the higher you're lifted, the harder, the father, you fall, fall, fall. No one else to blame for this, though. It was my bad, my bad.

“I want to keep talking to you, too,” I said.

Shit, I was crying now. I was such a fucking child. I didn’t want to make her feel any worse about this than she already did, and there really seemed to be nothing left to say now. How the fuck can someone have any form of conversation right after an A-Bomb like that has been dropped? So after a short conversation with a lot of painful pauses, I said that I had to go, that I couldn't talk about it right then, that I’d talk to her tomorrow. And before we hung up, she used the four-letter word again in the usual three-word sentence. The difference was that she added a `still', and that indicated to me that the three previous words were obligatory. And I used the four-letter word again.

Again, it had become a four-letter word.

"Unfulfilled desires are dangerous forces."
-- Sarah Tarleton Colvin.

TRUTH & DARE.
by Patchwork
6/22/04

She chooses truth again,
and I ask her, and then she looks at me,
says she has no sexual fantasies:
that she does what she wants and imagines,
so there's no need.

She tells me I could never know
all she wants to do to me
and my head's just spinning
and she's grinning as she looks down on me.

I choose dare again,
knowing I'll be too chicken to live up to it
and then she asks me about my sexual fantasies:

I know for me they're a dime a dozen,
never thought to count my chickens
before they hatched: never thought they could.

Now the egg cracks and in reality's light I find
I'm chicken, I'm so fucking chicken...

"The hardest battle you are ever going to have to fight is the battle to be just you."
-- Leo Buscaglia.

OUT THERE.
by Mousie
1/24/02

there seem to be greener pastures
out there
one with your name on it
if you'd just set aside your fear
and trust
in something you've long ago left behind
something that seems to sanctify you
while confusing your mind

you take comfort in such brittle things
and you wait for the security it might bring
and when the satisfaction never comes
you sit there pretending to be numb

out here
there is a place just for you
a little miracle
that you never let come true
out here
is where you keep landing
everytime you fall down
beyond your understanding

out here is a blessing
still under disguise
a truth among the many
of the world's cruel lies
out here you left something
you never recognized
that you may yet gain
if you are willing to compromise ...

there are so many wonderful things
for you to embrace
if you'd just hang up your pride
and come out of your hiding place ...

“When, doomed to death I shall have expired, I will attend you as a nocturnal fury; and, a ghost, I will attack your faces with my hooked talons (for such is the power of those divinities, the Manes) and brooding upon your restless breasts, I will deprive you of repose by terror.”
-- Horace, 5th Epode.

“This is the hag, when maids lie on their back,
That presses them, and learns them first to bear,
Making them women of good carriage.”
-- William Shakespeare (Act 1, Scene 4 from Romeo and Juliet).

"I sleep -- for a while -- two or three hours -- then a dream -- no -- a nightmare seizes me in its grip, I know full well that I am lying down and that I am asleep... I sense it and I know it... and I am also aware that somebody is coming up to me, looking at me, running his fingers over me, climbing on to my bed, kneeling on my chest, taking me by the throat and squeezing... squeezing... with all its might, trying to strangle me. I struggle, but I am tied down by that dreadful feeling of helplessness which paralyzes us in our dreams. I want to cry out -- but I can't. I want to move -- I can't do it. I try, making terrible, strenuous efforts, gasping for breath, to turn on my side, to throw off this creature who is crushing me and choking me -- but I can't! Then, suddenly, I wake up, panic-stricken, covered in sweat. I light a candle. I am alone."
-- Guy de Maupassant, Le Horla, page 893.

HAGRIDDEN.
by Rewired

Things were pretty weird already when I was sixteen, and then I talked with a poltergeist through a Ouija board, got on antidepressants, and finally got dry-fucked by a female demon in my sleep. All brought on by the resistance to instincts and the fear of death.

Perhaps that’s jumping a bit ahead, however.

I guess the core of this story really starts in early February, 1995, when I had asked my mother if she’d ever had anything strange occur to her that could be classified as paranormal. I was looking for her maybe having seen a UFO, or evidence of having had abduction experiences. That’s not at all what my question brought to her mind. What she began telling me was her terrifying experience with a Ouija board when she was a teenager, and it was her story that had sort of piqued my interest in it to begin with.

She had used it a few times. She told me how she had once asked the board if she’d ever get married, and what her husband’s name would be. It told her that she would be married twice and gave her the initials of both of them. She laughed at the thought of being married twice, and especially at the initials of her first husband, because they were the same as hers. She also laughed about having three children, one miscarriage. But it all came true, she told me, every bit of it.

That sort of freaked her out, but nothing compared to what happened one night -- the last night she’d ever use the Ouija. She had been in her friend’s attic, and they had been going about the usual routine of asking it questions, recieving answers, and blaming each other for moving the planchette. After awhile, they grew bored with it and stood up to leave the attic. Then they heard a noise. When they looked back at the board, they found the planchette moving erratically on the board at high speed, all by itself. She never used the board again and, having had the subject brought up in her mind, she then stressed her insistence that neither me nor either of my younger sisters ever bring one of them into the house, ever.

So, of course, I purchased a Ouija board.

I bought it from a friend of mine at school, stuck it in my book bag, and had my sisters hold onto it for me. We were all pretty curious. Though the board hadn’t given me much reliable, valuable information the first time I’d used it almost a full year before, I was getting pretty desperate at this time for any source of information beyond my bruised brain and the books I had been reading that might help answer the most fundamental of my questions. The Ouija board sounded as good an idea as anything else.

I knew little about the board back then, but since I’ve done some research. Apparently, the whole thing began in 1848, in a cabin in Hydesville, New York. Kate and Maggie Fox began communicating with what they believed to be the spirit of a deceased peddler, who at first communicated with them through knocks that merely indicated yes and no answers. More detailed conversation was soon desired, however, and an elaborate code system was developed by which certain knocks stood for certain letters of the alphabet. Hearing of this, others tried the same thing, gathering people in there homes to engage in elaborate Morse code with the Other Side. And so the Spiritualist movement began.

The reason this whole thing caught on is pretty obvious, once you think about it. Most cultures select, through their unique means, those who anthropologists call `shamans’ -- people given the role of communicating and interacting with the otherworld. Here in the Western culture, however, we have no such official role in society for such potential individuals. We could say the space has been filled by priests or psychologists, or that our potential shamans have been metaphorically burned at the stake under the categories of mental disorders such as schizophrenia. Regardless, here in the West, inspired by the Fox sisters, many have chosen to take on the role themselves and have direct contact with beings from that otherworld.

Our constant need for things to be better and faster soon took hold, however. The long and elaborate methods of knocks and raps became tiring and frustrating to many, and they sought a more direct and swift -- and less noisy -- means of communication. Many methods then came into fashion. Some fell into a trance and communicated with the entities in that fashion, through their minds. Others allowed themselves to `channel’ the beings; to be possessed by them for a limited amount of time for the purposes of communicating with others in the surrounding area. And then came a small device created, according to stories which cannot be validated, in 1853 by a French Spiritualist by the name of M. Planchette (French for `little plank’). The device, which came to be known as the planchette, was small and heart-shaped with three pencils attached to its legs.

By itself, the planchette seemed pretty useless, so many ditched the planchette for the pen. `Automatic writing’ was born, and has since been revived in the New Age movement as a form of channeling. It works like this: a trance medium would fall into a receptive, altered state of consciousness and allow herself to write spontaneously, without conscious editing. This began with the pen, went to the type-writer, and later even the canvas and keyboard. Most often, these writings were attributed to the works of the spirits. Sometimes, automatic writing was explained as the medium receiving messages from the spirit in her mind, which she then produced on the page. On other occasions, the spirit was said to be working through the medium’s hands. Through this method, many have produced books, novels, poetry, music and artwork that they attribute to the deceased or unearthly -- Ben Franklin, Jesus Christ, and even aliens borrow their hands. Quite often the medium did not even know what was being written, and the handwriting was noticeably different than her own. People who had a hard time drawing a stick figure where suddenly creating artwork that many critics have persisted are inarguably the style of the deceased artist the medium attributed it to.

Eventually, though, many came to interpret the material as having come from a secondary personality (which many attested must have had access to extrasensory perception and psychokinetic abilities) of the medium, usually locked in the unconscious mind, but now awakened and given space to express itself. For this reason, it was adopted later on as a creative tool -- and a therapeutic one. This form of writing was eventually picked up by Beatnicks and came to be known as `stream of consciousness.' Not knowing that it was an official style, I began automatic writing at about age sixteen, when I began seeing `aliens' and having flashbacks from my youth. It continued after my Ouija experience. It really did feel, to me, as if something else was running my fingers. Whatever it was, and is, there is no doubt in my mind it is the same thing `running' all my perceptual anomalies.

The planchette was revived by a coffin and cabinet maker by the name of EC Reiche. He created a small wooden board with the alphabet arranged in two arcs across the top of the board, numbers from one to ten below them, and at each bottom corner a `yes’ and a `no’ a `goodbye’ and a `maybe’. With this board he used the planchette, but he replaced the pencils with wooden pegs so the device was free to roam the surface of the board as two mediums placed their fingers upon it. Allegedly, he named the board the `Ouija’ (`we-ja’) because he received the word from a spirit through the board and had believed -- falsely -- that it was the Egyptian word for luck.

He eventually sold the Ouija to a friend of his, Charles Kennard, who then founded the Kennard Novelty Co. and began producing the boards around 1886. Shortly thereafter, William Fuld, the shop manager, made the decision to go into business for himself, forced Kennard out of the loop and changed its name to Ouija Novelty Co. He became a successful businessman and myth-maker. He claimed to have invented the board himself, started the rumor that the name `Ouija’ was a hybrid of the words for `yes’ in French (oui) and German (ja), and attributed much of his success to the guidance of the board itself. He remained in control of the company for the next 35 years, until 1927, when he plummeted to his death from the top of his Baltimore building. Until 1966 his heirs maintained the company, who then sold out to Parker Brothers, who currently hold all the trademarks and patents to the board and continue to produce it in mass quantities. The boards they manufacture still follow the original style, but now they got nifty ones that glow in the dark, too.

The board is quite easy to use. You just rest the board on the laps between two people and have them put their fingertips on the planchette. They then either wait for it to move or both begin jointly, lightly, swirling the planchette in a circular or figure-eight fashion on the board’s surface. They may state their goals or send an invitation. Through the board, people believe they’ve come into contact with the deceased, angels, demons, aliens -- you name it.

My sisters had not only been hiding it from my mother for me, they had been using it, and they seemed to be enjoying it. They told me how they had been talking to some guardian spirit watching over us who called himself Ed Fred. I had tried the board a few times in solitude and it had kind of scared me, but I decided that I wouldn’t believe it had anything to do with anything beyond my own brain until I had no other choice but to come to that conclusion.

It was on February 9 that my sisters and I gathered in my room to use the board together. For me, it would be the very last time. My sisters worked the board as I asked the questions. At first, I was very serious about it all. I asked the board if what I had seen were really aliens, and the board answered yes; the board also said there would be no new abductions until March. Then, however, my attitude changed. I had asked it a lot of questions, and some of them were questions I’d previously asked, only I asked them in a different fashion, and I received totally different answers. It was disappointing, to find all this to be a crock, and I started getting bitter and sarcastic. In the spirit of fun, no pun, I began asking it really cheesy questions. Then my sisters started laughing, and began asking sarcastic questions of their own. We were all treating it as a joke.

With one last drop of seriousness, I asked if my sister, Eve, was an abductee and if the aliens would be coming for her. It said yes. Then on a whim I asked if Eve’s eye, which she had been complaining had been hurting her earlier, had anything to do with the aliens. Ed Fred said yes.

I was in the process of rolling my eyes when Eve looked to the right, and I caught something that didn’t register right away. Linda caught it at the same time, though, and it registered a lot faster for her. She jumped. I looked back at Eve as it struck me what Linda and I had seen almost simultaneously: the big, bold, straight red cut on the white of Eve’s eye.

Stories of devices implanted into the bodies of abductees rushed through my mind. Had the existence of some intelligence behind the Ouija and the existence of the aliens been validated here in own fowl swoop? Absolutely not, I thought. It could just be coincidence. Or the entity speaking to us could be a poltergeist, and it could have cut Eve's eye itself. All I knew for certain was that Linda and I were entirely amazed and more than a little spooked. We just looked at each other, unable to say anything. Eve, by this point, obviously knew something was wrong and started to freak out. We tried to keep her calm as we told her about the cut on her eye. She was yelling at us and crying, saying that this wasn’t funny anymore. She stood up and said she wouldn’t play with the board ever again. She promised to calm down before leaving the room and not to tell mom, and Linda and I agreed to quit using it without argument. I eventually gave it to my cousin, Maddy. I kept watch on Eve’s room at night for the next week or so, during which time I heard a host of strange noises about the house. I kept a close eye on her room again in March, just to be sure.

By March, I was feeling pretty burned out by everything that had occurred since the dawn of the Winter season. I had by this time collected, on my own, a wide range of what seemed to be previously forgotten memories that stretched from the tragically mundane to the unspeakably bizarre. At first, I had sought clarity through books, then through a Ouija board. That just fed old questions further elaboration and spawned a hoard of new ones. It was around this time that the possibility finally began to sink it that I just might be going entirely insane, so I decided I was ready to go see a mental health professional.

When I approached my mom with this, she was, of course, all for it, and set up an appointment immediately. Though I’d previously seen at least three other social workers in my youth, this was the first psychiatrist I’d ever encountered. She was a skinny, wrinkly woman with a heavy German accent who insisted what I needed to do was to go outside more often to get some fresh air. She also told me to eat more fruit, save for bananas, because they don’t count. Perhaps she considered it cannibalism. Anyway, she threw me on 10 milligrams of this drug called Nortriptyline, and I began taking it on March third.

Considering the increased strangeness that occurred during this period, I did a bit of research on this drug years later. I found that Nortriptyline hydrochloride in the generic name for this drug, but it is also known under the brand names Aventyl and Pamekir. It is a tricyclic antidepressant (TCA), which means that raises the levels of neurotransmitters in the brain tissue that may be at abnormal levels and causing the condition of depression. At the same time, its a sedative that eases anxiety, restlessness, insomnia and chronic pain. The increase in neurochemicals may cause sleep and appetite to improve quickly, but it can take a month or two until the affects of the medication set in completely.

Not just affects, either, but side affects. The more common ones include feeling drowsy, dizzy, having blurred vision, feeling light-headed, having dry mouth, as well as experiencing constipation and the inability to urinate. If a person is already anxious, this drug may increase anxiety. It can amplify a present psychosis or awaken latent symptoms. It can cause symptoms of the manic phase to emerge in bipolar patients. Epileptiform seizures may also occur -- seizures known as idiopathic (medspeak for `I don’t have a fucking clue what’s causing this’) seizures. And if all of that isn’t bad enough, it can also put you at a higher risk for cavities. No joke. Now, life-threatening reactions to this drug include the following: dramatic changes in clear and logical thinking, fainting or dizziness, fever, itching, wheezing, bad coughing, a blue skin color and the swelling of the tongue, throat or face and pressure in the chest. Nowhere, however, does it mention strange dreams, out-of-body experiences or vicious attacks by non-corporeal entities, which is disappointing.

Nortriptyline comes in capsules of 10mg, 25mg, 50mg, and 75mg, and the dosage is specific to the patient. As with me, it is often taken just before bedtime to help you sleep.

The weirdness returned on the evening of March fourteenth, only eleven days after I began taking my happy zombie pills. I had been lying on my back in bed at the time, drifting in and out of sleep. This was rare behavior, I should note, for I’d been afraid to sleep on my back since childhood. I’d always gotten bad dreams when I slept that way. Apparently it still worked that way, though at the beginning it just gave birth to an interesting and unusual sensation. As I was lying there, I kept feeling the sensation of being lifted up out of my body and out of my bedroom window, always ending back up in my body seconds later. I didn’t believe I was actually floating in physical or spirit form, it was just an odd sensation I was curious about. I tried to control the experience, and felt that I could control how I floated somewhat. After awhile I grew bored with that and began to drift off mentally.

Then my attention returned threefold. I suddenly became acutely aware of an odd presence in my room. I found I couldn’t move. Then it got incredibly worse: I felt someone crawling atop my body, putting her knees at the sides of my rib cage. It was straddling me, and soon enough I sensed movement. I still couldn’t move, I couldn’t even open my eyes, but I did my damnedest to struggle and fight the paralysis so I could throw this thing off me. Whatever it was, the entity was pushing something over my face that made it hard for me to breath. I got the sense that it was a tank of some kind. It was then that my consciousness seemed to dislocate, and I got this weird image in my head. I was looking out through a porthole at a swampy area or marsh full of trees and muck. At the same time, I could still feel this thing on top of me, and I struggled to pull out of these images in my head and regain control over my body. I seemed to have some limited success. I no longer had the sensation of the tank being on my face, but the creature was now pushing it’s hands on my chest, making it harder and harder for me to breath. It was suffocating me. Then it put it’s knees on my chest and pushed down harder and harder. I couldn’t move or breathe. I tried to open my eyes to see the thing, to fight it, to try and ask for mercy or something -- but I blacked out for what seemed to have been just a moment and woke up. As suddenly and inexplicably as the experience had begun, it had ended.

I wrote the experience down the best I could, regained my composure, and eventually went to sleep. I was fucking exhausted.

The next morning when I awoke, I looked at my notebook. I was most certainly confused. For one, the entry I’d made from the night before had a peculiar nature about it. After my documentation of the experience, which I remembered writing, I had wrote that this sensation had `also happened at around four in the morning’. So apparently it had happened not once, but twice. That was the first strange thing. The second was that I had written down the time just before beginning that sentence, and the time was 1:31 AM. This presents a problem, as it implies that I had written of the first and second experiences roughly two-and-a-half hours prior to the first experience. Then, another problem presented itself: I had logged out at the bottom of the entry at 1:18 AM. As a rule, you can’t log out of something before you’ve logged in, especially so when you’re documenting two experiences an hour and a half before the first experience occurred. Apparently I had no respect for linear progression.

There was one more strange element in all this, however. In the margin by my entry I found an odd drawing. I knew I must have drawn it during, prior, or after the odd experience, but I didn’t remember drawing it at all. It was a circle with two elongated crescents to the top and bottom. Some of my friends think it looks like an eye.

All that kind of freaked me out. I had thought that medication would make all this weird shit stop, maybe clear up my mind so I could answer some of my questions, but now my problems just had another layer. Now I didn’t know if these new experiences were drug-induced, amplifying the symptoms of a previously-diseased mind, or were simply having no effect whatsoever. Taking them just seemed to add questions, not subtract them, and that was the last thing I wanted. So I wasted no time informing my mother that I was having second thoughts about the medication. She said to just give it a try, and I insisted that I had. She gave me a condescending laugh and told me that it had only been a little over a week since I’d first began taking the meds and that I shouldn’t be getting any effects yet. I wanted to argue, but I knew I’d have to bring up what had happened that night, so I let it drop. I took matters into my own hands and started skipping days in-between taking my medication without her knowledge. I did it slowly so I could minimize any potential side-affects.

So, what exactly was behind all this -- behind the Ouija and this `thing' that had straddled me that evening?

Some claim it has to do with `evil spirits’. It is frequently recommended, even persisted, that you do not use the Ouija board alone as I had. According to some, using it at all put one to great risk, especially if the person in question is already receptive to the world of the strange. For instance, a strong warning came from Edgar Cayce in regards to the Ouija. He had received letters numbering in the thousands from people who had used the board and found it to be a catalyst for the full spectrum of paranormal phenomena, including poltergeist activity, out-of-body experiences, astral projection, psychic vampirism and possession. These people believed that by using the board to communicate with spirits on the `other side’ you establish a link and open a portal that allows them to affect you and perhaps even the world around you. Parents and religious groups claimed that through the medium of the Ouija malevolent spirits have been capable of manipulating the minds and possessing the bodies of teenagers, causing emotional damage and in many cases suicide. I knew none of this when I first used the board, and would have believed none of it, and still don’t buy into it completely. It seems silly to me that a piece of cardboard could be considered to make all that much of a difference, but who am I to say? I knew nothing of these allegations, and sure, strange things had been occurring far before I’d bought the board, but things from then on got incredibly weirder.

Others believe the Ouija is guided by the unconscious, autonomous parts of the mind; that the planchette moved by the combined unconscious force or `synergy’ between the people using the board. In 1952, William B. Carpenter invented the term `ideomotor effect’, which refers to the ability of the unconscious mind to influence or control our muscular movements in an involuntary, autonomous fashion. He believed parts of our minds operating outside our conscious awareness were able to guide our motor actions in order to fulfill our expectations and also to resonate with the movements of other people through subliminally picking up subtle cues in their body language. He used the ideomotor effect to explain the phenomena experienced by those who used dowsing rods, pendulums, and, among other things, Ouija boards. He claimed that these people may find it difficult to accept that the ideomotor responses are reflecting unconscious portions of their personality because what they come into contact with they may find frightening. They therefore find psychological security in attributing it all to evil spirits. Others agree that the unconscious is at the root of it all, but add that there may be a telepathic, precognitive and psychokinetic component to it as well, which would explain some of the stranger stories, including my mother's. Another possible theory is that the joint and focused concentration of those using the board activates an unconscious psychokinetic ability in the users which inspire paranormal phenomena which validate their belief structures or opens a portal to the other side.

One thing was for certain, and it was this: if having sudden flashbacks of encounters I had beginning a decade ago with creatures I felt certain were extraterrestrial didn’t alone prove that I was a head case, being attacked by an evil spirit in my sleep did the trick. Or was that thing really an alien getting it on with me? Or were the aliens I saw really evil spirits? Who the fuck knew? Perhaps it had to do with that fucking Ouija board. Perhaps when I had used it alone, it had gained possession of my body, and the medication had made me more susceptible to it’s influence. Maybe whatever entity was behind the board was the same entity that straddled me that night. Maybe by letting it use my hand to move the planchette, it was able to take control of my hand so it could draw that picture in the margins of my notebook.

I began getting more worried about what I’d been remembering and experiencing, so in order to sort through my fragmented memories, I had eventually typed up the summation of what had been happening to me under an apt title, `Confusion.’ I began passing it around to select people in hopes that someone might understand me, talk about it with me, or perhaps be able to shed some light on whatever the fuck was wrong with me.

I was almost convinced I was alone in this insanity until I walked in the art room on March 19, and saw an illustration hanging on the far wall that totally blew me away. I had frequently seen alien-like images depicted in the art room, and all of them weren’t my own, but what I saw hanging on the wall that day totally blew me away. The drawing was done in pencil and charcoal and depicted very skinny, humanoid beings huddled closely together in the corner of a hallway. All their eyes, large, round and glowing, stared straight ahead, poking out of their oversized craniums and right into you. It sent chills threw me. It was terrifyingly beautiful. The artist was Marty Eston, brother of the beautiful Myra Eston, a girl in my grade who I sat next to in botany class. She was a dark little girl, and had quite a bit of a temper. For that reason, I was glad to find that I had successfully remained on her good side since the dawn of high school. She had a particular interest in vampires -- though obsession is probably a better term -- and a bit of interest in the paranormal in general. One day after I’d seen what her brother had drawn, I mentioned it to her in the subtlest way I could and commented on how eerie it was. She agreed without hesitation, and when I asked her whether she knew his source of inspiration, she sort of let out a nervous laugh and shook her head. Apparently her brother had seen a vision of it while on an acid trip gone wrong one night at home and it had really freaked him out. He was scared as hell when he saw it, and decided to draw it because simply explaining it didn’t cut it.

I thought perhaps she could at least appreciate the paranormal occurrences I'd been experiencing due to her preexisting dark-natured mindset, so I tossed her a copy of my story. A while later, as I was in the library and she was reading it in the far back, she came up to me with a wild look in her eyes, holding my story tightly in her hands. “Tim, do you know what you just described here?”

I didn’t know what she was talking about. “Which part?”

She pointed to the experience I had with the entity on top of me, pushing down on my chest. “That’s the Old Hag.”

I asked her to repeat herself, as I was a bit confused. Then she began to explain. She had some information on it - I believe it was a photocopied passage out of a book - and I nearly shit my pants. What I read fit the details of my experience to a tee. Attacks from the old hag are experienced, according to some modern research, from fifteen percent of the adult population worldwide. The characteristics of the attacks each person experiences can vary, but the general pattern is rather consistent. While in bed, the person finds himself unable to move. He might hear strange noises or sense movement, but he always feels a distinct presence in the room. Oftentimes he sees a figure, such as a shadow or an old woman (hence the label, `old hag’) which one often interprets as `evil’, malevolent or threatening. He find this figure straddling him, pressing on his chest with building pressure and making it ever-more difficult for him to breath. He struggles and tries to scream and move, but all efforts prove to be futile. He fears he might be dying, or might pass out. Before that occurs, however, he usually finds himself awake; shaken but alive, the experience over as soon as it had begun. Sometimes, however, it can lead to an out-of-body experience.

I now knew for certain now that it wasn’t all in my head, or in the least not only in my head, because others had had the same experience as well. The experiences aren’t limited to people with any sort of social status or intelligence and it certainly isn’t limited to Nortriptyline zombies. The phenomenon is apparently quite common, and has occurred cross-culturally for centuries under many different names. I was absolutely amazed at the wealth of material I found on it when I started looking.

Those residing in St. Lucia, West Indies, are haunted by the spirit of a dead infant ghost called Kohma, who leaps on the chests of people as they are just falling asleep or getting up and tries to suffocate them. Thailand has its Phi Um (`ghost covered’) and Phi Kau (`ghost possessed’) in which black beings cover the body and paralyze the victim. In the Far North they have their Ukomiarik (Yupik) and Agumangia (Inupik), spirits who attempt to take over the bodies of immobilized victims. The Czech have their Muera. The Polish have their Zmora. Japan has its Kanashibari (`tied down’ or `tightly bound’). Russia has its Kikimora. France has their Cauchmar (`trampling ogre’). The Old English have their Mare, also known as Mab, Mair, Mare-hag, as well as their Hagge, which is also known as the Hegge, Haegtesse, Haegtisse, or Haegte. The Greek have their Ephialtes (`one who leaps upon’), their Mora (the night-mare or ogre), and their Lamai, as well as the Pnigalion (`the choker’) and the Babrychnas (`the heavy breather’) that attacked people as they slept. Old Norse have their Mara. Newfoundland has their Ag Rog (`old hag’). The Spanish have their Pesadilla. In Mexico they call it subida del muerto, which means `the dead getting on top’. The Hmong of Laos has its Tsog (`evil spirit’), dab (`nightmare’) or Tsog Tsuam, an evil spirit that smothers, crushes, or puts pressure upon its victims. Even in China AD 30 we find the phenomenon, which is there called the Gui Ya (`ghost possession’). The Germans believed in a host of entities, such as elves known as the Alpdruck, the Nachtmahr, and the witches known as the Hexendrucken, all of whom were thought to be responsible for these hag attacks. They also believed in the Mare, which is where our word `nightmare’ derived from, and the Latin word for nightmare is incubo (or incubare), which means `to lie upon’. The most recent manifestation of this, some say, are the aliens or alien-human hybrids some say are doing the dirty deed with supposed abductees.

What explains this phenomenon, however? Many scientists, including Al Cheyne at the University of Waterloo’s Department of Psychology, believe that sleep paralysis -- specifically, Hallucinatory Sleep Paralysis -- explains the Old Hag phenomenon completely. The phenomenon is rather interesting, to say the least: while in a state of REM sleep, the body naturally releases hormones that immobilize the muscles and prevents the individual from harming themselves or others by acting out their dreams. These hormones usually fade off prior to awakening, but it is possible for a person to gain awareness while the hormones still have effect. Often but not always able to open the eyes, the paralyzed individual leis there, unable to speak or move but awake none the less.

Now, why might this kind of thing occur? The fact that Japanese research indicates that sleep paralysis seems to be caused by stress, interrupted sleep patterns, a loss of control in one’s life, and anxiety (and fear of death specifically) all seem to indicate that sleep paralysis may be a form of `tonic immobility’ still latent in us. This is the instinctual reaction some animals have in which they imitate their own death in order to ward off enemies. It’s that automatic response to fear that we often refer to as `playing possum’; the third option we leave out when we talk of fight-or-flight. We all know that sleep and dreaming is often a form of escape from the worries of one’s life; stress may trigger the `tonic immobility’ as a natural means of defense, deepening the sleep. While the body is mimicking the dead as a defense measure, however, the mind suddenly becomes awake -- but unlike it’s waking state out of normal sleep, the body does not switch back on along with it. So then the person panics, trying to breath as he regularly does when the body is still trying to maintain the shallow breathing that is natural from dreaming consciousness -- and as a result, the person would experience this resistance as pressure on the chest and lungs.

A few things may then happen. It is known from studies in sensory deprivation that when a waking individual is deprived from objective stimulus, one does not, as once assumed, slip into a coma. To the contrary, awareness may heighten. And another strange thing occurs: the mind `compensates’ for the lack of sense data. This data can lead to imagery or hallucinations of all the senses which are common to such hynagogic (twilight state just prior to sleep) and hynopompic (twilight state just prior to awakening) states: sensing a presence, seeing visions, hearing noises, seeing lights or shadows. It can even get more extreme, to the point that the individual has the experience of being detached from one’s body and totally within the context of that hallucination. The strange thing about it is that this world that the mind creates for the perceiver has all the qualities of the normal, external reality: we have not only sensations such as noise, taste, touch, sight and smell, but a sense of location, of dimension, of duration. So the assumption here seems to be that the sensation of pressure on the chest, mixed with the perceiver’s need for an explanation for this sensation, mixed with the necessity of the mind to compensate for the lack of sense data with a full-sensory hallucination, results in the mind creating the totally convincing hallucinatory experience of the `old hag’ in order to satisfy the perceiver’s need for an explanation for his circumstances.

A comforting conclusion, considering the crazy and much more deeply disturbing alternatives, but I must admit its not totally satisfying. This `reality’ that mind spins together on a moment’s notice is totally convincing, and if you take some time to ponder about it after such an experience, you begin to wonder just what element makes the `normal’ world so real and this `otherworld’ so fictitious. In the very least, you gain great respect for the parts of your mind you do not consciously govern; approximating the very most, you begin to question your fundamental assumptions on the nature of what you once considered reality. The thing is, the only difference between the real world and this imaginal otherworld seems to be the laws that govern each -- and though the laws between the worlds, after long enough, are revealed to be quite different, they remain consistent within the respective space of the world in question. So eventually you clear the bullshit away and at the core the question comes to be: why could these worlds not simply be different kinds of external reality? Could it not be a matter of reality and fantasy, but of different kinds of real?

You settle on this: until someone else comes up to you one day and describes in detail the experience you and her shared on the other side, outside your physical bodies, you have no real sound reason to believe this is anything more than a construction of your own warped mind. Even then, there is the alternate possibility of telepathy.

Sleep paralysis seems to be the best bet for explanation. I was even the right age. Japanese research has revealed through several studies that sleep paralysis occurs most often for males in late teens, and in the mid-teens for females. The experience can last up to eight minutes, but such an experience will also give you a good idea of how subjective time perception really is -- for an hour of subjective time, when the mind is dissociated from the body to such a degree, can be squeezed into five minutes of real-time. Or, as in my experience, it can fuck up your sense of time completely. But is their any real danger in this experience? Not according to the `experts'. It doesn't imply psychosis, though all my experiences taken together certainly would. And though little is known about sleep paralysis, experts such as Cheyne insist that regardless as to how frightening it is, one cannot die from it -- though how one would go rounding up statistics on people who had died from the experience is beyond me. Interview via Ouija board, perhaps?

What the `experts' tell us, though, still wouldn’t explain the experience that seems to be so universal: being straddled and smothered by a demonic, feminine entity. Whatever it was that rode me that night seemed to be female, but at the same time inhuman, and it inspired a reaction of fear in me, and of suffocation, of death, of the total terror of vulnerability to a force beyond my control. If this was a manifestation of my unconscious and nothing more, why would such a thing manifest in such a way, and in such a similar way to so many people throughout the world, and throughout history?

If we take the perspective of Carl Jung, there would be two major sources of information from which the mind would construct our convincing hallucinatory experience under sleep paralysis. The first is what he calls the personal unconscious, where all of the remaining beliefs, expectations, associations, and emotions we’ve accumulated throughout our life is stored. This does not account for the similarity in subjective and personal experiences over time and space, however. For that, we would have to turn towards his concept of the collective unconscious -- a concept of his which is largely misunderstood. He described the collective unconscious (or `objective psyche’) as the sum of all the archetypes, which he originally defined as the hereditary, instinctual patterning forces that arrange mental contents and to which cultural images are often attached.

Archetypes, he said, are no more miraculous or `spooky’ as instincts which arrange behavior. And the instincts of some species are very elaborate. They take on extremely structured and purposeful activities without ever being taught, do these activities perhaps once in their lives, and die. If such elaborate behaviors can be transmitted through the DNA of species generation of generation, why not solely psychological patterns as well? This was at the core of Jung’s argument, and as evidence for the archetypes of the collective unconscious he cited the many myths, works of art, hallucinations and dreams that occurred to cultures throughout history which had no known way of communication with each other. The Old Hag may certainly be a manifestation of one of these instinctual patterning forces.

The characteristics of my Old Hag experience centered around a common theme: the dominating demon straddling me, the porthole in which I was suffocating, the marsh or swamp I perceived through the porthole -- all these images ring of suffocation, being `swamped’, drowned, immobilized, overwhelmed, overpowered, controlled, dominated.

What links all the phenomena -- the hag attack during sleep paralysis, the drawing I made in my dream diary that I didn’t remember drawing, my stream-of-consciousness `automatic writing’, the use of the Ouija board by my sisters and I, the sleep-walking and out-of-body experiences I would have down the road and a dozen other things -- is the theme of a dissociated, autonomous portions of my mind. There were parts of me that were not conscious, and which would then be sensible to label as `unconscious’, if not for the fact that they acted just as if they were conscious and had a will and personality of their own. In time I would see these split-off portions of myself manifest in my artwork, in my writing, in my dreams, in my hallucinations, and in my projections. If we are at odd against our instincts, and thoughts, feelings and images we associate with those instincts, this may add up to an unconscious personality which compensates for our lack of conscious recognition and actualization of these aspects of ourselves. In dreams, waking dreams, and hallucinations we may meet up with this cut-off portion of ourselves in the most direct manner possible. Our resistance to it would feed its persistence; our fear and sense of weakness would give it more power and courage -- it would be draining our vitality, like a psychic leech, a spiritual parasite. It would take on characteristics of the vampire or werewolf.

So here I’ve come closer to an explanation. It becomes apparent that the physiological sensations of resistance to breathing would result in a feeling of suffocation, the feeling of paralysis would lead to panic, the lack of sense data would lead to the unconscious filling in the blanks -- and this would lead to a convincing hallucinatory experience which, even if terrifying, at least provides an explanation for the sensations: the illusion of a cause. It still does not answer the question as to why I didn’t hallucinate a boulder on my chest, or a huge frog, or a bowling ball, or even a female just sitting on me. It still doesn’t tell me why I hallucinated some female demon dry-fucking me and trying to suffocate me in the process.

The question comes down to: why a woman?

History and myth have certainly helped to evolve this fearful, demonic image of woman. When the image of the pagan mother goddess was demonized by the early Catholic Church, woman became demonized. That may have certainly added an extra layer of association with evil to the female in the minds of men, but it certainly didn’t begin there -- the women as a symbol of temptation away from higher ideals is seen in the myth of Buddha as well as Christ. Woman has been associated with the moon and the night, and therefore the part of our lives enshrouded in darkness. Woman was seen as representing, in many cases, the entirety of the unconscious, as the night is when most people sleep and dream, a time when men and women have sex, which is an act that was also demonized by the church. Femme fatale legends often emphasize the feminine power of sexual temptation and transformation who uses her insatiable sexual appetite to drain the life out of the souls of her lovers.

In the Medieval time period, these experiences were ascribed to evil spirits and demons called the incubus, from the same Latin word for nightmare, and the female counterpart was known as the Succubus. Though the Succubus is female in meaning, in Latin it is the masculine form of the word. The female form of the demon is `succuba’. The rationale for using the word `succubus’ was apparently due to the fact that the demons were supposed to be sexless, which, of course, would raise questions as to how they’d go about doing all their hanky-panky. The answer may come in that the incubus and succubus were believed to be shape-shifters. They were able to take on the appearance of anything from one’s significant other to their favorite pet, and even transform themselves into smoke so they could move through spaces so tight as a crack in the wall. That’s not all, however. They were said to lie on people at night and, as their victims were asleep, have sexual intercourse with them. The theory was that the incubus stole semen from the man and then, shape-shifting itself into its female counterpart, the succubus, it inseminated the sperm in another female. (And this, the story goes, was why certain nuns got pregnant -- the priests had nothing to do with it, really.)

These demons were often thought to be the familiars of a sorcerer or witch, and when they were they were known as magistellus. Oftentimes, however, the demons were even thought to be the witches or sorcerers themselves. And on other occasions, sorcerers or witches were thought to be the result of the vertical hokey-pokey between an incubus and a human. As the stories go in medieval European folklore, if a woman gets pregnant by an incubus, the child she bears will have all the appearances of a normal, human child but will possess supernatural powers and grow into an evil wizard. In fact, this is the supposed origins of the most famous wizards of myth, Merlin, who came into existence as the result of an incubus copulating with a nun. So in Christian eyes, penguin plus demon equals wizard. I can’t understand this math much more than the type they tried to ingrain in my head during high school, but its much more amusing. Also, its interesting to note that the incubus and succubus demons derive from the Bible, and that the word `demon’ itself derives from the Greek `daemon’, which means `intelligent’. Ignorance isn’t only bliss, then, but apparently the only means of achieving the status of good and getting into the Christian heaven.

There are Biblically-based myths based on the origins of the incubi, and they derive from the Hebrew scriptures, which put a nice twist on the tales in King James Bible, exposing this elaborate, sexually-laden soap opera porno. One myth, for instance, offers that the incubi were descendants of Cain, who was himself supposedly the offspring of `special moments’ held between Eve and the serpent of the Genesis fame. Apparently snakey-pooh coerced her into partaking of more than just fruit off a tree, if you catch my meaning.

A much more interesting myth, however, explains the incubi as descendants of Adam and his first wife, before Eve. This is, according to Hebrew scriptures, Lilith, the first succubus. She was purportedly brought into being by their god from the `filth’ and `mud’ for the purposes of giving Adam something to dominate and tinker around with. How nice of the Hebrew god, to give Adam a sex slave. Things went awry, however. Due to her feminist nature, which the all-knowing god could not apparently precognate, she denied Adam, swore vengeance on any future children he might have, and relocated to a cave in the vicinity of the Red Sea, leaving man to think for the very first time, “wow, what a bitch.” There, in her hide-out, is where Lilith supposedly went about getting nookie from hordes of nasty demons, which I must confess I find strangely arousing. The Hebrew god then sent three angels to her by the names of Sanvi, Sansanvi, and Semangelaf. Say that three times fast. When she refused the demands of the angels that she go back with them, a pact was made in which she swore that she would cease attacking any of Adam’s descendants if they had the names of these three angels somewhere in the vicinity. Those ascribing to belief in this story would therefore write the three names in a circle on the ceiling above where their infant’s crib lay as a means of protection. Lilith was said to lurk in the night hours, hungry for the sex of man and for the flesh of children. You've got to admit, that's one hell of a diet.

She apparently favored killing children by means of strangulation, and often left behind one of her own demon babies in place of the one she’d taken; they were known as `lilin’. According to Hebrew mythology, for instance, the lilin has enormous sex appeal and a taste for murder, with the objectives to steal the vitality of people and leave them feeling drained and empty. This theme, tying together sex, death and vampirism, is prominent in many of these old hag stories and experiences. I also got the feeling of being drained by the entity straddling me -- as if it wasn’t only trying to smother me, but leech off my remaining vitality. Common side effects of being a victim of as vampire are supposed to be extreme bouts of exhaustion which have no apparent cause.

Old hag attacks are often associated with the so-called vampire attacks, specifically `psychic’ vampirism, where the disembodied entity feeds off the human energy field rather than blood. In occult and paranormal circles, it is sometimes believed that libido, the sexual energy, is just another manifestation of chi or ka or whatever one wishes to call the energy that supposedly permeates the universe -- or that this energy is primarily sexual in nature. Jung’s concept of the libido differed from Freud’s original concept in that he believed the libido was not sexual energy; he used the term to stand for psychological energy, of which sexual desire is merely one manifestation. However one takes it, it seems the sexual libido is able to manifest in other fashions.

In paranormal circles, some have tied the Old Hag phenomenon to poltergeist activity. Poltergeist (German for `noisy ghost’) is a term used to describe a haunting in which the entity is mischievous in nature and proceeds to move and hide objects, make loud noises. They are basically perceived as mischievous ghosts who seem to `live’ for scaring the hell out of people and fucking with their minds; kind of like disembodied terrorists from the netherworld. A factor that became very important in the minds of some parapsychologists was that the poltergeist activity was usually focused around a small child, usually a young girl, who was going through the emotional-rollercoaster of an experience known as puberty. Rather than the child being the focus of a ghost, many have come to believe that the poltergeist activity may in fact be caused by unconscious and autonomous psychokinetic abilities. She is, in effect, unconsciously `acting out’ through psychokinesis. The libido needs an outlet, and since it is repressed it is out of control of the youngster and guided by his or her unconscious forces. Some believe that unconscious use of psychokinesis is just an extension of our psychosomatic abilities, where the mind can have an effect on the physical body, such as in hysterical blindness. Jung often found psychosomatic illness to be symbolic. The difference is that when you add psychokinesis into the mix, one can explain `stigmata’ and the bruises, bite marks and scratch marks often found on people who are plagued by poltergeist activity. When frustration rises in the child, poltergeist activity rises; when the child has outgrown puberty, the phenomena ceases.

It seems, then, that sexual energy -- libido, Freud would call it -- can manifest as psychokinetic energy. Then when this energy does not have an outlet and is repressed or died, it comes to be in the hands of our often child-like, autonomous unconscious, who finds an outlet for it through psychokinesis.

It is also believed that the sexual libido are manifestations of a force or energy that can be transferred from one person to another. The life force of a person was thought to be transferred by many means. Through this, the old or weak can draw the life force from the young or strong -- and the dead can draw from the living, and the real, perhaps, from the imaginary. One such way was thought to be skin-to-skin contact. So, for instance, you have King David, who, as a geezer, often slept with a young virgin. You have Emperor Barbarossa, who held young boys against his genitals and tummy in the hopes that he might draw in their energy. You have Pope Innocent VIII, who had young and healthy children to touch him for the purposes of giving him the gift of their energy. Another medium for this life force was thought to be blood: drinking or bathing in it would bring one youth and power. Vampiric themes may be prominent because they are manifestations of our desire for power and immortality -- and, consequently, our fear of vulnerability and the inevitability of death. The long-held view that vampirism (and being a werewolf) is contagious may stem from the fact that once a person is deprived of their life force, it creates a sort of psychic vacuum, and the person is forced to draw energy from others in order to sustain existence -- and often the original vampire returns to collect this energy. Perhaps what this tells us is that our desire for power and immorality, and our fear of vulnerability and death, is so intense that we’re willing to pay the price of being a parasite wholly dependent on its host for the purposes of survival.

Or perhaps as humans, our highly-developed psychology and what we have done with it has put sort of a wall between our sense of self and our instincts; we have created self-concepts, values, ideals, and perspectives of the world that put us at odds with our primal drives. This has caused a fundamental split in us -- a split that could give rise to the ego’s antithesis, the Shadow, and the persona’s antithesis, the anima (for men, anyway). And this may be a reason why throughout history and myth, woman has inspired in men -- and often women herself -- a certain fear. The sight of a woman inspires a primal impulse that threatens our sense of self-control and self-sufficiency and, in the meantime, gives us uncomfortable visions of our own mortality.

Jung spoke of the anima: the feminine principal in man. We come to associate certain parts of ourselves -- typically (though times are changing) in our culture things such as compassion, sensitivity, and intimacy with nature -- with the oppsite sex, and fail to identify and actualize these aspects, nessesarily projecting these characteristics away from ourselves and onto certain members of the opposite sex. They may also manifest as charatcers in dreams, stories, artwork, hallucinations. Our relations with the opposite sex, then, illustrates our relation with the unactualized portions of ourselves. We have made an internal situation an external one. Though we may inherit much of the anima, and find this part of her in myths and legends, she is ultimately unique and personalized for each of us.

The truth of the matter is that, at least on a genetic level, men are dependent on woman to survive. Though we cannot be given immortality by any known means, sex is our only hope at achieving some genetic immortality -- genetically, sex is our only defense against death. This could explain quite a bit.

Especially in our current patriarchal culture, the male is conditioned to expect out of himself a certain power and ability to control at all times, for the rule is to conquer or be conquered; to control or be controlled. With sex, then, there comes a certain contradiction in man, for to be sexual (at least in an orgasmic sense) means to relinquish that control, to let go, to trust, to be vulnerable. This sets man’s conditioned persona against man’s instinctual drives; it may inspire a deep fear of the female who, through his desire for her, controls him, has power over him. As a result, he senses a certain evil in her, a suspicion, a fear of being dominated, bound, suffocated and overwhelmed -- and at the same time that these things inspire fear in him, they may... turn him on. And so this fear may be projected in the `old hag’ experience.

In the twilight state on the border of sleeping and waking, were conscious and unconscious have equal footing, the conscious mind meets with the intense desires it has but fears like death, and the female image it needs but demonizes. Perhaps the act that is so common in the meeting throughout time and space symbolizes a certain need for resolution -- for the reconciliation of these opposites.

Or perhaps sometimes even ghosts and aliens need to get laid.

"When authorities warn you of the sinfulness of sex, there is an important lesson to be learned. Do not have sex with the authorities."
-- Matt Groening

"As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live."
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

PILL & THE LAY
by Patchwork,
3/26/04,
6:38 AM.

You are
the touch of the top
of a cold bottle atop my hot
and sweating forehead.

You are the soft touch of skin;
the hit off the morning cigarette.

You are the uncontrollable, unprecendented laughter,
the artistic madness when a piece draws itself,
the point in a story where words just flow,
the poem that demands to be written,
the cool summer night's wind blowing across my neck,
making the shirt on my back wave like the sea.

You are the soft voice that whispers comfortably,
`it'll be okay, it'll all be all right,
and if it isn't, than it doesn't matter,
no one will give a shit in fifty years anyway'.

And you're close enough I can almost touch you
are you shying away or am I just afraid?
Afraid to be naked, afraid to be open,
afraid to be innocent and vibrant
like I felt with the pill and the lay?

"She calls me goliath and I wear the david mask
I guess the stones are coming too fast for her now
You know I’d like to believe this nervousness will pass
All the stones that are thrown are building up a wall
I have become cumbersome to this world
I have become cumbersome to my girl."
-- SEVEN MARY THREE, Cumbersome.

Claire.
by Rewired

It was the fall of 1995. I was in a pretty bad state at the time, mentally and emotionally. I had, from about the beginning of the year, gone from what I consider to be a reasonably normal kid to a very tormented and lost young man. I wish I could blame all this on puberty, but it seems other forces were at work. I had about reached the pique of my horror in August, and that event had pretty much left me sinking in a swamp of overwhelming nihilism, unwavering pessimism, and the deepest, most thorough form of confusion one could imagine.

On the day in question, I was sitting in front of the computer, typing away like a madman. As I did so, I munched on my usual Ritz crackers and drank coffee mixed with hot chocolate mix -- a cheap form of mocha my friend, Ned, had introduced to me. The computer I was working on was actually my parent’s computer and was situated at the far end of the family room. I had wanted one in my room for forever, but in some small ways it was pretty cool having it down there. When I wasn't writing I could shoot some pool on the table behind me or play the piano situated at the other end of the room.

My mind was far away from the piano or the pool table that day, however. As a matter of fact, I hardly noticed where I was physically located at all. I was very wrapped up in this short story I was writing. It was about a lost young man who, one night, decides to commit suicide by jumping off a bridge and into the river below. Before he is able to do so, a lovely, dark girl comes along who turns out to be a vampire. My writing was going along pretty well, too, until my mind was pulled back to the mundane world by the sound of a familiar voice. I turned around to see my friend, Dante.

Dante. This guy was an excellent guitarist, and he played lead in a band that had formed the year earlier, my freshmen year of high school. They practiced habitually at the house of the rhythm guitarist, Aaron. As a matter of fact, as Dante quickly revealed, Aaron was the reason he’d stopped over: the guy was MIA and he wondered if I'd seen him. Why Dante would think for a second that I had a clue where the guy might be was beyond me, and I told him as much. Not to be harsh or anything, but I had never quite fancied Aaron. The guy was annoying, he never bathed, and his dandruff was atrocious. And other than that he had less than admirable qualities.

I thought perhaps Dante had just used Aaron's disappearance as an excuse to stop by, and I was fine with that, so we started getting wrapped up in some conversation. It didn't take too long at all, though, until I was struck by an unfamiliar presence. Struck like lightning. Struck by the purest manifestation of absolute beauty. It was this girl that was with him who I had never seen before. She looked damned attractive. An odd being, yes, but a damn fine looking being with her cute face and her deep, blue ocean eyes. Her shoulder-length, hot-pink hair made her even more difficult to ignore. She wore one of those weird green shirts with the collar and those little dinosaurs in front. I was absolutely drawn to her. To everything about her. And instantly I was reminded of that girl Claire Danes off My So-Called Life, who I'd found attractive ever since I'd first seen the show. Actually, I had been wishing for a girl that looked just like her for some time, but I wasn't actually serious...

When Dante introduced us she kind of had her arms crossed and nodded a sarcastic "hi" with a tilt of her head. Ah, I thought, a cocky woman. Anyway, as any conversation with me ever starts on my behalf with a person I've never met -- especially an attractive girl -- I started making fun of her. Yet to my surprise, this playful, pathetic and childish attempt at opening the lines of communication was actually successful. The teasing that went back and fourth between us led to talking, and the talking led to pool-playing, and that led to more teasing and more talking. The feeling I got around her was tremendously strange. I rarely, if ever, felt that way around a girl.

I noticed a certain conflict in me then. You see, I had by that time lost all belief in the instincts that came with being human. I had lost trust in all drives that I did not entirely understand. I felt that by this point in human evolution we should have transcended such urges. It seemed to me that the concept of love was merely a romantic veil we placed over our animalistic instinct to procreate. I kept reminding myself that I could not be fooled by these lowly instincts and that I had to make sure it was something in her that I admired beyond the flesh before I even considered trusting this overwhelming, warm and intense feeling her presence gave rise to in me.

After we had played a few games of pool, I took Dante aside as subtly as I could. It wasn't really pre-planned, it was just something I found myself doing. And then I found myself very quietly asking him just where this beautiful girl had come from. He explained how she had used to live up in California, but that her father had lost his job and they had to come live with Dante’s parents.

Dante lived half a block from my house. This pink-haired, Californian beauty lived not a block from my house. I was excited. He had liked my cousin, Maddy, at the time so I asked him if half-jokingly if he wanted to exchange cousins. When he looked confused, I was more clear: I’d set him up with my cousin if he’d set me up with her, I told him. He said that this would be cool and all, that this would be beyond cool, as a matter of fact, save for the fact that Claire already had a boyfriend. Some kid named Sidley who was living with Aaron. I jokingly - well, half-jokingly - asked Dante how much it would be to kill him for me. He laughed and said he wasn’t sure he could do anything, but he’d see what he could do.

I felt a release. A tingly feeling. A lightness, a playfulness that I had a faint memory of feeling some time long ago. Any hope, especially around that time, was more than I could ever ask for.

After we had played more pool, and eventually got bored, Dante ended up standing by the computer and asked what I had been writing. I told him it was a short story, and Claire immediately jumped and said she had wanted to read. I was a bit nervous, because I wasn’t finished, so I tried to get my ass in the chair before she did. We struggled for a bit and she ended up sitting on my face. It was strangely comfortable. Dante stood over us, a bit amused, a bit disturbed, spell-checking my story as Claire tried to read it.

When I told her it involved a vampire, she got all hyper and high-pitched. She told me that she was a Moonbeast. I lifted an eyebrow in confusion. When it had become clear that I didn’t know what she was talking about, she sort of pushed it aside and said she’d tell me sometime later. I liked that. That implied I'd be seeing her again.

The following day, Date gave me a call and asked if I wanted to come over to Aaron’s place and watch them play. I did this occasionally, as way back when the band first formed they’d played with the idea of me coming a member. It was brought up that perhaps I could be lead singer. Fortunately I had heard myself try and sing before, so I saved them from being subjected to such torture. But it was still cool to be in the same environment as these creative individuals, so I occasionally came over to watch them play. I was bored, so I agreed to coming over, and he came over to pick me up. I didn't have a car at this time, because I was phobic of driving.

When Dante walked in the house and I followed, the evening opened as I had predicted, as it always did every time I walked through that door. You see, Aaron has a funny way of greeting me. He always takes a look at me, takes a step back, widens his eyes as if he’s surprised that I’m still alive, and says my full name in a very astonished manner. And then I look at him without blinking and say his name in a spooky, threatening way. It’s nothing personal, it’s just some strange way of relating we developed some time ago. If you haven't noticed, I have a variety of social problems.

So their band room was the basement. And that basement was classic. Dimly lit, full of cigarette smoke, littered with beer bottles. There were microphones, amplifiers, a mixer, a bass guitar, rhythm guitar, a drum set, coffee tables, side tables, ashtrays, posters and calendars of half-naked women on the walls. Everything you think of when you think `band room' in reference to a metal band. It was beautiful. And then there was the black leather couch pushed against the far wall, behind all the instruments, right below the banner on which was embroided their band's name, with a bull skull right in the center. Ah, that couch.

And that’s where I was sitting. I think their bassist was tuning and someone else was pissing around when I was sitting there, burned out from my insomnia and too much coffee. My head was ringing and numb from the sounds of wailing gutairs and violent drum solos they'd been playing. Then, out of nowhere, I felt the couch move and I almost fell over to the left. I instead braced myself, leaned my body to the right, and turned my head to the left. And my brown eyes met with a familiar, life-giving, vibrant blue pair of eyes. Like pools offered to me by some Virgo moon goddess, in which I could bathe my shit-coated Scorpio soul. Not to trail off into astrology and metaphor or anything.

It was, of course, Claire. I was especially impressed by her strange, black cloths, which I had to assume was typical for California girls. If it turned out it was not typical, I was certainly of the opinion it should be. She wore these very short shorts, her big boots, her funky socks. Her beautiful blue eyes gave me a sinister gaze through the pink hair that hung across her face as she sat there smoking her cigarette.

Me? I was still in an antagonistic mood.

"You know those things will kill you," I'd said, nodding my head towards her cigarette. She responded by blowing smoke in my face.

I gave her a scowl, she gave me a teasing glare back. I nudged her arm, and she nudged me back.

Crap. I liked her.

Off and on throughout the night we talked, joked, teased, flirted. And throughout all of it there I was, realizing more and more that I liked her and beginning to hate that fact all the less. I mean, why should I despise the fact that I actually liked someone? That I was so drawn to such a strange, beautiful creature? I felt I'd recovered something within myself in her presence; something I'd lost a long while back and left for dead. And yet here it was, this glowing feeling, as if it had never left.

My mind was buzzing with thoughts I had never had before. What was wrong with me? I should go for it, I thought, I should really go for her. Flow with it and see what becomes of it. I had felt dead until she had walked into my living room, and the life I felt around this girl was amazing. Suddenly the hell I had been engulfed in since Winter seemed light years away. I had become a corpse as the result of my own personal apocalypse, and it was like she had breathed life into me -- the unprecedented appearance of a new genisis at the end of the world as I had known it. Proof of some death-rebirth cycle of sorts. I had tread through my own shadows, fought my own demons, and just when I thought it was all going downhill without a flow or a pause, without any hope of reversal, a light had appeared on the other side. A beautiful girl with pink hair and ocean blue eyes and funky socks.

Then I stopped myself. I mean, so far things had been unbelievable, like the opening of a dream, but I knew damned well that all dreams ended the same way: you woke up. Nightmares apparently worked in accordance with another logical system. I had to remember that I was in a nightmare here; brief flashes of dreams were just there to serve as a reminder of what I could never have for any length of time. It was just something an element thrown into the nightmare to further it, to intensify it. So all these thoughts circling around the possibility that she could be mine and mine alone, they were silly. Preposterous. An insane thought cooked up by an insane mind. It was a dream, and dreams weren't reality, reality was a nightmare that had no foreseeable end and no true intermissions. Anyway, there was that tiny little annoying detail about her having a boyfriend.

And yet, a voice reminded me, stranger things have happened. Indeed, ever since Winter, as a matter of fact, strange things have seemed to be the rule.

I got a call from Dante the following evening. He asked if I’d still take him up on that offer about exchanging cousins. I asked him specifically what he meant. He then informed me that Claire had broken up with her boyfriend. I got excited and totally immobilized with fear simultaneously. He said that she was very interested in me, but that I had to do the work if I really wanted her, and that he was going to hand her the phone now. Before I could protest, a cool, sexy female voice said hi from the other end of the line.

Hope was on the line. Reel it in, I told myself, reel this in. She's quite a catch.

We seemed to talk for hours that night. She told me all about her misadventures in California. She asked if I had a girlfriend. I said no, not currently, that I decided it probably wasn't a good idea because I was a little on the insane side. I had a problem relating to people who were, well, normal and stuff. She informed me that she was no stranger to insanity. As a matter of fact, she’d chased a bunch of pills with a bottle of Jack Daniels one night after a fight with her parents and woke up in a hospital having her stomach pumped, and after that, she got thrown in the loony bin. And then she came to Ohio. Which one might consider just a bigger rubber room.

I was fairly certain at that time that the loony bin was a place where I was going to end up, so I listened very closely to her strange tales. And the more she talked the more I realized that I was absolutely, totally, one hundred per cent, without a doubt, completely into this girl.

She asked me why I was so sure I was insane, and I told her that it was a long story. She told me she had plenty of time, so I flipped through the excuse files in my mind to try to find a better way to dodge the question. I came up empty. I didn’t want to tell her, but I didn't want to lie to her, and though silence wasn't a lie, it wasn't an option at this point, so I did all I thought I could do. I summed it up. I told her that it had something to do with UFOs. For some reason I thought I should dodge the whole out-of-body experiences, seeing aliens, remembering past lives, being attacked by evil entities from another plane of existence, being informed that the world was going to end thing. That’s never a turn-on. But she had surprised me so far.

And to my suprise she didn't seem suprised. So I figured California must be one hell of a place. She told me she had seen a UFO once, or thought she had, when her and some friends from the loony bin were trying to escape out a window. It was just a light, glimmering and bouncing in the darkness. She did warn me that they were on a stew of prescrption drugs at the time, though. I smiled and asked her if she’d ever seen anything else like that; anything in the area of the paranormal. Then she said yet again that she was a Moonbeast, and I asked her to elaborate.

She said that when she had just gotten out of the loony bin, just before her father had lost his job and moved out here to Ohio, she had been walking by an old clock tower and some guy had come by and asked her if she wanted to be a Moonbeast. She wasn’t sure, she told me, but she thought it was supposed to be some type of werewolf or vampire. I secretly rolled my eyes, but reminded myself of what had happened to me, and told myself that nothing should be shoved into the category of the impossible anymore. Anyway, she said that after she said yes that the guy had bit her, and she had fainted, and that ever since she’d been obsessed with clocks. It sounded pretty out there, pretty cheesy, but so did inter-dimensional entities draining your vitality and getting probed by aliens, so who was I to talk?

I asked her how different life was down there, and she said it was certainly a different world. After she told me some stories, I could see why. For instance, she also took some time explaining this disgusting game the kids would play down in California. It was called `mooshie cookie’. Apparently several guys crowd in a circle around a cookie and jerked off. The last one to spooge had to eat the cookie. I told her down here in Ohio we stuck to games like Red Rover and Duck-Duck-Goose.

We eventually got back around to the fact that she was single again, and I said that I was, too. I had been, since that little thing with Anne. I think I told her about Anne, how I’d met her at a water park with my cousins over the summer, how we’d met just before I’d gone completely insane and started seeing stuff. I told her it just hadn’t worked out. She suggested I go out with her now, because her and me, we could work out if I gave her a chance. And I said that I promised myself that I’d never ask out a girl over the phone again; that I thought I should have guts to do it in person - and then I cracked down and asked her if she wanted to be my girlfriend. And she said yes.

So the next day I found myself at Aaron’s house, in his basement, on that black couch alone with Claire in her cute gothic-like Californian get-up. I lay with my back to the couch. She had her legs wrapped around my waist and she laid on my lap. We made out for what seemed like hours. An endless, blissful, relaxing eternity. I rubbed my fingers through her soft pink hair, felt her soft lips press violently, then softly, against my own. Her smooth, cute little chin. And occasionally she’d pull back and I’d see those blue eyes of hers staring back into mine, eyes that seemed to be as entranced as I felt.

I found myself thinking: I don’t deserve this. There’s no way I deserve to be this happy. How had this beautiful girl happened to fall into my lap? And then again, why should I ask questions? So I enjoyed the sweet, intense electric building there between her and I. I let go into it all until I realized, suddenly, something that disturbed me a great deal: I didn’t know her last name.

Not only did this disturb me royally, but the fact that it disturbed me pissed me off. It seemed that every time my one, lower head wanted to do something my other, higher head broke in and had to ruin everything. I had ceased to believe that rythmic organ located somewhere between them had anything to do with this at all.

Just then I heard footsteps and the sound of Aaron’s ever-astonished voice going: “Holy shit… holy shit,” then saying my full name again, then: “-- is getting laid in my basement.”

Claire stopped a moment to explain to Aaron what a retard he was for considering making out the act of getting laid, but apparently the astonishing sight that I was still alive (since yesterday), mixed with the fact that I was engaged in some form of intimate interaction with a female was more than Aaron could take, because he was already running up the stairs in what was quite clearly sheer terror. After some short commentary to Claire on what a moron he was, I then re-engaged with bliss.

Some time later, we took a break and departed for upstairs. After Claire had disappeared for the moment, and I saw Dante, I shook my head and just let out a wow over his cousin. Aaron then came by and started going off on how I was getting laid on his sofa. I didn't acknowledge his words, or even his presence for that matter, hoping that would be enough for him to shut up. Then Sidley, Claire’s just-recent ex, broke in. He made some crude remark regarding how I should handle Claire in bed, and I just gave him an evil look. This seemed to perplex him. I was about to defend myself and Claire when Dante stepped in to do so for me, explaining, quite simply, that Aaron was an idiot and the fact of the matter was that I was `not like that'. Dante knew about my whole fear-of-sex thing, and he accepted it as part of my character. He turned to me and made sure to add, though, that I should know that his cousin was sexually active. That, I must admit, got me a bit nervous. I had no experience in that area - none, zip, zero - and I didn’t want to sail those waters anytime soon. The thought of sex terrified me. At least: the part of me that was making a big deal out of something so small as not knowing her last name didn’t want to sail those waters. Some people might call this denial of the sexual impulse as fear or anxiety. At that time, I called it the act of having morals. But let it be known: it was in actuality what is known as fear or anxiety.

And then Dante pointed out something I hadn’t noticed - the hicky on my neck. He said it was quite a mark, and as I’d discover later in the mirror, she did indeed have quite a talent for marking her territory. It was going to be difficult covering this up. The mark of the moonbeast.

I think I just happened to ask what school she was going to, and Dante turned to me suprised. He informed me that she had just moved down here just before I’d met her, and that in less than a week she would be going to my own. The paperwork and all that shit just had to go through. That basically knocked the wind out of me. My school? She was going to be going to my school? I’d never had a girlfriend at school before. What exactly were the responsibilities of having a girlfriend at school? I was new at this. Claire was already into sex, and would no doubt be expecting that from me soon, and I still didn’t know if I was supposed to walk her to class or if I was expected to defend her honor or what. I was absolutely terrified. I was paranoid enough during that period for reasons that should be clear, and this whole being-a-boyfriend-at-school thing was not going to help matters.

Dante announced he was going to be taking me home soon, so Claire hurried up to follow. As she did so, she fell into a lamp, which toppled over and broke on the floor. She fell down. We all went down to help her, and through some sheepish laughing she said she was all right, but that she had gotten part of the lamp in her knee. Someone put a lampshade on top of her head, and she just kept laughing. I smiled then as I smile now. You got to love the little things that stick out in memory.

The next day in school was strange. Covering up the hicky wasn't possible, as turtlenecks drive me batty. So every five minutes when someone asked me if I'd gotten action the night prior I'd say, quite simply, that it wasn't a hicky: it was a heat rash. I don't think anyone completely bought this, but it seemed to shut them up. Except for one lady, a teacher I knew, who stopped me in the hallway and asked who the lucky girl was. When I persisted that it was just a heat rash, she called me out immedeatly and, in so many words, let me know that she knew I was bullshitting her. I finally managed to cover up the hicky, though. My face got so red when the teacher didn't buy my bullshit story that the hicky just sort of blended in.

When Claire had come in for her first day I was, as usual, at school early. I had no car, and our school’s bus systems had been voted out in the previous school levy, so I was always there early. I remember seeing her there in the hallway outside the art room, in her ripped jeans and in her blue, zip-down, hooded sweat shirt - what she called her `Ohioan cloths’. And I remember her cornering me just outside the art room door, just outside the door of my shrine, where my friends and I always hung out before school. And I was nervous. Incredibly nervous. I couldn’t resist it when she kissed me, but it was a quick one and I was sure to look around afterward.

See, I hadn’t told my friends about her. I hadn't told anyone about her, because I was terrified to give recognition to the fact that she'd be coming here. See, for some reason any girl I even had a casual interest in ended up being hated by the majority of the school. Whether it was because I liked them or because I just had the knack for liking girls every one else liked using as a verbal dartboard or emotional punching bag is uncertain, but I felt her being my girlfriend just might have cursed her from the beginning. And she had no doubt been through enough.

Not that my concern for her was entirely selfless. The fact that I had a girlfriend would no doubt attract much attention, and I was the kind of guy who went out of his way to not attract attention. Some had a thirst for the spotlight, I’d rather be hiding off in the shadows somewhere. Now I’d be in the shadows with this fine beauty who kept sticking her tongue down my throat, and her pink hair would be a beacon.

All day long I got asked if `that pink-haired girl’ was my girlfriend. I remember one girl in class, quite a snot, I might add, asked me if I `was going out with that one new girl who looked like the girl off that television show, My So-Called Life’ and I proudly said yes. Then she got all snooty and said she didn’t like her. I told her that was her prerogative. This was the same bitch who had gotten her whole class of freshmen girls to shun me because I had written a goofy letter announcing my admiration for one of her friends. I ignored her. I had found my smile, no matter how nervously I felt I had to conceal it, and that was all that presently mattered. From the first day, though, my expectations had been fulfilled: she was hated all around the school. I had cursed her.

And as the days wore on, I couldn’t help but notice that the other side of me was winning over. I began to feel as if I was using her in some way. That whole fear of succumbing to lowly animalistic impulses began to claw at my mind again. My mind searched for other reasons why I shouldn’t be with her; why it wasn’t `morally’ acceptable. She had told me that I reminded her of a boyfriend she’d had down in California - one that had strangely had my very same name - and she, of course, reminded me of Claire Danes, who I’d found incredibly attractive for a long time. It seemed to me we didn't even like each other for who we were, but for who we reminded each other of. We hadn’t even had time to get to know each other. And love at first sight? I was sure all that stuff was bullshit.

So I called her up one night, about a week after that blissful night on the couch were I realized I didn’t know her last name, and I told her I thought we should break up. Right after I said the words I regretted it, but it wasn’t like you can stop after breaking up with a girl and go, “oh wait, never mind. I didn’t mean that. I’ve had a sudden change of heart.” But I wrestled with it all night. In the morning, I saw her by her locker, gathering books. Her face and eyes were red and wet from crying. She looked at me, frowning, and then glared at me. That look she gave me killed me. It was totally impossible to ignore the fact that I was a complete asshole now. She slammed her locker and gave me the stare of death as she walked passed me, not saying a word. My heart sank to my throat and choked me, then fell down into my stomache and twisted into a knot.

It wasn’t long until she was going out with a friend of mine, a really nice, interesting guy who wore a trench coat and shared my interest in the Occult. He had a Ouija board he tinkered around with and seemed to have a pretty good knowledge of the paranormal literature. He was an artist, too, just like me. He even drew the little alien guys, but I cannot say whether it was for the same reason. I was happy for them. They seemed to be happy. And though it took awhile, Claire eventually began talking with me again. She’d let me bum fifty cents to buy some Pepsi from the bake sale in the school library or give me a bite of pizza she bought in the cafeteria. We talked. Things were friendly between us, the wounds seemed to slowly heal. But let it be known that I still felt like a dumb shit for dumping her. And her and my trench-coat friend? Their relationship lasted, at most, a week. She called me up one night to tell me she had broken it off with him, and that she really wanted me back. I felt the conflict in me again. How can one person feel two ways at once, I thought? But I knew how. I wasn't exactly singular.

I told her I wasn’t so sure it would work. And she said in the very least I had to tell her why I didn’t think it would work; why I’d broken up with her out of the blue in the first place. And I beat around the bush about it, because, to be honest, I couldn't entirely provide an explanation for my actions. No one had contemplated my motives, it seemed, for the longest time: they merely accepted my short-circuiting self for what it was and left it at that. She really wanted to know my reasons, though. We spent about three hours or so talking. She was actually begging to have me back. It was scary. Life had to be some fucked up dream. What the hell did she see in me? I wasn’t able to give her a real reason, but it seemed evident that neither of us could get our minds off each other.

The other part of me, the paranoid part, he’d taken back the wheel. He’d pushed the love-struck part of me into the passenger seat. There were more important things to worry about, this part of me said. I was, for instance, quite convinced the sky was falling at that time. I’d been pretty straight with only a select few of my friends about what I'd seen and experienced, but I’d told no one everything. To tell anyone a significant portion of what had been going on with me was as pointless as it was stupid, and I knew that. But I did tell my friend, Ned, that I thought the world was ending. Though it wasn't my envisioned version of earth's future, he seemed to agree a great change was coming and that it would tumble humanity back into the dark ages. Whatever, I thought. So he decided to take me to the Ledges right across from the school one day after school hours and show me some plants I could use to make tea and eat and so on in the event of the apocalypse. No, really.

Little did we know Claire was trailing us. Or me, rather. She came right between Ned and I, came up to me, put her hand down my pants and pinned me up against a moss-covered rock. She then proceeded to stick her tongue down my throat as I did a bit of protesting that soon became quite muffled. All the while Ned was standing there, frozen, eyes open with shock and disgust. He was quick to point out that I was saying no as she was sticking her tongue down my throat while doing nothing to prevent her from doing it. He yelled at her for putting off her pheramones, called her a leech, and then added that her and I ought to get a room.

I was quick to notice that an increase of resistance on my part to her led to an increase in her persistence. So not only could I satisfy the one part of me that wanted to transcend this primitive urge by denying her, but I could satisfy the primitive urge as well. Strange how it worked that way. It also allowed me to totally deny that I was infatuated her. I loved how she had pinned me to that rock. How unwilling she was to take no for an answer. So I increased resistance. And, as predicted, she increased persistence. I kept her close enough not to be out of reach, but far away enough that I could breath and feel my freedom. So Claire and I hovered in that undefined space between friends and significant others.

Almost immediately, she became an integral part of my little group of friends. Our group was rather odd; I had somehow accumulated them when I went insane. Like moths to a light bulb, like flies to a pile of shit, we seemed drawn to each other. More than once I’d heard someone comment on how incredibly weird it was that we all hung together, because even for a small clique, we were quite diverse. I guess one's enigma is another's common sense. The way I’d seen it, we didn't have to be like one another, and at least for a time, we were able to accept and build on our differences. We had just enough in common that we could do things together, like hang out in the library after school, at Ned and Nathan’s house on the weekends (where their father came to refer to us as the `Barbarian Horde’) and go to the coffee shop not thirty minutes away from the school.

When Claire began to tag along, they accepted her pretty well. Well, except for Ned, who constantly accused her of emitting pheromones and often referred to her as `the leech’. As for me and the others though, I think we all agreed that Claire fit in to our little clique rather well. And deep down, I think Ned felt the connection, too.

Claire wrote letters to me often. She always had this amazing ability to write down or say things that would stick in my head from then on. Like that one time she asked if I’d ever heard of the song, Cumbersome, by that band, Seven Mary Three. I said that I thought that I had. She said I should listen to the lyrics, because it explains our situation entirely. It certainly did. Claire was very hurt and most of the blame lay on me. I was really cruel to her back then. She was always getting mixed messages from me, because I couldn’t balance myself out. I was always juggling, unable to reconcile my dualities. Half of me needed her, the other half wanted to be alone. Half of me wanted to get closer, half of me wanted to fade away and never return. A part of me didn't want this feeling of need. So she was my goddess and my temptress. She brought out my soul and she brought out my monster. I'd just lose it sometimes, unable to deal with these conflicting sides of myself, and I’d just start yelling at her. She was the light that brought out the shadow. Before she had come along, nothing in the external world really interested me. I think my friends had kept me at bay, but she brought me to solid ground. If not for my friends, if not for Claire, I would've drifted far, far out into the seas of insanity. I may have ended up in that loony bin.

By October, she had ended up going out with this kid, Gavin Janis. I met Janis when Ned had come into the art room one day and told me that I had an evil twin walking around. Several people had apparently commented on how this guy looked just like me, listened to Green Day just like I did at the time, only he was into drugs and alcohol and sex and all that stuff I denied myself. So I was quite interested to meet this guy, who had apparently heard quite a lot about me as well, but had never seen me himself. So when Ned told me he was in the library, I slipped out of the art room and snuck down the hall, where I was met with a pair of brown eyes, not totally unlike my own, staring back at me fro the table. We both admitted to an uncanny resemblance.

Well, it turned out that hew as sort of head over heels over Claire. He wanted to ask her out, but he was nervous about it. And so I began to see a bit of my personality in my so-called evil twin alongside the physical appearance. I urged him to ask her, and basically set them up. I think a good amount of my reason for setting them up was to try to prove to myself that I wasn’t attracted to her anymore. They went out, too, until around the Halloween party at Rowan’s house, when Claire’s persistence knew no bounds. At the party she had followed me outside and guided me in the woods, where she pinned me up against a tree. It was basically the same thing that had happened at the Ledges, only Ned wasn’t right there, a foot away. But in the mist of all this occurring in the woods, I noticed that people from the party had followed my lead and were slowly maneuvering outside. I freaked out out and ran away from her, and ended up lying down, hiding, in a field of weeds.

Not long thereafter, Ned came up, with his arms over Rowan. Those two were hitting it off at the time. Him having a girlfriend was even more shocking than me having a girlfriend. When he spotted me in the weeds, he laughed and asked just what the bloody hell I was doing. I said I was hiding from Claire. He went on to say that it was more than obvious we were both nuts for each other, and that I should stop being a fuckwit and just go back out with her. I told him she had a boyfriend. And he brought up the fact that it was a me look-alike, and that this should tell me something. And he again suggested I stop being a fuckwit.

I was being a fuckwit. But why the hell was I acting this way? I was in total denial of my fear. I was in total ignorance to the fact that I was playing this game because I figured she’d always be there, that this tactic of resistence would keep working. Winter was on its way, however, and though I didn’t know it yet, Claire would be moving away. Her parents would get in a fight with Dante’s parents and they would get kicked out of the house. She would move in with her grandmother, distance would become an obsticle to my game, and I would be silently devistated.

After Ned and Rowan left, I just sort of lay there in the weeds for awhile, staring up into the star-filled Ohio sky, wondering what I was to make of everything that had happened in my life over the passed year. Wondering what was wrong with me. Wondering why I could not just let go and let this beautiful girl in. Wondering just what that was that was crawling up my pant leg.

"Dwelling on the negative simply contributes to its power."
-- Shirley MacLaine.

"Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come."
-- Matt Groening, Love is Hell.

UNTITLED.
by Ness
12/98

one day you're gonna lose me
and you're gonna think you didn't abuse me
so why did I go
as if you didn't know
I love you seems to be only words
words that are no longer being heard
it's just like a casual hi
when I hear them it almost seems like a lie
I don't feel any love coming from you
I just don't know what to do
all I hear is negative
I don't even want to live
I just want to cry
and all you can say is what and why
we don't understand each other
you make me feel like a bad wife and mother
maybe it's true
If only I knew
am I as bad of a person as you make me feel
I don't even feel like life is real
my heart is broken
more with every hateful word spoken
you make me feel like all you want is perfection
and because I can never be you won't give me affection
I feel like my existence is completely pointless
I feel completely worthless

DOES SLENDER EQUAL YUMMY?
by Rewired.

“I’m fat,” she says, and I want to scream in her face -- and not just because she’s not. There is a widespread belief that men value women who are slender. That skinny is equivalent to beauty. And it would be in some sense satisfying to find some reason, through evolutionary psychology, as to why 80% of the women I know, no matter how slim they are, are possessed by the delusional notion that they are obese or are mere steps away from becoming that way. But is this slim equals attractive assumption justified? Not according to Devendra Singh at the University of Texas-Autsin. Singh found that while miss America has become 30% more twig-looking over the past several decades, her waist-to-hip ratio has remained basically the same. His paper seems to show that men judge a female's figure not by whether she is slender or overweight, but by this hip-to-waist ratio. Sounds fucking lame, doesn’t it? And yet there's evidence for this and logic behind it. According to Singh, the ideal hip-to-waist ratio is with the hips being about a third larger than the waist. This physical characteristic in a female reflects a certain hormonal balance that causes a woman to store fat in her hips as opposed to her waist, which correlates with resistance to disease and higher fertility. So equating slim with beauty is relative to cultural influences -- instinctually, being slender is not necessarily being beautiful, and being `overweight' does not necessarily mean being unattractive. So get over it, gals. I’m not telling you to put yourself at a risk of a heart attack, but men aren’t asking you to starve yourselves.

"The body says what words cannot."
-- Martha Graham.

"Great food is like great sex -- the more you have the more you want."
-- Gael Greene.

KUNDALINI.
by Patchwork,
6/29/04.

Caressing, teasing
her kundalini.
I live for that
look on her face.

Pain and pleasure
are related and in
the sex and sweat
the distinction just
disappears.

Bite my shoulders again.
Dig your nails into the skin
of my back and then
breath deeply.

Rest peacefully;
I just can't sleep.
And I know I should be
dead tired.

Just another taste.
I want more, and without you
I'm just so dead and bored.

Hold me down,
pinch my skin.
Let me feel your body.
Let me drown in
your sensual reality.

I've postponed, I've drug this out,
and I've endured.
Life's long and hard and
what's the fucking hurry?

But now I'm here.

I've postponed,
I've strung myself along
to the last possible moment,
devoured,
and here I'm
still thirsty.

And I know I
shouldn't be
this thirsty.

"Each relationship you have with another person reflects the relationship you have with yourself."
-- Alice Deville.

STORY ABOUT A GOTH GIRL.
by Rewired.

She has inspired so much poetry, and for so long I’ve wanted to sit down and weave it all together, to try and put together the puzzle that surrounds her. To introduce her to the world of my writing. To just write a story about her -- a story about a goth girl.

Terra is her real name, or in my writing life, anyway. I call her the Goth Girl now because, well, she fits the title pretty damned well. Way back I used to call her the Queen of Darkness or the Dark Maiden in a half-joking fashion -- and prior to that, before she went goth, before she became who she is today, I habitually referred to her as the Evil One. The joke, when I first met her when she was circa thirteen years old, was that evil always hid behind a cute face, and a girl as cute as her couldn't possibly be anything less than pure fucking evil. I have demolished all belief in an absolute morality since then, but in a purely subjective, relative, personal sense, she would be the personification of emotional chaos in my life -- the temptress.

I met her, fitting enough, on Halloween, 1998. I think it was either shortly before or shortly after Claire and I broke up for the last time. I had heard Sandra and Nick refer to their little cousin before, but I'd never met her. It wasn't much of a meeting that night, either, not really. I don't recall any official introductions, no hi or hello, she just kind of appeared out of the woodwork.

I think I had gotten off of work, and they'd just come back from seeing the movie Spawn. We had gone driving around for a bit, in the middle of nowhere of course, when we noticed the gas gauge was on E. Nathan was driving, and it was Sandra's car. She said he had no reason to worry, because it had just gotten to E and it would get us a good ways before the gas tank was really empty. She said this just as the car coasted to a stop and Nathan burst out laughing.

So there we were, a herd of teens and twenty-somethings walking around deserted roads in the middle of nowhere at three in the morning, without a gas station in sight. We took the opportunity to be loud and obnoxious, as we were all tired and wired, and I remembered doing my usual. For some reason around that time I'd developed this odd taste for talking about pretty much anything that made people squirm, and that evening I was speaking at a rather high volume about how my ass itched. I caught a few giggles from her. I was sure that made a great first impression.

I saw her a few more times after that. Sandra and Nick and I would stop by her house sometimes before going to our usual hangout -- a 24-7 restaurant not that far away -- and I noticed she had changed a lot from when I had first met her. Not that I had known her all that well right away, mind you: it just seemed as if there was something brewing in her. Rotting, dying, changing in her.

Her parents house was really cool, really big. She had an above-ground pool and a huge trampoline in her backyard. She had a pretty good size yard, too, and she enjoyed riding around in her go-cart in the middle of the night. As we were all on it with her one evening, and she was talking with Sandra and cutting a turn, I happened to look over at her. I think that's the first real time I ever really looked into her, and her face just kind of burned into my memory. She had this long, black, frizzy hair tied back; she had on these really girlie cloths with bright colors -- and then there was this dog collar around her neck. It kind of threw me off. It was one of those things in a picture that didn't seem to belong at first, but only for a brief instant, until you really look into the picture.

And I look into her eyes -- her dark, vibrant eyes -- and I see so many contradictions. I see this war going on in her. This raw emotion unable to break free. Intense chaos. I was stuck by her that night; it was like a bolt of lightning. Even in the beginning, she had come across as this cute, quiet little girl. A dark little mystery. She seemed mature well beyond her age; her dark eyes glowed with a curiosity, a deep intelligence, a rich and vicious kind of emotion that was incredibly stunning. The more I got to know her, the more intrigued I became. The other side of her, it seemed to be blossoming. It was a bitter taste, however. She seemed to be growing pessimistic. Cynical. Even sinister.

If she was any older, it would have been very easy to admit she was incredibly good-looking, but her age kept popping up in my mind between me and my dirty thoughts, and it was building up to be a hefty dose of guilt. It wasn’t just that she was thirteen, though, but another reason -- one which may require some explaining.

You see, around that time, Sandra and I had a `thing'. I don't know quite what you would describe it as, exactly, but she thought she had feelings for me, and I thought I might have feelings for her, as well as another girl, Anne, but I was still hopelessly chasing after the unachievable, Claire. In short, things were very ambiguous between Sandra and I, not easily classifiable, and the situation was uneasy enough already with her that I was pretty damn sure that pursuing her cousin, even if she had been of acceptable age, would be the most destructive and unethical choice as of yet. And those around me were perceiving me as destructive and unethical enough as it was. So I tried my very best to keep a lid on my quiet infatuation. I put it on the back-burner.

It got more difficult to ignore it, though. Soon she was hanging out with the rest of the clique at the all-night restaurant on routine. She got her hair cut short, she began dressing differently. By that time she had gone pretty goth. She wore black cloths, fishnets, dark make-up. Not the kind of cheesy goth you see a lot of nowadays. She was simply being herself. Her outer persona was more in synchrony with her inner self and the change she was experiencing. She had found an image of comfort, and it was incredibly alluring. Too alluring.

And I wasn’t the only one who thought so, either.

At first, that was kind of a comfort, because at least I wasn’t the only pervert. But it didn’t remain comfortable for long. It started at the all-night restaurants with the rest of the insomniacs. Countless guys would come up to us and ask about her. They would come up and try to talk to her, or just blatantly hit on her. Then either Sandra, Nick or I would ask them, judging by looks alone just how old they thought she was. It became sort of a game with us. Their guess, no matter how young, was always far enough off the mark that when we told them her real age their eyes would grow large and round, their faces would go pale, their jaw to drop and they’d let out the exasperated, "what?" or "you're fucking with me, right?" or the ever-so-popular "holy shit" that we’d quickly grow tired of. And I'd just nod: I know, I know, I’d say. And they would shy away, feeling like perverts.

And I hate to be the one to say it, but who could blame them for their confusion? It first struck me with Terra, but it certainly didn’t end there. It was happening everywhere, and it has since continued: the phenomenon of girls developing into women a hell of a lot earlier than they used to. It seems strange enough on the surface, but the more deeply you ponder it the less sense it makes. Think about it: in our advanced human society, with all our vitamins, surgeries, and all our other sorts of high technology that are helping us to live longer, healthier lives, it would make sense that kids would take a longer time, not a shorter time, to want to grow up. Why? Because they’ve got so much more time in which to do so. They could really take it easy and take their time on life's path, because there really is no reason to hurry -- you've got more time than your ancestors could have ever dreamed of. Yet it should be clear to anyone that its just not working that way at all. We’re living longer, but we’re growing up and developing more quickly, too. Women start menstruating earlier, their breasts bud earlier, the need to separate from their parents and escape the `second womb' develops earlier than ever. And that’s not all: kids are marrying earlier, getting pregnant earlier. No one's taking time on the path of life anymore, no matter how much longer it is stretching. Instead, they're running down it like crazy monkeys on speed on some race from the womb to the tomb. Like a bat out of hell, last one there's a rotten egg. This just never made sense to me, and it makes less all the time.

Ahem. Anyway.

The leap to maturity wasn’t a major source of comfort for her, it seemed. When we would tell the guys what her real age was and she saw their reaction, it was so obvious that she simply hated it. She hated being reminded of her age; she hated that being a turn-off for guys. I think she was really trying to find her place with us, or through us, and I personally think she belonged with us, at least in comparison to the kids her age. It wasn’t just even her maturity level or that she looked older, either -- there were deeper reasons, I think, that she belonged in our group. She was just different, period. Not conventional at all.

Some time later I would explain to my psychologist that I had always felt different from most other people in my general vicinity; that I seemed to work on a wavelength not necessarily higher or lower, but undeniably different. That I thought in a different fashion, a different way; that I processed my emotions differently. That though I could fit in by outward appearance, within I was utterly alien -- in some sense or another. And in Terra, I found that likeness, as I have in a few other girls I've been interested in before and since.

She seems so nervous and awkward sometimes, as if she doesn’t feel comfortable in her own surroundings, even within the confines of her own skin -- and then other times she talks and moves with such beautiful ease, such amazing elegance. I like watching her when she doesn’t know I am; but eventually, her eyes look up to meet my own. Its as if she can feel my stare. To me, she seemed to be of the same inner `species'; I could feel it in her vibe, I could taste it in her dark eyes. I was at first silent about what I'd noticed about her and how very much she was like me. I wouldn't wish likeness with me upon anyone. But the way she thought and felt, the way she talked and expressed herself, the way she wrote and did her artwork, the way she approached people when she did and the way she ran away to be by herself when she didn't -- it all seemed to cry out to me that she was of a like nature. An upgrade perhaps, a few further mutations, maybe a few less -- but remarkably similar, and of the same kind, the same breed.

In retrospect, I find it foolish that her likeness to me didn't make me worry about her right away. Psychologically, she was having a hard time adapting to the world around her. At that time, I hadn't reached the angriest part in my life, but I had for years lived in the pessimism and cynicism about humanity as a whole. I could see it destroying her as it continued to destroy me, and I should've done more to comfort her in those early years. To let her know she wasn't alone. To try and tell her that the path she was taking didn't help matters at all. But I suppose that would have made as much sense as Sandra's grandmother did when she told me how horribly bad smoking cigarettes was for me -- in between taking heafty drags off her Marlburo and blowing smoke out of every visible orfus.

Since she didn't seem to belong anywhere, she definitely belonged with us -- she belonged around me -- around people who, to greater or lesser degree, in one way or another, didn't really belong anywhere, either. I think we could’ve done so much better, though, and I can’t help but feel that we were in a major part to blame for what eventually transpired. We should’ve seen the signs that shit inside her was going down. We should have noticed that as she continued hanging around us her problems in school seemed to be amplifying. That her grades were dropping. That she stopped doing sports. That she started arguing with her parents, hanging out with reject kids her own age and smoking cigarettes, smoking pot, drinking, popping pills. I certainly don’t think we were the sole cause of it all, but we didn’t exactly provide the best examples we could have.

As for her and I, we began to bond. I remember us sitting together in my shitty blue Mercury Topaz and us sharing a smoke. It was the first time I'd ever seen her smoke a cigarette; apparently she had been doing so for awhile. The moments like that one, those times we had together, just me and her -- as few and far between as those times were -- they were something I really looked forward to. Her brain was a beautiful thing to watch spill before me; a waterfall of rich intellect and raw emotion. She would be silent forever and then talk really low, really fast, and you could tell when she really began letting go and getting into what she was saying. She'd get all animated with her hands and her face would contort. Her words, too, simply amazed me; they revealed the complex web-work of thought behind them. She saw the forest and the trees, the big picture and the details. I truly enjoyed our little talks, and it felt good to see that she trusted me to such an apparently high degree.

She knew I liked her, and she liked me -- but as close as we got sometimes, I wouldn't even kiss her. It was just simple rules. A line you don't cross. Then one kid in our group, Nathan, disregarded those rules. He crossed that line, the lines drawn by that whole absolute morality bullshit I sort of believed in at the time. He went for Terra, and that pissed off a lot of people in the group. It pissed me off doubly, for obvious reasons. Terra and Nathan didn't last very long, however, and soon thereafter, Kirk entered the picture. Things between Terra and him grew distant in a jiffy, though. A lot of his friends were bashing on him for going out with a girl so young, and he agreed that as mature as she was for her age, she wasn't looking for the same kind of thing he was. I don’t recall if it ended officially or just sort of faded out, but I do remember how hurt Terra was over the whole thing. I remember how I sort of envied what Nathan and Kirk had the courage to do, though, no matter how culturally incorrect it was considered. I was older than both of them, though -- not by much, but it just made it that much more wrong for me to feel that way about her.

Then it sort of came to a tee one evening between her and I. Terra and Nick came over to my parents house unexpectedly one night to come see me. My friends often do this, as I'm usually awake and we're all big night owls. But it was just him and her this time around, and he ended up just dosing off on the sofa. Her and I somehow ended up in my bed, laying beside each other. I think we held one another. That was the first time anything like that happened, and it would be the last time in a long while.

Nothing happened in the sense that many are probably assuming about now; we didn't even kiss -- but I suddenly noticed a tension there that I'd always felt sizzling below the surface, but which had never been permitted to dance in the foreground before. And there it was, in all it's dark, insatiable intensity. This incredible comfort with her, but this raging desire to get closer, and the profound guilt for feeling that way, and the deep paranoia about how she might be feeling and just what she might be thinking.

I don't even remember how we got from my room to downstairs. I don't even remember us talking. All I remember is us standing outside in the driveway. Memories regarding that evening are limited to eerie emotions and quick flashes of images. I remember us looking at each other a lot; those long, devouring looks where you don't seem to blink at all, were you seem to swallow each other whole through the black vortices of your pupils. Almost electric, almost psychic. And as much as I wanted to be close to her, I wanted to be free of this. It wasn't the first time I'd felt that way, and it'd become a characteristic element in my ongoing friendship with her.

Reasons for this ambivalence, in time, would change. Obstacles between her and I would change; given time, even the roles we played towards one another would change. But ever-present was the torture: any way you sliced it, she was close enough to see, but too far too reach.

We saw Terra a lot less when Nick, Sandra and I all decided to move into an apartment in a nearby college town in May of 1999. We'd been there only a little over a month when the terrifying event occurred, and it was a day or two until the news finally reached us. The news of the near-fatal tragedy. On June 6, 1999, the day of Nick’s graduation ceremony, Terra had overdosed. Upon hearing of this tragedy, my head began doing flip-flops. And not only out of worry: the odd coincidence here was astounding, as Claire had just recently overdosed on pills in the attempts to numb the pain her husband was subjecting her to. She made it through just fine, but this was not the first time Claire had done it. It just triggered memories of the tale she'd once told me about what had happened a year before I'd met her, when she'd overdosed and ended up in a mental ward. I feared what might come for Terra. All of us were terrified of what permanent consequences there might be.

The story was that Terra had swallowed 13 over-the-counter pills with a friend of hers the day before. Strange, as thirteen was her favorite number. Strange, too, that the date it all occurred was 6/6/99, which reminds one of a double yin/yang symbol. Later on, I got the specifics regarding what had happened. She told me that the pills she’d taken were Coricidin D Cold and Flu tablets. She had taken them before; pretty much on routine for about a month or so when partying with her friends. It had taken until about nightfall when she began feeling things were taking a turn for the horrific, and that’s when she began to freak. She’d tried to puke the pills up, but it didn’t work. She didn’t sleep. Couldn't sleep.

The way she explained it to me, the way she wrote about it later on, she was riddled with paranoid delusions. She wrote a lot about how she worried about her family being dead. It seemed as if all she had buried in herself in her attempts to distance from her family through her rebellion came back to her with three times the force, like some lethal, psychological karmic boomerang from the depths of her personal, unconscious, psychological hells. She plunged into her Shadow.

She finally broke down and told her parents what had happened, what she’d done. Her mother called the poison hot line, and she then took her daughter to the hospital. She spilled about the booze, about smoking pot, about doing all the drugs. The doctors at the hospital suggested taking her to a nearby mental ward, and once there the doctors wanted to keep her overnight. Thankfully, her mother brought her home. I think it was a day or two later when her mother decided that Terra needed to get out of the house, and that's when she brought her over to our apartment.

From the moment she stepped in the room, I think we all immediately knew something was wrong, but we never took into consideration how strange everything in the world might seem for her. The room was dark, for one thing, and we were also in the middle of watching the movie, Pi, which, if you've seen it, you know is strange enough in a mundane state of consciousness, let alone a drug-induced psychosis. To top it off, Sandra and Nick had gone to get their eyebrows pierced earlier that day, and she expressed a good degree of paranoia about that.

I tried talking with her, but she was, of course, as wary and suspicious of me as she was with everyone else. I suggested we go to Eat-N-Park, maybe to get her to eat something and find some ground in what had become, over the years, a well-worn path of routine. Familiarity offers a sense of security. But what we couldn’t see at first is that for her, the familiar wasn’t familiar anymore. The whole way there she asked where we were really taking her, what we were really doing, why we were conspiring against her.

Once there, she was convinced that the place had somehow changed since she had been there last. Everything was the same to us and everyone else in the world, but nothing was familiar to her. This, I discovered later, is the experience of jamais vu, the reverse of deja vu. Its where you see familiar things as if for the first time. Usually, the experience is associated with bliss. Not for people like her and I, however. Here was where jamais vu makes the everyday world seem alien, and even your closest friends are strangers, even enemies.

We convinced her to order food, but when her plate of scrambled eggs arrived, she just stared at them for awhile, using her fork to play with them. We talked and drew and acted as we usually did, as if nothing at all was wrong, but she didn’t seem to be in the groove of things at all. She seemed paranoid, and I now wonder if perhaps we had shown more signs of worry rather than simply trying to play like everything was normal if it would have lessened her uneasiness a bit. Probably not.

When I finally brought her outside the restaurant for a cigarette and tried to get her to tell me what she was experiencing, what she was thinking and feeling, I was totally terrified. I tried to tell her that it was just her mind that had changed and not the world around her, but she wouldn't listen to reason. It was no more productive than trying to convince myself out of my own morbid, dismantled delusions -- all I could do, as usual, was document and contemplate. I could only provoke her to express so that I might capture -- there would be no complete circuit, no feedback, because nothing I said changed her or penetrated through her thick cocoon of maya. In her mind, there was too much noise. Too much static.

We eventually went back to our apartment, and her mother came to get her. Our goth girl left our place that day as she had come: a stranger in a strange land. I found myself identifying with her completely: she was at a level where I had once been, and still occasionally, spontaneously visit. When I received the letter in the mail she had sent me the day she overdosed, it reinforced my beliefs that she was in that place. In the letter she had attempted to describe to the best of her ability what she was feeling and how she was thinking. She explained how she saw that everything was interconnected in this web (echoing the words I'd heard from an unconventional female figure from my youth, which present logic often insists I must have hallucinated). At the asylum, she had brought her sketch pad, and in it she had drawn an eye, just as I had routinely did in my high school years on napkins in coffee shops, a habit I continue to this day.

Years later, she would tell me how she had written down in her room at that time the words `I AM TIM'. She felt that in her drug-induced psychosis that she was not only in the same place I was, or had been, but that she had in some sense become me -- that she was one with me.

Some time later I learned of Terra’s affinity with the stories Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of OZ, and due to the fact that she experienced a psychotic break as I do occasionally, it is no wonder. She found herself in a world completely flipped upside down, struggling to come to grips with it as her personal demons came alive right before her. The entire universe once so familiar and safe to her, had been overtaken by a menacing, alien cloud; an ominous, dreary, twisted, frightening, insane and malevolent Shadow. She could not remember who she was, and all she wanted now was to go home, to find that security, that identity, that familiarity, but could hardly recognize her own face, she scarcely remembered the place. And that’s how it is on the other side of the mirror, over the rainbow: once you go there, you're never the same. You're never as certain about anything. Even if you manage to claw your way back, the Shadow remains with you, haunting you.

In the weeks that followed, we heard a few other frightening stories, but after awhile we caught word that she was slowly approximating the little goth girl we all knew. So luckily, there seemed to be no permanent damage. She had changed, however: her grades in school improved and she had reconnected with her family. None the less, after the whole overdose episode a distance formed between her and the group. I think a lot of that was her doing, but we certainly contributed. We felt it kind of necessary. I think we all kind of felt that we may have contributed to her problems, and the guilt we had inspired us to do the best thing we could after the fact. While we didn't want to abandon her, we felt that she might benefit from some space and time.

And over time, thankfully, the space diminished. I'm not certain when Terra re-emerged, perhaps almost a year later. She came back into our lives seeming a lot more together than she had been in exiting it. She wasn't popping pills anymore, she mostly just smoked cigarettes and pot now and the occasional alcohol. She had been doing better in school, she had gotten her license, grown out her hair -- but she was still the dark, confused girl I'd known. She still dressed in her alluring, gothic get-ups, she still had that insatiable look in her eyes. She still wrote, too, but she admitted to doing so less and less often -- she was more focused on her artwork now, and it was terrific artwork. I told her how I had gone the other way, drifting from my artwork and finding my place a lot more in writing, though I still drew from time to time.

I'd go and visit Nick and Sandra at their grandfathers house, where they were living at the time, and she'd come over there, too. It felt really good having her around again. I still felt that tension between us. Apparently she did, too: she always said that when she was eighteen she'd do all these naughty things to me, because all the restraints would be gone. What that meant to me was that the promise of all those years of torture, of not being able to be affectionate with her without feeling guilty about her age, without feeling like a pervert -- all that would be relieved in the future; there was a promise of resolution.

Then the fateful event occurred. It was when Nick finally agreed to go visit his grandmother at her grave site; the kind of thing only people like Nick, Terra and I would become inspired to do at round-about four in the morning. The problem was, we weren't entirely sure where the graveyard was. Eventually I talked Nick into stopping at a nearby Dairy Mart, where we asked the clerk where the nearest cemetery was. He warily gave us directions. Walking out of the place, I couldn't help but imagine that he figured we were seeking out the place in order to conduct some horrific satanic ritual or something.

It was in that graveyard we eventually found where Terra and I kissed for the first time. I can't remember exactly how it happened, or who kissed who, but it was a great moment. A long-awaited one. It was an electric kiss, a consciousness-altering experience. After we kissed in the back seat of his car, Nick drove out of the graveyard in the twilight of the morning. It was such an beautifully surreal experience. My desires for that girl ran deep, deeper than the flesh but not without sight of it. I was lured in by the darkness in her, the similar energies we shared, and the fact that our first kiss was in a graveyard was... well, so fitting. As fitting as the fact that I had met her on Halloween.

I wanted her badly, but discovered afterward that she had a boyfriend. This I found frustrating. She had told me that when she was eighteen that she'd do all these nasty, dirty, terrific things to me. Now it had become when she was single that she'd do all that. The date was always being pushed back. Put off. Occasionally, she brought up the fact that I could have had her years ago, but I was always quick to bring up the factor of her age. I think we did enough to contribute to her downfall when she was young; throwing a sexual experience with me in the mix would've been the ultimate exercise in stupidity. Reflecting on that, I felt old. I mean, I'd met her when she was thirteen, and now here she was in her senior year, planning on going to college to be a mortician (she eventually changed her mind about pursuing that, however, as she admitted to feeling a bit uneasy around the dead. Oh holy irony.)

Her boyfriend really worried me. He seemed to be a very messed up and shady character, and I was always waiting for him to snap. I also wondered if he occasionally did, and if she’d tell us about it if he ever tried to hurt her. What we did know for certain was just how paranoid and controlling this guy was. He'd call her cell phone almost religiously, drunk or sober, asking where she was at and who she was with and when she'd be home. I started calling her cell phone her `electric leash', as apparently that's what it had become. Every phone call was a yank where she was to `heel'; every cell phone was a test of her obedience. Terra claimed he had good reason to be suspicious of her -- she had not been the best of girlfriends, she told me, defending him and her guilt. She had cheated on him and kissed other guys. For instance, unbeknownst to me, her and I had kissed while they were together. I still didn't think it justified how controlling the guy was.

She finally broke it off with him around August of 2003. With her being single and all, I expected a chance to maybe be with her in a relationship -- if nothing else, perhaps that she'd take me up on that promise she made about doing naughty things. But I talked to her in the parking lot outside my work one night after close. She told me she didn't know how she felt about me, that all that was a long time ago. So was there a chance for us? That direct question, as was every direct question with her, was never answered directly. Expecting certainty from her was about as hopeless as expecting certainty from myself.

Shortly thereafter, to add to my confusion, was the Saturday night we spent in the cubbyhole. Where Sandra and Nick lived at the time was with their grandfather, and Sandra had a room upstairs. There was this little cubbyhole were there was just enough room for a tiny bed. A sheet covered the entrance to it. You basically just crawled in and were concealed, as if in a cave. She would push me close and then push me away, get me riled up and then turn cold. I was getting dizzy, lost in an emotional, hormonal hurricane. I told her that I didn't mean to be rude, but I was pretty much overflowing here. I couldn't just sleep by her, not like this. I had to leave, or I had to go all the way. I was sorry, I told her. During the night, I got up to leave the cubbyhole, to go to my car and drive home, but she grabbed my hand and wouldn't let me leave. The torture continued. She'd turn me on and then turn me away. I was ready to explode. And that kind of torture didn't end that night, either.

Eventually, I asked her why she was doing this, and she only said that she couldn't say. I said that sometimes it seemed as if she was afraid of me, and she said that was true. She told me that I was `too intense'. Since when was intensity a bad thing, I asked her? And how did that justify her getting me all excited and leaving me standing there, ready to explode?

I didn't get it then, but that Saturday night in the cubbyhole represented the whole of our relationship with each other; the whole of our relationship with ourselves. I was talking to her one day and I suddenly realized what it was that made me empathize with her so much, that allowed me to place my feet so easily within their shoes and walk for miles -- it was because the shoes fit.

Terra and I are both split within. We share the quality of an internal dichotomy, a psychological duality that, try as we might, we can never seem to reconcile. She didn’t like it at all when I said it seemed as if there were two people behind her eyes, constantly wrestling. She told me that the idea just scared her; she'd must rather perceive it as her having `two opposing sides’, but to me it seems to be much more than that. It’s as if there’s a whole other personality within her, as there is in me.

When she talks, sometimes you can hear the battle going on with herself verbally. Listening to her, I find that she goes back and fourth about everything. Every little choice is hard for her. She wants to go to Miami with those other kids from her college, but then she says she doesn't want to go, and then she decided last minute she did want to go, but it was too late. And when she looks at me and we start kissing, the heat turns up, the hearts start beating, the sweat starts rolling, the breathing gets heavy, the looks get intense and intoxicated, hormones rage, and I’m so sure she wants me -- that’s when the strangest thing happens: someone else steps into the spotlight behind her eyes. “I can’t do this,” she says. The two sides of her are sending their own, divergent messages. And that can get pretty damned infuriating, especially when both sides are sending their messages simultaneously, or alternating by the millisecond like some traffic light flashing from green to red, green to red, green to red.

She is the kind of person the Scarecrow described to Dorothy in the Wizard of OZ; the kind of person that goes both ways. Every desire has it’s evil twin, every force has an equal and opposite counterforce, every thought has a counter-thought, every push a pull, every black a white, every yes a no, every desire a repulsion. She wants it all, even the desire to not desire at all. She wants companionship and isolation, she wants to go out tonight and she wants to stay home, she loves you and hates you just the same. What’s more, both these coexisting, contradictory, opposing forces have an equal intensity, an equal immortality, and both are pressing with all their strength to take dominence. The most honest place she can reside, then, is in the realm of the perpetual maybe, where she can safely be the probability wave that never crashes upon the shores of actuality. If someone tries to shove her one way, she goes the other -- if others pull her close, she pushes away. She resists what persists, persists at what resists -- forever in pursuit of the unachievable until it turns to a golden opportunity, forever running from the golden opportunities in front of her until they fade into futility, when she suddenly turns around to turn the other cheek.

Whatever she does, whether it appears so or not, she is always contradicting herself. She is always telling only half the story. She is forever the hypocrate, forever the embodiment of contradiction. Whatever choice she goes with, she lives the regret of the opportunity cost. No matter what she does, one half of herself will not be satisfied. Which explains why she sometimes gets the feeling that there's really no point in doing anything, in changing anything about herself or her life, because she cannot foresee any resolution to this perpetual dissatisfaction. It is an excersize in futility. At least if you remain where you are in life, you have the comfort of familiarity, of habit, of well-worn paths. You're still riddled with an endless amount of internal conflictions, but at least you've got some sense of security, some part of your life that is routine as opposed to unpredictable chaos.

The comfort comes in keeping all options open; in not getting herself into something she cannot just as easily get herself out of. If there is any movement in her life at all, it is the perpetual running in circles through cycles and seasons, where she always ends up in the same place, eternally dissatisfied.

Indeed, it sounds all too familiar...

"Love is a perky elf dancing a merry little jig and then suddenly he turns on you with a miniature machine gun."
-- Matt Groening, Love is Hell.

STILL UNWRITTEN.
by Mousie
1/24/04.

love is enough
to light your steps for your feet
to save a man gone too deep
to rekindle after being burned
to be gentle after being spurned

to find a person gone astray
to make everything okay
to whisper in to the ears of stone
to make you feel like you're not alone

love can do such awesome things
and think of all the joy it brings
even when you despise it
it waits for you with the perfect open arms

you know not what the future holds
but you know without love you are lonely and cold
so why not give things another go?
it might work out better than you know ...

"The truth will set you free, but first it will make you miserable."
-- James A. Garfield.

CHOICE OF AN OLD DEGENERATION.
by Rewired,
8/12/04.

I was at Denny's with Rena and Mary, just like a dozen times before. We had not done this in awhile, though, not since Rena and Nick hooked up, but they had swung by the house after work, knocked on my door and damn near dragged me out of the house. As I sat there, I couldn't help but feel the distance again. I like them, I enjoy my time with them, but I just don't feel like I'm connected with anything or anyone around me. There's this space, this distance that's killing me. And it's always been there, it's ever-present, but it times like these it seems I drift further back, farther away -- or maybe it's just that I realize the distance in times like these, and I'm not receeding as I feel I am.

I'm not really an active part in anything, though. I'm not an active participant. I'm not the nucelus, I'm not the center of any universe but my own, even for a moment. I'm always off to the side, the casual observer, the passive witness. I feel numb. I feel like a zombie, and no one notices that anything's wrong. Or I don't notice that they notice.

I was thinking as I was sitting there how there might be another reason for why I feel so jealous over what Rena and Nick have, and so enraged at the circumstances that are coming between Kate and I. With Kate, I felt as if I was finally establishing something; finally building a world of my own, in a way. Not an isolated world, but an inclusive one. A world that connects. I don't think I've ever really had that. Aside from my solitary pursuits and all the endless shit that goes on in my mind, sleeping or waking or twilight, I'm not the center of anything. I don't have anything really holding me. I don't even know if I can explain what I mean correctly; the thoughts are there, I just can't seem to express them effectively. I think, though, that it comes down to this: I felt real with Kate. I felt alive. I felt connected and associated. I felt reason and meaning that extended beyond myself, into the world, toward, concerning, involving another person. And through her, or with her help, I seemed to be able to become more intimately connected with the people around me. I have something with someone; I have a part of the world. I belong to the nucleus of something.

With her gone, I feel myself drifting away again. That whole thing about feeling like a stranger in a land he doesn't belong to; that whole thing about feeling lonely, even in -- especially in -- the company of friends has come back threefold. I can't react. I'm not a part. I'm dissociated. I feel like I'm suck in a mask playing a role that has no real meaning, like those empty personalities in television shows who you know are going to get offed before the credits roll because they have nothing to do with the storyline. I'm back to just `tagging along'. It seems by nature they try to fit me in, and they may even think I fit in, but I'm really just floating. I really don't fit in. It's like I'm just a ghost around them, a crude photocopy. It's as if they've defined me and assigned me to my place and they don't even really know me. They think they know me, but they don't, and I have no way to crawl out.

I've totally fucked up explaining this.

I'm terrified in a way that these people surrounding me are going to build up this picture of me -- it seems they have already; I've felt the inflexability of their perceptions more and more lately -- and trap me inside it. That what I really am is this ambiguous blob of swirling colors, and they've just imagined the outlines, the figure that contains the color, and they cannot see anything outside the lines they've drawn. I'm afraid that they cannot see the real me, just the picture of me they've made. And that by recieving that feedback from them, I'll instinctually reinforce it, and that will prevent me from changing... aide me in degenerating... and fool me into thinking, as they do, that I exist only within the lines of the figure they've drawn.

Kate was able to make me feel as I've never felt. Open and free. A mystery to be unraveled. Not something quickly labeled or assigned to a seat. I could feel her changing me. I could feel the world slowly changing in my eyes because of her. I could see the people being convinced out of the picture they began forming and accepting this mystery blossoming before them... but now she's gone, and I feel like I'm slipping back into this trap. I can't crawl out. And what I can't change I distance from, so I know that the mask is not who I am, so I can flee from the ficitons weaving here and if nothing else preserve my belief in myself...

“For of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: 'It might have been!'"
-- John Greenleaf Whittier

I'm Here.
by Patchwork,
5/20/04.

Another touch of torture
with the promise of resolution.
I cannot concieve of the future
but the official stance is a good omen.

I waited so long;
just long enough and
the time is right.

I waited so long,
and the last few days
have been so fucking surreal,
and I just might...

...be coming out of my shell:
carefully, cautiously,
gracefully, steadily
blossoming...

... be coming out of my shell:
to let myself drown in this,
to let myself go wth you
in exchanging smiles, matching rythms,
feeling so atune with you...

So just keep me focused;
let me leave that
nihilistic pessimism
far behind.

Reality can wait.
The future can wait.

So just let me
channel the intensty that's
constantly fed back by you;
let me get lost in the beautiful flow
that's naturally brought on
by your presence.

Maybe I found
who I need right here
maybe you're all
that I need, my dear.

I'm so comfortable here,
it's almost frightening in this light.
Lost on this bed in the
shifting gaze of your mood eyes,
should I be so amazed?
And shouldn't I be more afraid?

You are my intoxication.
You are my liberation.
I waited so long,
and finally I'm here.

Finally, someone
brings me here.

"I've always enjoyed being told what to think. Of course I do the opposite of whatever is requested of me,
but I find the attempted intrusion flirtatious."
-- Lisa Carver.

"It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses or majority, merely because the majority is the majority. Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people."
-- Giordano Bruno.

"In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

REMEMBERANCE OF THINGS TO COME.
by 3i,
8/4/04

I awoke on the edge of a cliff in the
darkness of tomorrow night
I looked behind me, saw billions of
blind led by a hundred blind...

There's something dreadfully wrong
in our small, crowded world today
that calls for re-evaluation;
a call to flush it all away.

Tradition and popularlity defines
the lines between wrong and right,
what is truth and what is lie,
but we can re-create our minds.

I woke up in the dawn a
million miles back today
pleading for a new direction, screaming,
there's got to be another way...

Still circa seven billion sheep trying
to squeeze into the herd's ideals
marching behind their authorities,
so certain they know what's right and real.

And every structure is a house of cards
held up on a foundation of blind faith.
When beliefs mould our perceptions,
the `self evident' just has no case.

Our minds, so short-sighted and expedient
and hopelessly blind to the long-term effects
as we seek quick solutions to the riddle of the day,
deaf to the cries of the world just beyond our heads.

If we cannot wake up, how can we hope to survive?
We fear our own deaths, but can you really call this life?

I woke on the edge of a cliff in the
darkness of tomorrow night
I looked behind me, saw billions of
blind led by a hundred blind...

Then I woke up in the dawn a
million miles back today
pleading for a new direction, screaming,
there's got to be another way...

Ever-haunted by the dark decent I'd seen
hanging just below my feet,
the wind pushing at my back, the void,
hungry to swallow me...

"SHA-wing."
-- Garth and Wayne.

JUST ANOTHER STIFFY IN THE BONER PARADE.
by Rewired.

You find it shallow, materialistic, superficial. Then it happens again, and you’re brought down to that primitive level. Suddenly you’re just another stiffy in the boner parade when she walks by: that smooth skin, those bright eyes, the way those locks of hair fall on her beautiful face. Your vision becomes vivid; your world is open to the color, your senses are now acute and attentive, taking every moment of this visionary experience in. The way she holds herself, her posture, the sexy moves she makes. Tension builds in you, visions of positions, scenarios regarding how you might coax her into bed -- if only you had the metaphorical balls. The way her shirt exposes her tummy, the way her tight pants reveals the alluring shape of the bottom half of her concealed body... She ignites sexual impulse. She calls out to your entire body. Every pore is psyched and ready.

And you beat yourself down for it, because you don’t even know her, you’ve never heard a word she’s ever said, you don’t know her name or number or history or age. This self-hate is reinforced, and perhaps born, by the many women who call men shallow because of their reaction to the sight of such a female. And in a way, you feel slightly superior, slightly `above’ your slobbering compadres in your act of hating yourself for being just another slobbering fool, for finding those female passers-by so fucking insatiable. None the less, the burning question still remains, and it comes down to this: why is she so fucking insatiable? Why can glimpsing beauty no deeper than the skin make you want her to such a maddening degree?

Evolutionary psychology may be able to provide something along the lines of an explanation. Basically, what evolutionary psychologists have done is take Darwinian evolution and apply it to the area of human behavior. Some have attested that they are attempting to reduce us to pre-programmed stimulus-response robots, but it doesn’t seem to be this way to me at all. They seem to take into account that we are not slaves to our instincts as many other species of animal are -- our nervous systems are very `open’ to programming. On one level, then, we are greatly influenced by our instincts. On another, our ability to learn puts us at the influence of those around us, especially in our early years, which gives rise to the distinctions between cultures. And yet on another level, this `open’ nervous system allows us to develop the personalized psychology and unique behavior patterns which result in all the diverse, unique characters that walk the planet today.

So evolutionary psychologists recognize that we have influences other than genetic ones, and that we even have the ability to choose to disobey our instincts. Their argument seems to be that at the base of it all, certain instincts developed for certain evolutionary reasons, all aiming at survival of the species, and it helps to understand what and why these instincts are. If only to provide weaponry against the conditioned guilt that puts us at odds with our intense desires to put her legs above her head and kiss our sexual frustrations good-bye through `the old in-out', as Clockwork Orange fans might put it.

Well, the desire for sex exists in order to inspire us to reproduce, of course; that’s obvious enough. What isn’t as obvious is why we consider some people beautiful and perceive others as just okay, or downright unattractive. What evolutionary psychology communicates is that what we consider attractive are physical characteristics that reflect the good genetic make-up that produced them. Men aren’t alone in this, either. For instance, a number of studies have revealed that men and women both look for average faces -- symmetrical faces. Why? This symmetry indicates that we’ve received two copies of each gene (one from each parent) in each cell, which indicates resistance to disease. Having a back-up copy has survival value, because it’s difficult for a disease to knock out both copies. (Simple logic, but it's failed to influence me in regards to computers.) This indicates a healthy person with which to make healthy babies.

Though their are some simularities, as one would expect, on the whole men and women look for different things in each other. This makes sense, as both men and women have different instinctual goals at the base of it all. The central instinctual goal for men is to spread their seed as far and wide as possible. In regards to seeking out a long-term mate, a guy looks for physical beauty before anything else. If you're prone to knee-jerk reactions (as I am) you may at first be appalled, thinking of this as shallow. If you look at it more deeply, however, you may have the same general reaction I did when I came upon this information and chewed on it a bit: it's all irrelevant, because beauty is merely a word, and beauty can mean different things to different people. It turns out that this isn't entirely correct, however, as there is a general agreement among men cross-culturally as to what physical feminine beauty consists of, which is pretty strange when you consider all the disagreements we have in other areas. And so the question poses itself: why would the general physical characteristics regarded by men to be desirable and `beautiful' in a female be a worldwide human inheritance? Evolutionary psychologists present us with a very convincing explanation: good looks reflect good genes. Remember in alchemy, how they always said `as above, so below’? Well, here we’ve got `as anatomy, so genetically’.

Look at it this way: the hardwired instinct of the human male is to impregnate as many females as possible for the purposes of creating as many offspring as possible to carry on his genes. Since this goal can only be accomplished if a woman has healthy genes to donate (as this will dictate the genetic nature of the children) and if the woman can carry the fetus to term, deliver it, and care for it after birth, he seeks out women that fit that criteria. So what it comes down to is fertility and healthy genes. Now, how he discovers if a woman has these qualifications is through her appearance, as physical characteristics are the products of the genes and as such indicate the genetic nature of the individual. Specifically, what men instinctually look for in women are clear skin, bright eyes, and a youthful appearance because being attracted to these qualities has survival value. Any male who, by mutation, did not develop this instinct was not apt to spread his genes, and so died out -- natural selection in action. So basically, when our eyes meet with a girl who fits that general pattern, the visual cues trigger the instinctual reaction we experience as attraction.

At this level, her intelligence, religious, spiritual, or philosophical persuasions are irrelevant: if she meets this criteria, he has the instinctual desire to fuck her. Again, this doesn’t mean he acts on his instinctual response. If a female checks out in the area of physical attractiveness, he may then approach her and start a conversation to see if she satisfies his more personalized criteria. He does this by paying attention to what she says, how she says it, and how she responds to what he says. Of course, if she satisfies the physical but not, for instance, his social criteria, he will often go for her anyway -- as physical attractiveness is all his instincts say is required in order for him to want sex. So much for higher values, huh?

Other guys may look the other way if their personalities don’t match, or they may not approach her at all to begin with and just stand in denial or drool in the distance. I am usually one of these `other guys’. I used to say that this was due to the fact that I had `morals’, but I’ve come to realize that it’s out of fear -- of rejection, of relinquishing control and succumbing to my instincts, of so many things.

Not to justify being a wuss, but there may be good reason not to trust your instincts. Trying to defeat your instincts by looking for beauty beyond the depths of skin would be difficult enough, but there’s an added exoskeleton to break through. Women who we would not naturally find physically attractive have developed counter-strategies such as make-up, fake nails, contacts, nose jobs, boob jobs, push-up bras, contacts, liposuction, hair modification, and strategically-made clothing. All these things can alter their appearance and fool our instincts into thinking she fits the instinctual criteria and elicit that perception that she’s physically beautiful. What I mean to say is that sometimes, it can take a lot of peeling just to get to beauty that’s skin deep.

"If toast always lands butter-side down, and cats always land on their feet, what happens if you strap toast on the back of a cat and drop it?"
-- Steven Wright.

ME.
by Ness,
4/25/00.

who needs a man
that's why I am
I've got to learn who I really am inside
I've got to learn not to hide
my demons suppressed in my head
the voices telling me I should be dead
they want me to end my life
so how can I ever be anyone’s wife
I hurt everyone around me
I wonder how that could be
how did I become so evil and cold
am I going to be like this when I'm old
give me a man and I'll break his heart
I'll rip his soul apart
this is why I'm here on earth
that is how I gain my self worth
hurting others comes so easily
to someone as heartless and cruel as me
maybe I'll find a man that can break the spell
someone who can make me well
but I'll probably die young and by myself
with my twisted mental health

“Life is a place of service. Joy can be real only if people look upon their life as a service and have a definite object in life outside themselves and their personal happiness.”
-- Leo Tolstoy.

“Yes, I know your peril. But, by my love and hope I entreat you: do not reject your love and hope!"
-- Nietzche: Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

“Ideals are like stars: you can never reach them, but they guide the way."
-- Vince Lombardi.

BARSTOW.
by Patchwork,
7/16/04.

We took a walk in the evening
under the beautiful night sky, almost,
but not quite killed by the city light
of the Ohio college town
where I find myself.

What are the chances I'd
get it this damned good? Who knew?
So I take the time to honor the variables
that brought me here to you.

We held each other's hands
and we talked and walked and walked,
stopped on the sidewalks only to

look at each other,
embrace each other,
kiss beneath the street lights.

You told me about stepping on dirt devils,
about the beautiful California sunrise and
the sky, riddled with multicolored lights
as it rose in the desert in the morning.

You told me about the sandy town
where you grew up.

You went over all that was
and all that you could've been
and I thank the Present-That-Isn't
and All-That-Brought-You-Here.

I take my time to honor the variables
that brought you here to me.

I look at you and I think,
from soul to skin, I sink,
and I'm in, I'm here to walk with you
whereever this goes.

Whereever this leads, I'm with you,
just stay here with me.

But you say you've got to go, but
you'll be back, not to worry:
you'll be back from Barstow,
you'll return to Ohio and Me.

Till then I yearn and bleed
for the sun my life is missing again.
And I stare at the flame of this candle tonight:
believing you, dreaming you, breathing you in;
reaching out to you outside time and space,
where existence is fluid and suffering, erased.

And I know you had to go,
and you'll be back from Barstow.

So I took a lonely walk tonight
beneath these college town street lights.

It was like a ghost town that I owned,
and I was lost in the sandstorm in my mind,
swallowed by a dirt devil I stepped inside,
but saved by the vision of a California sunrise
that is to be back in my dark Ohio skies
in due time, in due time:

I am saved by the memory
of your eyes,
of your eyes.

"He who binds himself to a joy
Does the winged life destroy; But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sunrise."
— William Blake

“It is said that an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him with the words: `And this, too, shall pass away.'"
-- Abraham Lincoln.

Wondering.
by Patchwork
7/28/04
circa 9 PM

I was feeling dark, I was feeling dead
needed a nice walk to clear my head
thinking over all those things you said
wondering if your words rang true.

And it's not that I want to doubt you,
but trust is vulnerability and
I've been naked and hurt before,
and I cannot stop wondering, no,
my life is one of wandering...

I breathed in the air, I hugged the wind
that sent the tree's summer leaves clapping.
Cloud above the sidewalk, what happened
to my sun and skies of blue?

And it's not that I want to doubt you,
it's about everything and you, too.
I've always been a lost fool,
and I cannot stop wandering, no,
my life is one of wondering...

And I gave space for
the echoing voice inside my head
and made it the mantra
kept in beat by my dragging feet:

`Take things as they come,
for this, too, shall pass.
Know when to hold on
and know when to let go.'

And I took you into my heart:
and to believe your words?
Every pore in me wants to;
I want to believe it's time to hold on
but I feel your grip loosening,
I hear my soul screaming...

And it's not that I want to doubt you...

"If you are going through hell, keep going."
-- Sir Winston Churchill.

WHEREVER I GO.
by Beka,
2/3/04.

Wherever i go, that's where i'm headed
whoever i know, i'm gonna forget them
I hear it's a hard, dark road
but i'm still believin'
and i still got soul, so i got a reason
Did i already build a whole pile of regrets behind me?
yes i did
I shake my head and smile and say thats okay because
you live and you learn, learn and you live
and you just keep goin'
I just keep goin'
Wherever i am am, that's where i'll be leaving
whoever still can, never stop seeking
this life's like the road
just keep beleiving
yes i still got soul, so i got a reason
I did venture off that beaten path so many times
lost wandering through my mind
i just shake my head and smile and say that's okay because
you live and you learn, learn and you live
and you just keep goin'
yes, i just keep going

"Sex can be a means through which the body presses past ego to find its soul. Yet in our culture, sexual ecstasy has become largely associated with the failure of spiritual longing and integrity rather than their natural expression. Religious leaders go to great lengths to convince their followers (and themselves) that flesh is a punishment for life rather than its gift. They cite the AIDS epidemic as some cosmic proof of their argument. Perhaps this is because they have also decided that death is the enemy of life, rather than its most faithful companion and only mode of existence. [...] Death circles life and overwhelms us with a presence so infinitely vast that it is almost impossible to consider on its own terms. Perhaps that is why it hands us its child, which is sex, to teach us this mysterious way. [...] Sex is frightening, exhilarating, liberating but ultimately without finality. No matter how long we wish to postpone or prolong our orgasm, it ends almost as soon as we surrender ourselves to it. Could this not be true of death as well? We fool ourselves by thinking death is final, simply because we are changed by it.[...] Orgasmic sex offers a chance to test this hypothesis and to practice our death. It invites us to `conquer' the enemy by befriending and forgiving him. It allows us to reverse the poem, `do not go gentle into that good night' and to walk with confidence and gratitude into the deaths which beckons us. Orgasm, that `little death', is not a threat but a promise;
it is our assurance that all is well in the universe."
-- Sex and death - what's the connection?, (author unknown).

SUN ON YOUR NECK.
by Patchwork,
7/7/04.

Sweat is on my back again.
We both sigh as you gracefully guide me in,
then you pant and moan and grab my hand
and I stare through your hair
at the sun on your neck

with the stars and
crescent moon on your back
and the butterfly and flowers caressed
by a matress damp of our sweat
and the sweet aroma of sex.

And then I try and penetrate
the insatiable light
inside your eyes, open wide
and between your legs, divided,
and utter `yes' to life;
to wage a defense
against my pessimistic, paranoid,
nihilistic bent, and

in a moment there's something about
the dark in this candle-lit room
something about the smell of this sex
and nothing but the pressure of skin
between me and you,

something about the music
in the blissful convulsions we become
as we're building, matching rythm
until we're one

there's something about it all
that helps me approximate sane;
that helps to guide me back to align
with my inner self again,

and I don't want to have this need or feed it,
but it seems to be the only route to peace,
the only way to some primitive scerenity --

uninhibited openness and honesty;
a way for us to strip ourselves down
much further than just the skin,
getting ever-closer to true penetration,
our souls, then devirginized,
both of us blissfully bleeding.

I saw something down there in that sacred space, like a rabbit hole,
the first time it happened that autumn so long ago that I thought
that I had lost long before I was born, and I'll keep on digging in
this till I break on through, till I find it again somewhere in the
diminishing space between me and you...

because I got closer to it tonight than I ever have
inside that candle-lit room, in the blurring boundaires between me and you:
something that lifted me up, set me free, brought me back
as I stared through your hair as my sweat rained down on that
sun upon your neck...

"But what does the role of the anima as guide to the inner world mean in practical terms? This positive function occurs when a man takes seriously the feelings, moods, expectations, and fanatsies sent by his anima and when he fixes them in some form -- for example, in writing, painting, scultpture, musical composition, or dancing. When he works at this patiently and slowly, other more deeply unconscious material wells up from the depths and connects with the earlier material. After a fantasy has been fixed in some specific form, it must be examined both intellectually and ethically, with an evaluating feeling reaction. And it is essential to regard it as being absoltuely real; there must be no lurking doubt that this is `only a fantasy.’ If this is practiced with devotion over a long period, the process of individuation gradually becomes the single reality and can unfold in true form.”
-- Man and His Symbols, Carl Jung, (pages 195-196).

NIMI & THE SECRETS OF THE UNIVERSE.
by Rewired.

I don’t really know how old I was, but it feels as if I was seven or so. I’d gone over the fence in the backyard and into the field behind my house, eventually having settled down in the sandbox nearby the tennis court to play. I was nervous about the people nearby playing tennis, but they left shortly thereafter. As soon as I was alone, this shadow crossed over me, draping me in an eerie darkness. It was as if some storm cloud had appeared over my head. Moments later, it seemed as though my head had been struck by lightning: my mind was suddenly overcome with high-speed imagery, and it felt like information was being `down-loaded’ into my mind from directly above me in the sky. I saw three-dimensional visions of geometric shapes and breeding fractals, of nets stretching on into infinity, of webs inter-linking, of cubes within cubes and patterns that stretch on and on. I got the sense that these visions have to do with `cosmic patterns’ and `higher dimensions’ and that someone in my head is trying to explain to me the underlying interconnectedness of all things. I was on overload, completely whisked away by all of this, feeling as if my mind was about to explode. Some time later it ended, and it seemed to be a lot later in the day than it should have been. I was alone in the field.

I have hazy memories of seeing something in that field behind my house, though I can’t say for sure it was the same occasion. I had no idea of what I might have seen, either, until I pulled out of a box full of childhood drawings a picture I’d made in second grade. Atop the paper was written the words, In Celebration: A Past to Remember, a Future to Mold. On the left side was a big, gray brontosaurus. On the right was a gold, saucer-shaped object with an eye in the center of it. Around the edges were 21 portholes, ten of them black, nine of them gray, and they were all connected with the eye in the center by means of curved lines. To the sides of the saucer were curved lines that seemed to express flying. My teachers didn’t understand what it had to do with the project, whatever it was, and gave me a lousy grade. But when I looked at the picture, I got this really creepy feeling. And the feeling connected that drawing to that field behind my house and that day in the sandbox.

I've come to believe this was the point of my life when the female being stepped into the picture. In the attempts to recall a possible name she might have had, I only got the sense that she was a Teacher of some sort. Somewhere along the line, however, I began referring to her as Nimi. For what reasons I don’t know, but it seemed to fit her. She had popped up in the first rush of memories from my childhood -- the ones that at first trickled, and then flooded my brain in late 1994. Most of these memories dealt with menacing, non-human creatures. In my mind, she was connected to them in that she seemed `alien’ and that she may have shared their overall appearance. For the most part, I remember her as a presence or subjective voice, but I do seem to have vague, fleeting images of what she might have looked like. She had the overall shape and appearance of a Gray, with the spindly body, long fingers and upside-down egg-shaped head. Her skin was more white or translucent, and she appeared more soft, more graceful, more feminine. She had the same slanted eyes, but at times I get the impression they were rounder, and perhaps light-blue colored rather than the traditional black of the more menacing Grays. She also wore a hooded robe like some cosmic monk, perhaps merely to hide her appearance from me.

Though I entirely associate her with the concept of alien just as much as the others, she seemed quite different to me in almost every other possible respect. She was very benevolent, individual, and freedom-oriented, and I remember her as being my only coach, guide, and comfort throughout all the madness. I never once recalled feeling anything I could regard as intrusive or malevolent from her. Even now, the thought of her makes me smile and fills me with a happy, mystical feeling -- but also an eerie, sad emotion. It felt as if she was an old friend who elicited some ancient and secret nostalgia. I always had the impression that she represented some group opposed to whatever the more menacing creatures were doing, but I have no real reason to believe this. For all I know, she worked solo.

Like the others, I never really recall her speaking, only communicating to me telepathically, putting words, impressions, and images into my head. There was certainly a distinction here, though. The others pushed into your mind in an intrusive manner without any respect for privacy -- a telepathic tactic more akin to mental rape. Nimi, on the other hand, always practiced a sort of psychological etiquette; with her, it was like sharing subjective space. She seemed to be different from me emotionally, but not as much as the other creatures, and with her, there was her empathy to bridge the difference. Her interests seemed to be aimed toward two-way communication and mutual understanding so that we both got something out of our encounters with each other.

My earliest memories of Nimi stem from a time in my youth when my family was still living in the house we’d leave behind by the time I was ten. I first recall her visiting me at night in my bedroom when I was about five and rooming with my sister, Eve. Within a few years my youngest sister, Linda, began rooming with Eve and I got a room to myself at the end of the hallway, right by my parent’s room. Most of my memories of Nimi stem from that period, when I must have been about seven. I remember my room very clearly, and most of all my bunk bed, which only had a top bunk. Beneath the foot of my bed, where another bed would be in the traditional model, was a dresser. A cubicle with book shelves was beneath the head of my bed, toward the wall closest to the window.

It was at that window that Nimi often talked with me. I have fond memories of our long and detailed conversations; warm and expansive feelings generated from them. I was fascinated by what she had to show me, but on the whole I understood very little of what she said. Much of it was simply over my head. I can only seem to access bits and pieces of what we spoke about, and though I remember various occasions when we’d communicate with each other at night in my room, the events blend together and it’s hard to tell one from the other. Amnesia may have a lot to do with it, but it probably also has to do with the fact that there was an underlying theme beneath all that she told me. Primarily, she seemed to visit me for the purposes of teaching me what I guess you could call `spiritual’ information.

Some of what I remembered Nimi telling me explained some spontaneous interests I’d acquired when I was a lot younger. As an example, she spoke of a concept that I knew for a long time only as `folds’, where you take your present point in space, determine the point of your destination and then `fold’ the space between. In other words, you basically pull yourself toward the destination or pull the destination towards you, depending on your perspective. I, of course, thought this ingenious when I remembered it in high school and approached a friend about it, who laughed and said that I’d just explained a wormhole. Since then, I’ve done a little reading on wormholes, specifically an article where Stephen Hawking talks about how they can be used as a possible means of time travel. This I found interesting, because though I had no specific memories regarding it, I had the distinct impression that Nimi had spoken with me at length on the nature of time.

From the age of five to about the age of twelve I was absolutely obsessed with the idea of time travel. In second grade, after watching a UFO special with my grandmother at her apartment, I wrote a letter to `the government' asking them to release their information about aliens and their spacecraft, and I added specifically that I was interested in whether or not these craft could travel to the past and the future. I was absolutely fixated on the movie Back to the Future, and after hearing some references to Einstein, the speed of light and something called relativity, I begged my father and uncle to explain to me what it was all about. I was depressed when they said that they didn’t understand it themselves, but I was fairly satisfied when they told me that the speed of light was 186,282 miles per second. For the next several years, I would dream about time traveling and make some cheesy `blueprints’ for a time machine I eventually hoped to build. When we moved to our new and rural home, I even got some kids from school along the way to help me with the design, and started gathering `parts' in a location in my woods. Needless to say, that never got very far.

Through Nimi, I also began to grow a great worry regarding the ultimate fate of mankind. In one of our conversations, she seemed to express quite a bit about energy, spoke about a `source’ and then told me that the universe functions a lot like a circuit board, specifically bringing up such things as transistors, transmitters and receivers. She told me that by learning how a circuit board worked, I'd learn much about how the universe worked. So I started collecting them, and started asking my uncle, who is a smart guy who works with computer, a lot about them. I never got far with understanding them back then. Though I understand a bit more now, I'm still not clear regarding the relation. Perhaps by using the analogy of the circuit board, she meant to express that the universe is a network of interconnections, with each point inextricably linked to every other so that what effect one part effects the whole. Also, it meant that you can move from one point to another without having to go through all the points between. This would work well with what she explained about `folds’ or wormholes. It would also resonate well with her description of this `web’ that stretched across the universe, interconnecting all souls.

Much later, I discovered that the belief in a web of inter-relations or net interconnecting everything in the universe is held by many spiritual traditions, as expressed in, for instance, the Net of Indra or the Web of Life. Pluck a strand of the web, and the whole web vibrates -- the part effects the whole. The theme of one thing affecting the whole is also expressed in the metaphor of throwing a stone into a pond: the waves caused by the stone hitting the surface of the water travel to all edges of the pond, and then return to the source. A code of mutual respect for diverse forms of life, then, can not only be viewed as altruistic, but as a rational act of self-interest. This operates just as well in a psychological or spiritual realm as it does in the material. This web-work of invisible connections is the fundamental concept behind sympathetic magick, telepathy, and synchronicity or `meaningful coincidence’. The alchemists insisted that `as above, so below’ and `as within, so without’, which also implies invisible links. It is also expressed in the beliefs of precognition and retrocognition, which implies that all events in time and space are connected, and that there is a two-way flow of information by which the universe can correct itself.

I also have a code of ethics that seems to differ from most of the people that surround me, and I’ve always felt that these values had been taught to me by someone else. Perhaps it wasn’t Nimi after all, but it seems to fall into accordance with a lot of other things she had said. For instance, I’ve always cradled this philosophy that so long as you’re not harming anyone in the process, that you can do as you wish, and that everyone else has this very right. It’s sort of a code of mutual respect. If someone inflicts upon your freedom, sometimes it’s necessary to wage war, but only as a final solution, and only so far as it takes for them to step back over the line where their freedom ends and the infliction upon yours begins. It’s certainly not an all-embracing philosophy, but as a central tenet, it seems to be a good start. I also consider it effective equally to the microcosm and macrocosm, and the inner world and outer. I later found this to be a philosophy held by some spiritual and religious traditions, such as some Pagans, who call it the Rede. It’s also embraced by Libertarians under the name of the Natural Law.

It also seems tied with some other attitudes I’ve always placed value in. I always thought it wise never to become involved in someone else’s conflict; that getting in the middle of a war that had nothing to do with you was unethical. To take a stance of neutrality between two warring parties and to listen to both sides, to be an ear of comfort, was to help you as well as them come to a better understanding. It was always important to me, though, that I was never to become the messenger between them -- silence is not a lie, and oftentimes it pays to play dumb. This may help explain why, ever since I was really young, I’ve been somewhat of a confessional with a pulse. People, often absolute strangers, seem to come up to me and spill to me their worries, their wonders, their fears and their secrets. All too often I’ve caught them stopping in the middle of their stream of emotionally-laden words, show an expression of absolute confusion and then say something like, “I can’t believe I’m telling you all of this -- I’ve never told anyone this before,” shake it off, and then go on about what they were saying. They know I’m listening, and they know I won’t tell their `enemy’ what they are saying any sooner then I’d tell them what their enemy was telling me. I’ve slipped up here and there across my life, but the complications that arise when I do so only reinforces my sense of value in this approach. I feel this philosophy of human relations also stems from Nimi.

How Nimi explained the psychological nature of the more menacing aliens seemed to indicate they cradled what might be considered the antithesis to this philosophy. She said that they belong to one mass mind or telepathic group mentality. I envisioned this as if each body in their civilization was merely the appendage of some greater, immaterial mind, and that at some level they were truly one, and in constant communication with one another, forever putting in and taking out of this one mind. For a long time the vision of this type of society -- a world without independence or personal freedom, a world where there are no secrets and no privacy, a world where there is one purpose and one goal and total population control -- has frightened me to the bone.

After explaining the interconnectedness of all things and how what affected the part effected the whole, she then went on to describe this `dark blanket of negativity’ that was suffocating our world. I pictured this as a dark cloud that hung over us; a brewing storm. The sense I got from her was that is was more emotional or spiritual, but that its effects stemmed far beyond that and vibrated the entire web. I don’t remember her communicating to me directly how the `dark blanket’ would manifest, but I felt undeniably certain that catastrophic changes were coming for our world.

I remember around second grade how I felt this incredible fear for where we were going as a species. I had grown an interest in dinosaurs and the meteor that I was told had destroyed them, and this fear of meteors pelting the earth has recurred in my dreams ever since. I also grew concerned about our pollution of the environment. I became worried about biological warfare, nuclear weapons, human war in general. I was even paranoid about the nearby power plants having a meltdown. What seems interesting to me in retrospect is that as frightened as I was of the malevolent creatures, and as certain as I felt that they had come here to colonize our world, I didn’t feel as if they were going to be the cause of our world’s end. Nimi seemed to indicate that the human race was bringing out it’s own demise, and so did the others. Perhaps from their perspective, as from Nimi's, they could see where we were going to end up down the road if we continued in the same direction while we could hardly see a foot in front of us. So perhaps that is why it was the thought of the human species committing suicide that plagued my thoughts; that one hand of the human super-organism, so-to-speak, was going to stab the other. The fact that we were affecting the entire universe as a result haunted me, as did the fact that I, as a part of the whole, was as responsible as anyone for this carelessness and ignorance.

Once, through the window beside my bunk bed, I revealed to her that I wanted to be a scientist or a chef when I grew up. She told me that I was an artist, and that it was something that I had developed over lifetimes and would most likely continue developing because it was the type of communication I was most aligned with. That same evening, she told me how there is a light or energy around all forms of life, and furthermore that my light was blue and hers was green. Although I remember that she indicated that there was a definite significance to these colors, I don’t recall exactly what that significance was. I had also told her that I felt as if I had a foot in another world, or was perhaps even half into another world -- something I’d decided on my own a long time ago -- and she said this was quite true. She explained how everything coexists on other `planes of existence’, and that some people can function on these planes better than others. When she told me this I had the vision of a few sheets of wood hovering a few inches above one another in a black void. I felt a bit of confusion about this because it was my understanding that the world was round and, I had guessed, the universe -- but she seemed to communicate that it was just one way of expressing the nature of something; nothing more than a tool for my understanding.

The general theme of souls, a spirit world, and reincarnation seemed to be followed up in another encounter. I remember going into my sister’s room one evening and climbing up to the top bunk with Eve, so I could explain to her in detail the strange `dream’ I’d had the night prior. She listened curiously as I explained how I had been in a strange, brightly-lit room where a crowd of people were huddled closely together. In the middle of the crowd of people someone had held out their hand with their fingers spread out. In the center of the person's palm was something wonderful and strange: a tiny, rippled white worm. At one end, which I was certain had to have been the head of the creature, there was a brilliant, shimmering blue light. As I stared at the creature in wonder along with this crowd of unknown others, Nimi's loud whisper to the side of my ear stated clearly, “It’s an extraterrestrial.”

I went on to explain to Eve what had been explained to me and the rest of the crowd. The blue light I’d seen in the worm’s head, I told her, was it’s soul, and we were all radiant beings like that. People don’t only live once, but have many, many lives and death is really nothing more than a transitory state. We were like hermit crabs, and when our time in one life was up we shed one `shell’ and eventually climbed back into another one that was more suitable. Some souls don’t have bodies, and they’re invisible to our eyes. They exist all around us, however, and if we try hard enough, we can see them.

Nimi once assured me that though a lot of what she was communicating to me I wouldn’t understand right away, that a part of me would remember and I’d see correlations and applications later on. And I certainly did. For one thing, what she had to say gave me a context for many of the weird experiences that would occur to me in life, specifically the supposed past life memories I recalled and the out-of-body experiences I had shortly after the memories and flashbacks of my childhood. Also, long after I’d recalled these conversations with Nimi, I began to read the occult, paranormal, metaphysical literature, as well as some Eastern spiritual concepts. It was like a perpetual state of deja vu. There were a lot of concepts in the literature that I wasn’t drawn to, of course, but a great many of the concepts -- and strangely sometimes even the analogies and metaphors used to convey the ideas -- struck major chords in me. I sense definite connections between a lot of what I read (and still read) with those not-even-a-quarter consciously-recalled memories with Nimi when I was younger.

The connections didn't stop there, either -- a connection perhaps even more interesting came out of what seems to have been the latest of my childhood memories of her. It seems that Nimi disappeared for awhile, but she returned to me later on in life. It was after my family had moved to their new house and well after my grandmother had moved to her new apartment, so I must have been around eleven. It was around that same time that I still visited my grandmother and slept over. She’d let me take her room and she’d take the couch. On more than one occasion I’d wake up in the middle of the night hearing someone talking, sensing movement, or merely feeling a presence. When I did so, I’d turn my head and see a dark silhouette standing in the darkness just beyond the frame of the open door. The first time it happened, I’d just figured it was my grandmother. Though it seemed bizarre to have her stand there, staring at me from the shadows, I figured she was just checking in on me. I eventually asked her about it, and she denied it had been her. When it happened on a few more occasions, I began to grow pretty scared. My grandmother wasn't the type to play practical jokes at all, but hoping that perhaps it was her anyway, I’d call out her name, but she wouldn’t answer. The silhouette wasn’t some inanimate object, either -- I distinctly remember it moving. And a few times I would either suddenly find myself awake or suddenly find myself falling into a deep sleep after I heard some loud whispers coming from the figure. I can’t say what the voice said, though, just that I recognize it now as one of Nimi’s whispers. On one occasion, however, I do recall lying on my grandmother’s bed and staring down at the blanket. Nimi was telling me about the Native Americans and the art of weaving. I remember at that time in my youth this became something I was instantly interested in learning about, and I could never say why.

I was confused and intrigued by this last memory even more so than the others. Unlike the other memories, though, this seemed to tie her to something and someone beyond me, something and someone specific -- specifically, weaving and the Native Americans. I didn’t look into this for a long time, but when I did I was surprised at what I found. What I found was Spider Woman.

It is widely accepted that she originated in what is present-day Mexico, in the civilization that once flourished in the city of Teotihuacan, home of the beautiful Pyramid of the Sun and the Pyramid of the Moon. In Nahuatl, the native Mexican language, the name of the city means `place where there is god-becoming’. Legends told how this was where the gods had gathered to plan the creation of man. Though it is widely accepted that she originated from Mexico, as I said, no one knows for certain -- nor do they know how she managed to pop up in the legends of many Native American tribes. Among the Native Americans she is known as either Spider Woman or Spider Grandmother, she was also variously known as Thought Woman, Corn Woman, Serpent Woman, Earth Woman and Sky Woman.

All throughout the various stories, legends and myths, she carries with her specific themes and associations, all of which undoubtedly align with Nimi. She is a prophet and a magician, the great teacher, sacred guardian and mother of all creation, appearing as both young and old, directing the spiritual life of her people, whispering wisdom into their ears. She was the creator and guardian of ancient alphabets and languages. She is often said to have taught the natives how to weave -- not only the weaving of blankets and baskets, either, but the weaving of stories, art, and the very fabric that is the pattern of our lives. She is the female creative force at the center of the cosmos, weaving the great web of life that interconnects all tribes, all people, all of existence together. She reconciles dualities, and teaches one to achieve and maintain a balance between the past and future, the spiritual and physical, the masculine and feminine. The past, she teaches, always influences the future -- though our present thoughts, emotions, and behaviors, we weave our own fate or destiny; we are the writers and keepers of our own lives. She is often associated with death and rebirth, and there may be several reasons for this. In many cultures, the cycles of death and rebirth are associated with the wheel or the spiral -- and within the cobweb is the spiral. Also, one can’t help but notice that the spider has eight legs, and when looked at seems to morphologically appear as the number eight we are familiar with -- and eight is the symbol for eternity, the ongoing spiral of life, without real beginning or end.

In Teotihuacan, her image was found in the murals on the walls in the Tepantitla compound, thought now to have been a living quarters for citizens of high status. Here, she was believed to have been the goddess of the earth, water, war, darkness, the underworld and creation. She is often depicted among cobwebs, as well as many creatures of the night associated with the underworld such as owls, jaguars and, of course, spiders.

She also had significant influence on the Hopi. According to one of their creation legends, which views the earth as a sort of womb, we have existed in three previous `worlds’. The Creator first placed insects inside the earth, in the first world, and told them to discover the meaning of life. When their quest was run with difficulties, Spider Grandmother was sent to help them move to the next chamber. At the end of this world, as with each proceeding world, their lives, overcome with greed, corruption, and the turning away of the Great Spirit’s teachings, were punished and purified by the Great Spirit Massauu. Brought to the second world, they became animals. Still, they failed at finding life’s meaning, and so again Spider Grandmother came to help them move to the third world, the next chamber, where they become mankind. Still, the meaning of life was lost to them. So this time, assisted by birds, Spider Woman helped them climb up to the surface of the earth, the fourth world, where she taught mankind how to weave. The fifth world is the world of peace. I can’t help but assume that with the progression from the first world inside the earth to the fourth world on the surface that the fifth world must be the skies above.

She also was present among the Dine, or as we are more likely to know them as, the Navajo. In their myth of origin, which was in the very least heavily influenced by the Pueblo, there are said to be two types of people: the Holy, and the people of the earth, who are their creation. One of these holy people was the Spider Woman. Legend has it that when the Dine came from the third world into the present fourth world, there were monsters roaming the land who went about killing many people. Using her supernatural powers, she sent out Monster-Slayer and Child-Born-Of-Water on a quest for their father, the Sun-god, who knew how to destroy the monsters. Having succeeded, Spider Woman was honored as a deity and chose her home at the top of Spider Rock, an 800-foot sandstone monolith in Arizona’s Canyon de Chelly National Park.

As with the Hopi, she also taught the Navajo how to weave. In the book `The Magic of Spider Woman’, written by Lois Duncan and Shonto Begay, the Weaving Woman becomes obsessed with her gift and as a result disappears into her loom. She is saved by the Spider Woman, who pulls out a thread from the weave to release her. When a spider leaves it’s web, it departs on a thread. This is why they leave, in the corner of their weave, a loose thread they call the spirit line to pay tribute to Spider Woman and her teachings. This line is made so that they can keep an open mind to think of new designs; without a spirit line, they’ve closed their mind. This weaving tradition was from that point on passed from generation to generation from mother to daughter.

The trendy dream-catchers you see nowadays also stemmed from a legend about Spider Woman, this time with the Anishnabe tribe, also known as the Ojibwe or Chippewa. For them, Spider Woman would go and spin a dream catcher above the cradle of every infant. It was believed that these webbed hoops captured good dreams and delivered them to the dreamer and let the bad dreams escape out through the hole in the middle of the web. When the nation scattered and Spider Woman found it difficult traveling all about, the women of the tribe took up the weaving of dream catchers.

If Nimi is an extraterrestrial, why would she and her people keep in contact with the Native Americans, who so many regard as `primitive’, as opposed to a society as `advanced’ as our own? And what does any of this have to do with weaving? The answer may be that to some, weaving, like the web, is considered a metaphor for beauty, balance, harmony, order and the interconnection of all of diverse forms of existence and consciousness -- which seems to be a reflection of the native’s way of life. It's also a way of life which seems to have more survival value than our modern, advanced society, which is characterized by themes of separation, limitations, competition and blind subservience to authority.

Many natives viewed the tribe as existing within a circle, where everyone has equal value, worth, and importance; where everyone is simultaneously a follower and a leader, where all are both independent and interdependent. The specialized role the individual plays in the circle is determined by one’s talents, which supports and is supported by others within the circle for the reason that each person’s talents compensates for the other’s areas of deficiency. Perhaps one is good at determining where food might be found but is not talented it capturing and killing it, perhaps both are not skilled in cooking the food. By working with others who are talented in areas where you are not, you all help each other more fully develop your talents to their full potential. With each person caring for the circle, and the circle, in turn, caring for each and every person, the circle becomes a community of mutual support for each individual, where giving becomes synonymous with receiving. And since they did not perceive themselves as apart from nature, as manipulators or observers, but rather an integral part of nature, they also established this kind of relationship with the earth herself. They would thank the animals they hunted and killed for food, plant a tree for where they took one down. To further nurture their deep, intimate contact relationship with the earth and each other, and to maintain a certain balance and harmony, they conducted their ceremonies and rituals.

Since my initial recollections of Nimi, I have discovered that many Native Americans -- specifically, the Navajo and Hopi -- have been coming fourth speaking of the return of the Star Nations, Star People or Bird Tribes, who they openly regard as extraterrestrial and claim to have been in contact with for years. They also claim that some of these `star people’ work to help us against the others, who wish to exploit the human race and earth. They speak of a coming great change, where we will face global catastrophe, potentially ushering us fourth into the fifth world of peace or the final resting place of humanity in total obliteration. So the question becomes: are the striking correlations between Nimi and the Spider Woman of many native traditions evidence of archetypal forces, as described by Carl Jung, or does it instead imply that Nimi was a real figure, originating outside of my mind?

"All blame is a waste of time. No matter how much fault you find with another, and regardless of how much you blame him, it will not change you. The only thing blame does is to keep the focus off you when you are looking for external reasons to explain your unhappiness or frustration. You may succeed in making another feel guilty about something by blaming him, but you won't succeed in changing whatever it is about you that is making you unhappy."
-- Wayne Dyer .

NEVER-ENDING CYCLE.
by Lame,
01/07/04.

old chances come
then go again
you tell her it's cool
but your not happy this had to end
you've known her longer
now you're just good friends
oh why did he have to force his way in
and catch her attention

you type away
trying to get all feelings out
you can't help but think
why didn't it work out
then you begin to wonder
what does she see in him
he's not any different then me
things could get better
but they'll probably get worse
she'll run to him every time
she needs to quench her thirst

you want to get angry
you want to go beyond just mad
you want to get even
and stop feeling like you've been had

you're pissed
you're mad
you're blaming me for what you no longer have
or do you
doesn't she write you still
isn't it true you see her more then before
or at least as much
you're too busy cracking
to realize there's very little that you're lacking
but proceed if you must
hit me with another verbal thrust
if this is what you need for release
I won't ask you to cease

"Happiness is not in our circumstances, but in ourselves."
-- John B. Sheerin.

LIFE’S FUNNY, ISN'T IT?
by RuAtha,
09/05/04.

“What we have here is failure to communicate. Some men, we just can't reach.” Guns and Roses couldn't have said it better. Some men you just can't reach. Truly, she had tried to reach him, through actions and veiled words. Sometimes the best route is a straight line. She wonders what it would be like, had she taken that straight line.

Her life after 24 years has been twisted and gnarled twice as much as the average human at this age. Always thought to be an old soul, she had access to things a child shouldn't have access to. Adding to this travesty, this young girl’s body grew rapidly to match the soul inside, becoming an eyeful by the age of twelve. There were plenty of eyes to see it and she knew it. The weekends were spent hanging out with her father -- at the local bar. Growing up with an alcoholic father is never easy for anyone. Like any child she would do anything to get her father’s attention, so she went with him to the bars on the weekends to spend time with him. Knowing full well what she looked like, she made sure she used it to full affect. Luckily her father could see enough through his drunken haze to notice it and stopped taking her to the bars. Then, there were her brothers.

During summer breaks, she would spend two weeks with her three brothers in Erie, PA. The first summer, she was twelve and got herself very, very drunk. Not so sure what happened that night, it is very much a haze to her. Then the summer after, she went for her two week sojourn to Erie and stayed with her brothers. One night, she was up late with her third brother. This was the beauty of being here; she was treated like an adult. Her brother wanted her to lie down on the couch with him, so she did. After a little while, he started caressing her stomach. Slowly moving up, he began to caress her small but fully developed breasts. A guilty pleasure, she knew she should get up, but it really did feel good to be touched in such a way. With one hand, her brother started working up the bottom of her shirt. Before he could get under her shirt and touch her further, she got up mumbling something about the bathroom. This was the last time she went to PA.

The next years blew by in a blur. During these years she had “boyfriends”. She couldn't date until she was sixteen, house rules. But she was still able to have group dates or supervised dates. By the time she was sixteen she was well versed in heavy petting and passionate kissing. Maybe more then a girl that age should. A mere formality at age sixteen, she lost her virginity to a Peter, a boy two years older. The only mystery here was the fact that she didn't bleed and there wasn't any pain. There was no stopping her from there. For the next two years, she had more boyfriends then a girl had a right to have. She even broke in Jeremiah, a virgin. During this time her sister was getting ready to marry this guy who wasn't even worth marrying. One night she stayed at the house with her man, but there was nowhere for them to sleep. Heaven only knows how it happened but all three of them slept in one bed. The only bed big enough for three was her bed. With her sister in the middle, they went to sleep. Well, her sister went to sleep. Her loving fiance offered to give her a massage. So, with one hand he worked on her back, and then told her to turn over. He then worked his way down slowly to “massage” her breasts. She knew this was wrong mainly because this was her sister’s fiance. This didn't stop her from letting him do it, even wishing he would move his hand lower and satisfy the ache between her legs. He never went under her sports bra and quit of his own volition.

Then, her senior year came finally. Senior year brought some good times and some bad. This year also had the realization of something she had been working on since fifth grade. Bradley. Hot now had a new definition. Already having a highly developed sexual predatory manner, she carefully stalked him. Never had she been kissed so well as by this boy. Too bad she really didn't care for him, so all of the technique in the world only took him so far. It definitely got him into her pants, just never her heart. So in the front seat of his land yacht she finally got what she wanted. Only down side, he was just too big -- think of the phrase, `sitting on a fence post'. Size does matter. Small men can bring an orgasm; men who are too large can only bring discomfort.

Senior year also changed her life. She signed on to the military. She spent a lot of her remaining time in Ohio with one person. She had known Tim for about four years now and had been trying for about two years to get into his pants. She truly thinks she could have got into them numerous times in the past, but for once she considered someone else’s feelings in the matter. She cared for this boy she had known for some time. She had loved this boy. He didn't want to have sex, no matter how much his body said otherwise, and she respected him. It didn't matter if he wasn't well muscled or well dressed. Every time she was around him she felt giddy, nervous and incredibly in a constant state of arousal. If anyone was in tune to her more primal natures it was her. It didn't even matter if he was good at kissing or touching. Heaven knows she had enough experience to weigh and measure his prowess. She truly believed that when he looked at her, she was special. She had never felt special to anyone else. Every time they kissed it was so sweet sometimes she smiled in spite of herself. The one time she remembers most was after one of her school dances where her mom had driven them to and from. The whole way to his house they had made out in the back seat. When they got to his house she walked him to the door. He was so shy to be seen that he pulled her into the door and kissed her. It was so sweet she smiled against his mouth during the kiss. Not explained, just there. It didn't matter to him that she was trailer trash, that she had been around the block more then once, or that she had vices. She left him in tacked as it were and left.

In the span of six months she was up to her old antics again. She found Phillip in AI to play with, even contemplated marrying him, but didn't. She went to Korea and broke in Inzirillo AKA Izzy, another virgin but she can’t remember his first name. That makes two for her. By the time she came home to visit, she had another lover in Korea. Raul was well muscled, good looking and well versed in bed. During her visit back home, she called up Tim. Spending the weekend with him, she found out a few things. Being near him still made her positively hum and he was still a virgin. She muses if he had waited for her. Not likely. Up to date all of their petting sessions had started with some kind of deep conversation which would continue during and between kisses and caresses. She had grown tired of this routine, tired of not completing what had been started countless times before. She honestly thought that was how Tim kept himself somehow apart from the now and was able to repel the thought of actually having sex. For so many years he had put off the matter, afraid of it maybe. She knew well just how disturbed he felt with his own life, looking for answers he just couldn’t find. She thought she could answer those questions and assuage the worries, if given an honest chance. She was never truly given that chance to walk into his innermost thoughts and feelings. But really how could she complain, when she didn’t allow him truly in either. Someone should have made that first step. She thought she just may be. Finally, something had given way. For once in her life, she was going to make love to someone, instead of having sex. She succeeded in her mission with mindless zeal. Sadly, Tim was only half involved with the moment, having escaped into his own mind yet again. Maybe for the better, since the only time she could not maintain her shields in her eyes was at that moment of ultimate closeness where her whole soul was laid bare. Never before had she worried about the matter. The only one who cared to look was Tim anyway. So, she succeeded, only to lose in the end.

She went back to Korea, claimed two more lovers whom she can’t even remember the names of. Came back to the states and married Raul. After having his baby, she grew to love him. She never again felt that special hum with her husband’s nearness like she felt with Tim. Over the course of five years, she grew to love her husband deeply and fully. Still thinking fondly of Tim from time to time, she had come to accept her life for what it was. She knew a part of her would always love Tim. She also lost a large part of herself along the way. A part that only one person could see anyway. Tim.

My story ends here. It’s by no means my whole story; there are pitfalls and joys along the way that I remember occasionally. The blessing and the curse is that my mind doesn’t willingly remember everything. The most potent memories are the ones of my senior prom, sitting outside a supermarket, bonfires, and being at houses of people I had only just met. Sitting in a tree, getting drunk, Geauga lake, and my sister’s apartment. Everything else is a blur I try not to remember. To me, it was well past time to make plain this portion of my life, if only for Tim to read and know. This is just one more thing for him to assimilate and dissect to pieces. Your welcome, Tim. I had been trying contact you to tell you this for a while, but this seems to be the only way for you to know it. So will everyone else who reads this.

Happiness isn’t given to a person on a silver platter, not even on a bronze one. Happiness is for those who can seize what they truly want in life and hold onto it. Happiness is also coming to accept what you can’t have and appreciate what you do. What might have been will always be present in everyone’s life. What we do about it defines who we are.

-- Annie.

This e-zine, Gopher: Writings from the Rodents of the Underground, is © copywrite 2005 by Rewired and the Horde/GS. All contents are credited and owned by their respective authors.