Writing as a second life

Writing, writing, writing... My fingers have been dancing an endless, monotonous dance across the keyboard for as long I remember. Before that it was across the paper. Same difference.

It's like the argument with the chicken and the egg. I am no longer certain which came first. I don't know if I write because I need, or I write because I am needed. I don't know. I don't care. All I know is I can't stop. I write letters, keep a diary, have two blogs, I am between two books and one novel(la). I have also been gestating a bloody saga in my head for the past twenty years. I live so many different lives with countless different names, each hero a distinct voice inside my mind. I am a living shadow that connects everything, I exist everywhere at once and at the same time I'm no part of it.

Maybe my heroes pray to me, and if they indeed do, they worship a very cruel mistress. I only do what I think is fair and inevitable. I can't protect them. I can't even protect myself. I try to recreate life the way I understand it and the way I perceive life may be screwed and fucked up six ways to Sunday. Still I do my best to recreate it and infuse it with the wonder I miss.

I have so many secrets. Not from the ones I keep close. They know everything, they have been given the keys, yet I've never told them which key goes where. The unicorn holds most of them. Even she doesn't see all of me. She knows so much because she has gained my trust, or rather, because she has never betrayed my trust. At the same time there are vaults even I have no access to. The keys to them are held by the Firstborn, her father. My memories are there, and my name, and my crimes and miracles sleeping entangled in one another, mingling breaths and sharing their warmth.

And now it's time for betrayal, isn't it? Why? Because we are weak. We take true blessings and throw them in the mud, and seek gratification in all the wrong places. We only appreciate what we have when we lose it. If only I could save her from that choice. Yet she is human, and must enter the fire to gain access to knowledge. She must suffer.

And you still have no clue what I am talking about.

And I pity her as much as if she was a real person, if not more because she is a part of me.

 Still she must suffer.

At nights I ask you where you are. You don't reply. You can't.

And I read your blog and it's a voice across space and time, defying even death.

It's no wonder I am writing, is it?

Love

What do you do to deal with the inadequacy of every day life?

What can you do to deal with the fact you are isolated inside a body and will be so for the rest of your life?

I thought I saved myself from danger and my own temperament that loves tragedy and impossible loves but in reality I opened the door and stepped out of life. I left everything behind, and as the piano pours out one melody after the next, I watch life from behind the window like a beggar outside a busy restaurant. I watch everyone else eat and have a good time. I cannot enter because I don't fit. I never did. Or so I used to think.

The line that 'killed' me came from an excellent TV series called True Detective. It was about how each of us considers ourselves to be something more than a collection of biological urges. Each of us considers ourselves to be more real than the rest, each of us thinks that our perception and life is more real than other people's. And we are all the same, a pitiful bundle of flesh and urges wanting to go on and condemned to die. We crave reproduction and power even when we claim that our causes are noble, even when we dress our desires with a higher meaning.

I crave the sky. I crave death. I crave freedom. I crave life. I crave godhood like the protagonist of 'Perfume'.

I am a bloody idiot.

I am no different than anyone else, just better at deceiving myself. Smarter than most, enough to muddle my thinking with my own mind games. I have exiled love from my life and feel comfortably numb, empty and safe, unfulfilled and manic. Yet I go on. I despise my own biology for condemning me to these urges because I have glimpsed something else, bigger, better, different. And at the same time I realise just how silly I am to despise something that is perfectly innocent, my body. And also because what I have glimpsed may be nothing else but Love. Love as in everlasting Love, that we try to bring down to our human size and try to live it as best as we could, reducing it and twisting it to something we can understand.

When the protagonist of True Detective briefly crossed over what he found was Love.

I am almost there. Almost at the point of understanding.

Almost at breaking point, where everything will make sense once more.

All I need is to take one more step, even if I have to crawl.

Open the door again, even if my hands are shaking and I am absolutely terrified.

Welcome back to the game.

Welcome back now that you know how everything is connected.

Breathe. You are safe.

Just breathe. The rest will follow.

Turning point

When I had gone to bed at 03.00 am the heat was stifling. Then I woke up at four, because a window was banging from the air. I sat up, groggy and disoriented, and tried to understand where the sound was coming from. I deducted that it was from the rooftop and decided to get up and close it. I was in my knickers, and in spite of my sleepiness thought it would be a good idea to put on something, like a t-shirt. I doubted anyone would see this bare-breasted woman on top of a building at four in the morning, but you know what they say... Better safe than sorry. Barefoot and sleepy I went up the single flight of marble stairs that leads to the rooftop, opened the metallic door with the misspelled sticker advertisement and stepped out.

The cement under my bare heels was still pleasantly warm from the scorching heat of the day. The wind was blowing on my face, rather warm but very strong, and my hair was flying everywhere at once. I walked to the window of the elevator shaft and closed it, then looked around. It was late and except for the wind, everything was quiet. Almost all windows were dark. The cypress trees in the garden were bending with the currents of air, the branches of the large pine trees shaking and moving in disquiet. I looked at the distant stars, glittering their eternal, monotonous song, and felt utterly alone. It wasn't an unpleasant feeling. It was like I was the only living soul on another world that night; maybe on the surface of the moon, or in an alien vista, on my own, scantily dressed, not a worry in the world. I was feeling alone, yes, but in a safe and exhilarating way. Those are the moments I am at perfect peace and I don't need someone to share them in order to validate them. My feet registered the uneven cement and the pieces of glass and small stones under them, the gale was ruffling my t-shirt and hair and caressing my entire body, and it felt like it carried something with it, like something had arrived together with the change in weather, riding the very currents of air that kissed me.

I stood there for a while, absorbing everything I could. My only regret was that my wings are not capable of carrying me into the night. Only in my fantasy and dreams. I would have given anything to be able to ride with the spirits that night, putting all thoughts of sleep and normality behind me. But I couldn't, and eventually I closed the door behind me and marched back into my room, where I landed in bed and slept again.

Maybe in my dreams I did ride with you.