It was her who first shone

Through that cheerless night

With silver gaze and mystery’s ring.

In the sea, in the deep bosom of her waves,

Where she first whispered;

Where, upon a thousand ridges

Shimmered sapphire’s gloom.

And what a beauty she was—

Enough to go mad.

Over her sea and her secret wisdoms

All my stones were skipped

Until I’d none besides my weary form.

How I danced alive across the moonlit waves,

Destined to drown beneath her raptures,

Singing to her: “Farewell, farewell, wild-eyed nights!”

And drowned I would have done in darkness,

If not for what truly shone there,

That rose again in that dark.

______________________

The only thing I know for sure is that all the philosophers were wrong. Death is not pleasant nor something to not be feared, death is cold. Dante was right by setting the 9th circle of hell in ice because torment is not burning eternally it is being gnawed by frost’s relentless bite.

The slow thawing was when I regained conciousness. Not some half-assed pediatric conciousness but Jungian conciousness, acute awareness and wisdom. The reverberations of life permeated my body as waves of sensation crawled across my frame. It was like being stabbed over every inch of my body.

As I began my slow journey outward I began to sense more and more. My eyes adjusted to light as if they had been hibernating and needed to relearn how to see. My body began to shiver from the cold as my feeling bagan to return. Torents of sound richotcheted around my brain like bullets colliding isnide of my skull.

It took a few minutes to relize I was not alone. I truly think that for a few minutes I beleived I was the only man alive, blissful minutes. The men who stood around me were tall, but I had no great claim to perception of height because when I looked across the room I saw a drinking glass stand seven feet tall.

“His irises are uneven and they keep unfocusing,” one of the doctors said. But to my untrained ears it sounded like a hoard of racoons clawing through trash,

My sight remained tinged for a few minutes but soon my senses began to dull. The heightened state of conciousness, however, did not leave me.

It was days before I could remember why I had gone into the cryochamber. Peices of the complex puzzle of life formed in my mind and slowly conected. The yound boy who would one day become Adolf Hitler. My mother who carried me a few years to early so that I would have to serve in one of the biggest blood bathes known to man. The mother of a future German soldier who would throw a hand grenade near me in such a precise location that only a few shards hit my frontal lobe leaving me wounded but not dead. The years of trying to find expieremental surgeries to remove the shards and finally my retreat to the cryochamber.

If even one of those peices had been altered slightly, it would have changed my future and subsiquently made a blemish in the overall history of mankind.

I was under constant surveilance, as if I were in the Soviet Union and not the United States of America, in the facility.

I was given a small room, which resembled a hotel with plad curtains and a TV. The TV I was given was like I remmebered: small, boxy and black and white. They told me a lot had changed but if the TV were a symbol for how much things have changed then not much seemed to have shifted. This beleif was soon destroyed as I eyed the mini fridge (that is what I was told it was called.) The shelves were decked with food that I did not recognize.

As I was inspecting my room for clues of what the future meant for me, a doctor entered my room.

“I assume that knocking is a foreign concept in 2019,” I said sarcastically to the doctor. His only response was a shameless chuckle which infuriated me.

“I do apologize for that, but I am very eager to be talking to you. There are only a handful of people who have been frozen for as long as you have and survived.”

“Please get to the point of why you are here I wish to sleep,” I said with a hint of distaste.

“Yes of course. We have given you scheduled times that you may leave with an assistant so that you may begin to familiarze yourself with the world,” the doctor said.

“If this TV is any indication of what this world has become then I will not have to familiarize myself with much,” I responded.

“Oh. That is not what televisions look like now. We have tried to decorate your room in a manner which fit your time period. Televisions are very large now.” My superiority wavered at this. Up until this point I hadn’t thought much about the advancments of human technology because I had beleived it hadn’t advanced too much.

“Well I guess we will see how I can handle it,” I say incredulously, “Now please leave.”

The doctor swiftly got up and drifted out the door.

The first thing I noticed, when I left the facility, was that cars had advanced so that they looked like sharp wasps instead of fluid worms. They moved faster and vibrant colors splashed across each one. Even the dull greys and browns were glossy and colorful.

The second thing I noticed, as we drove into the suburbs of New Jeresey, was the ammount of people. I was told that we were still leagues away from any actual city, but swarms of people choked the streets. They were all different colors, mixing together like choclate powder in milk. Like ants, they all flowed from there dwellings and recreation centers clogging the world.

We eneded at a park in New Jeresy outside of all city limits. The grass had seemed to dull in the years since I had seen it. The clouds were darker as if they had been pumped with gasoline (I later figured out that was the case).

I envisioned my world, my life in the fold of this gargantuan monster of planet. I was enveloped in the claustrophobic feelings which were created from the sheer ammount of people I had seen.

The park itself seemed so uncomfortably unsanitary that I retreated back to the car. The trees were the only thing which hadn’t changed all too much. They stood like sentinals of time unhindered by its flow.

It reminded of a story I had been told when I was young. It went a little like this, “One day a strong storm swept across a forrest leveling many trees. As one of the trees fell, it landed next to a little fern which had not fallen. The tree, while laying there, asked the fern ‘how is it that I have fallen and you have not?’ The fern responded, ’Dear friend, the wind is proud, for this reason we ferns bow to it whereas you trees stand steadfast. You would not have fallen if you had shown humility.”

I found myself seeing the planet in the same way. The advancments made by human kind were just the steadfast stubborness of the tree and one day soon, I am convicned, we will follow that fate.

We set foot on the peak at midnight,

Upon the withering summit of despair

Where even the distant lights of distant towns

Fell funny on our eyes like colourful pandemoniums.

We wonder here and get lost somewhere

In the wildernesses of depravity.

We follow cloven prints in the turf

Through myriad scenes and mirage of self

Unto the crumbling ruins of yesterday

Where monsters sleep queerly like insomniacs.

Medusa rises out of a dream like dawn

And spreads her whorish tendrils

Over our motley, unshaven heads,

As we tilt our faces in unholy prayer

Toward inglorious chemicals.

Half our brains are dashed in piss steeped rivulets

In sunless cubicles strewn wall-to-wall with sublime obscenities.

Midnight swallows night in transient roars

Escaping the hellish scapes of our heads.

We are the Monks of Despair, perusing this place

Like the devil upon the earth.

Night watches us and stalks us

Like a thousand lonely, unmanned lighthouses

Casting new constellations onto the starless sky.

Cocaine dries our throats like the Sun doth the desert

And no more words can come from us.

You will not hear us muttering inanely at the walls,

You will not see us—us who are mad,

As we follow those lights to our demise.

We are the Monks of Despair.

We escheweth truth and trusteth evil

And experience we shall consume unto the pitiless end.

For nothing exists but the pleasure of living,

And all that the universe contains falls under our dominion.

We shall fill it further with the fantastical contents of our minds;

Fill it and bury all in our subterrainicon,

And the children will have to eat, sniff and claw their way out

Without ever opening their eyes to the horror

For they would die of surprise.

Oh children of this world,

Divine in thyself a new Path!

Do not dine on the corpse,

Nor suckle at the barren roots

Like a lamb silly to be a tree.

I have lusted after the greatest lust and found only madness.

I have searched inwardly by the greatest vanity and found the same.

I was a Monk of Despair meditating like a lunatic in lunacy.

But I have escaped the temples they constructed for us

And come bearing an ancient truth like a stone:

Be careful, ye who seek, what you wish for,

For it will come true!

_________________________________

How thin the walls are before the dawn,

When the flock, like a rain-clouds’ rise and fall

Resounds with a peal of maddened squawks.

Torrid with anger do they tear down what a thousand years made;

What a thousand souls perished over and a thousand hearts

Bled over through long, lamentable wars.

The truth is the wounds they suffered

That the idiots know nothing of—

The wounds that spilt a thousand rivers of blood

And roared through the geysers of Hell

So that men could know its sound.

The idiots who are sheep without meekness;

Who are lame for wolves’ easy gorging;

Who will stand naked and burn at the fiery Eastern Gate

Beside the emptiness of their words.

And there will be no water to save them but more blood,

And all the truth will vanish under our hatred like a dream

Before the Day breaks.

____________________________

It seemed that out of battle I escaped

Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped

Through granites which titanic wars had groined.

Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,

Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.

Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared

With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,

Lifting distressful hands, as if to bless.

And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall,—

By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell.

With a thousand fears that vision’s face was grained;

Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground,

And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan.

“Strange friend,” I said, “here is no cause to mourn.”

“None,” said that other, “save the undone years,

The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,

Was my life also; I went hunting wild

After the wildest beauty in the world,

Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair,

But mocks the steady running of the hour,

And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here.

For by my glee might many men have laughed,

And of my weeping something had been left,

Which must die now. I mean the truth untold,

The pity of war, the pity war distilled.

Now men will go content with what we spoiled.

Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled.

They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress.

None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress.

Courage was mine, and I had mystery;

Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery:

To miss the march of this retreating world

Into vain citadels that are not walled.

Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels,

I would go up and wash them from sweet wells,

Even with truths that lie too deep for taint.

I would have poured my spirit without stint

But not through wounds; not on the cess of war.

Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were.

“I am the enemy you killed, my friend.

I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned

Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.

I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.

Let us sleep now. . . .”

___________________________________

Wilfred Owen (1893-1918).

He stood at the top of the mountain

He beheld the terrain before him

He understood the nothingness

And he said, "Let us grow again."

A knock.

Or a tap, maybe.

A soft sound,

but

definitive.

The door creaks.

It always has.

Night air feels different

than daytime air.

Come in.

The air is thick with the light, clear shards of

starlight

where they've fallen

from nowhere.

Nothing breathes

outside.

The floors creak, too. The boards

track each foot

step.

Please, sit.

The chair legs scrape,

grasping

at the floor.

Tea?

The cup clinks on the saucer.

The water sounds

desperate,

then calm.

Thank you.

But you can't put it off,

you know.

I know.

...

Night air feels different

than daytime air.

When you stop breathing, you can

still

feel it.

“Gender equality” overused and normalized.

Just spilt that word thinking they’re meaning it, but without meaning it.

Hide their wrongs under the mask of equality, but do the completely opposite.

Are they kidding with word “equality” or are they kidding with the world, that make this word just a word we can spill?

David has round eyes. And right now, they are full of sadness and deep concern.

“This makes me realize,” he says “that it’s in the cards.”

David is legitimately crying. Tears are seeping into the top of his buttoned up collared shirt. By day, he works at the largest insurance firm in the greater Boston area. A job he loves. But he has admitted that when he leaves his office, he blasts jazz to prevent panic attacks and crying jags.

I stare at the floor. It’s like watching a stranger cry on the bus. I wonder what happened.

David says, “It makes me realize that Abby, one of us, could not show up here one day. It would be over.”

The group leader finally turns to me. Abby, how does that make you feel?

I don’t know, what would it be like to feel anything right now?

I hate this question.

David, in some twisted way, is getting to the Heart of Group Therapy. Suicide is always lurking in the back of our mentally ill minds. For some reason, I always think of my insurance company here, checking the box of: Ok, Abby is suicidal, coverage is approved.

But is this more than money? I think back to the aftermath in the ER, After Ativan. I apologized. To everyone. My body on the hospital bed. Taking someone’s place.

We don’t pump stomachs anymore. Too much damage. We wait it out.

No matter what?

My war is against my very being, my soul. As I watch David cry, I retreat to a familiar place.

My body is sitting and staring, not looking or fighting.

What happens when a caterpillar dies?

Socrates asked his pupils on the summit of the acropolis

Is it gone? Is it dead?

He said as he watched their glimmering eyes.

What comes of that incremental soul?

The one a caterpillar sheds.

Is a sluggish life

All that caterpillar has to give?

Or is its living a constant fight

A symbol for our strife?

It is the never ending lie

That death is holding all our souls.

For what a caterpillar calls the end

The rest of the world calls a butterfly.

“What a caterpillar calls the end, the rest of the world calls a butterfly.”- Lao Tzu