Stigma
As far back as I can remember, I've always had this vague notion that there was something fundamentally wrong with me. Something I could never quite put my finger on. Yet it was there, lingering in the background. A subliminal message playing on repeat my entire life. I've no idea where it originated. It's almost as if I came into this world feeling inherently flawed. An obscure birth defect, prominent to everyone but me.
Whatever it was, most people took notice. And much like having a huge stain on the back of your shirt. It isn't until you catch everyone staring that you become aware of it's presence. Though to this day, not a single person has been able to articulate what it is they find so terribly wrong about me.
Wish it Were Different
Mom,
I'm sorry, from the bottom of my heart, for the pain I've put you through. Your first born succumbed to the pleasures and tragedies of the world. I've been addicted to horrors. My heart has only known pain and disappointment in the face of love. I've had no choice but to make solitude my best friend. How terrible it is to watch your child suffer, unable to do anything for them. You taught me kindness, compassion, and empathy, so I know you've felt my pain as if it were your own. And knowing that breaks my heart even further. I promise it was never intentional. I hope you never know just how awful I feel knowing you've suffered because of my actions.
I've gotten through unspeakable battles that you will never know about, but understand that I have become stronger because of them. I am wiser and even more compassionate from those things, and it is from your example that I was able to emerge from hell with even more love and empathy for the world. I hope that makes up for all the pain and tears that have fallen because of me. I hope you understand the love I feel for you even though you couldn't be there to help me or hug me when I needed it most. I cry every night hoping you don't hate yourself because of that. My son, your grandson, will be stronger because of it all. All because of you. I love you so much.
Love always,
James
Tides and Wells
I know they can't even be an ounce, but the weight is so much more.
Two five by seven glossies, printed in a tourist trap kiosk. I paid a far higher price than I should have, but the cost hasn't yet been tallied.
Money is a tide, but memory is a well.
Wells sometimes run dry.
Her well isn't as deep as it once was.
I'm stricken by how much she looks like her grandmother. What strikes me even more is the possibility that she'll live as long.
I'm ashamed to admit that I hope she doesn't. Her independence is already gone, her mobility a thing of the past and her thoughts have started trailing after.
My great-grand was with us into my early twenties. She lived long enough to wither on the vine, mind as sharp as a razor but a body fragile as glass. When the light in her eyes began to dim, when her memory began to slip, her body had already started to go. It was an easy thing for her to follow.
My mother's mind started slipping by inches, and her body has declined by miles. Now it's a race to see which one will be gone first.
She knows she's in decline. She's fighting it, but she's losing.
Dialysis starts soon.
I took her on a bucket list trip last week; we originally had it planned for late summer.
Late summer will be too late.
The water was too cold, but she went anyway. She'd never stepped foot in the Caribbean, and now she has.
When I told her about the trip, the first thing she asked was if she could swim with dolphins.
"Absolutely you will," I told her.
And she did.
She hates having her photo taken, so while she was distracted with my step father, I moseyed over to the photo center.
She never asked what I had in the bag.
Two photographs, professionally captured, have her kissing or petting her very own personal Flipper. She watched that show when she was a kid, and half a century later, she finally got to swim with a bottlenose.
When it's her time to go, I'll probably be tasked with building an electronic photo reel. It will be hard to do, because she avoids cameras when she can. She always has.
I knew when I bought these pictures that eventually they'd be displayed in memoriam.
Carrying these photos back to my hotel room, I know they can't even be an ounce, but the weight is so much more.
The Unwanted Inheritance
It started with nightmares. Blood-curdling screams that would jolt me awake in the dead of night, tangled in sweat-soaked sheets as memories and fears that weren't my own clawed at my mind. Images of war, of violence so horrific it seemed beamed in from another plane of existence entirely.
At first, I thought it was just a phase, night terrors brought on by stress at school or the pressures of being a teenager. But the nightmares only grew more vivid and persistent as the years wore on. By college, I was avoiding sleep entirely, living off caffeine and adrenaline as the waking world became a sanctuary from the psychological torture that awaited me each night between the sheets.
It wasn't until my psychology elective that I began to untangle the knot of intergenerational trauma that had been passed down to me like a curse, striking at me from the grave.
My grandfather Ian never spoke of his experiences in World War II. According to family lore, he had been captured and held in a prisoner of war camp for 18 agonizing months, enduring torture and deprivation that marked him permanently, though you'd never know it from his stoic silence.
When he finally returned from the war, his own father was so traumatized that he could barely look at his son, the living reminder of the violence and fear he had endured on the frontlines. And so the psychological scars went unacknowledged and unprocessed, packaged up like a ticking time bomb to be passed on to future generations.
My dad jokes that the reason he had kids so late in life is because he spent his 20s and 30s trying to outrun the ghosts of his father and grandfather. The substance abuse, the self-destructive behavior, the inability to form real emotional bonds - now I recognize these were his ways of coping with the ancestral cloud of trauma and disconnection that haunted him.
And I inherited it all. The night terrors, the emotional numbness, the feeling of always being on guard, waiting for the next mortar shell to drop on me at any moment. This was my bloody genetic legacy, an unwanted inheritance of psychic injuries incurred before my great-grandparents had even said their marriage vows.
I fought it as long as I could, wrapping the pain up tight like my grandfather had done and shoving it deep inside where it couldn't be explored or excavated. But the nightmares always found a way to bubble up, threatening to swallow me alive in the process.
At my lowest point, I found myself drunk on the bathroom floor at 3 AM with a bottle of sleeping pills, seriously contemplating ending the cycle of intergenerational trauma through the most permanent solution. And that was my wake-up call.
There are resources out there to begin the process of generational healing, even for those of us who feel irrevocably damaged by the traumas of our ancestors. I started seeing a trauma counselor and joining group therapy sessions with others who carried their own inherited psychological wounds.
I'll never forget the first time I met Jacob, a young man whose grandfather and great-uncles survived the atrocities of a Nazi concentration camp but never opened up about the soul-scarring brutality they experienced. Jacob and I became accountability buddies, checking in on each other's progress and emotional state while we worked through EMDR therapy and family mapping exercises.
With the group's support and my counselor's expert guidance, I began to unravel the heavy cloak of trauma, allowing the light to pierce the darkness I had been living under for so long. I started practicing mindfulness and meditation to find stillness and separate my own identity from the intergenerational pain.
The nightmares persisted in the beginning, with vivid flashes of images and sounds that made me jolt awake in a cold sweat. But I learned grounding techniques to ease the anxiety spirals and remind myself that I am my own person, not just an avatar for my family's tragedies.
As the weeks and months passed, the nightmares slowly started losing their grip on me. The visions of war and violence faded, replaced with more abstract fears and half-remembered fragments. Some mornings, I would wake up and realize with surprise that I had slept through the night undisturbed, with no memories of dark dreams whatsoever.
With that release of the nightmarish visions, I felt myself becoming lighter somehow, less weighed down by the unseen baggage I had been carrying for so many years without realizing the burden. I laughed more easily, took more emotional risks by opening myself up to others, and discovered newfound reserves of creativity and ambition that had been locked away by the traumatic inheritance.
Jacob and I still keep in close touch, meeting up for a hike and outdoor meditation whenever we're in the same area. We often remark on how our friendship formed from the mutual goal of healing from generational trauma, but now our bond transcends that psychic scar tissue. We are who we are because of it, but no longer defined or imprisoned by it.
My story is not unique, unfortunately. According to research, trauma can be encoded into our DNA and passed down over multiple generations through cellular memory. Many of us may be walking around haunted by nightmares and neuroses imprinted on us like scratches on wax from experiences that predated our birth, feeling the pangs of fear and violence that scarred our ancestors.
But just because these unwanted inheritances get passed down to us, that doesn't mean we can't begin the process of healing them. What my grandfather and father and so many others of their wartime generations couldn't do - open up the traumas and allow themselves to feel them, metabolize them, release them - is still possible for us.
It takes courage, patience, perseverance. It takes being willing to feel the weight of atrocities and psychic injuries we never experienced directly but which became entangled in our cellular code. It takes a village of support, of shared empathy and mutual dedication to doing the shadow work and bringing light to what has remained cloaked in darkness for so long.
These days, I sleep through the night more often than not. And on the occasions when I have a nightmare that summons those ancestral agonies, I don't panic or try to stuff them back down. I allow myself to sit in the discomfort for a while, grounding myself with deep breaths and mantras to remind myself that I am safe, that those horrors are in the past. And then I release them back into the ether, more convinced than ever to continue doing my part to cauterize the generational wounds.
We can't keep passing down this heirloom of unprocessed trauma to our descendants like a sick inheritance. We have to be the ones to stop the cycle, to un-inscribe the nightmares from our DNA, to remember the light and the warmth of our shared humanity.
It may take generations more of mindful effort to heal the intergenerational trauma on a mass scale. But we are the ones with the opportunity and the obligation to step into that light, one cautious but determined step at a time.
Required
Due to the unbalanced nature of Daniel Moors' testimony, when the drugs had been almost absent, it was readily apparent that psychological dependence had set in. And at the moment he had desperately needed his vice.
However the young man had luckily had enough lucidity to not antagonize the officers or much move when called for a disturbance in the estate.
Due to his incoherence, his erratic behavior prior, due to the fact that the younger brother was petrified with eyes blown wide and drenched but otherwise uninjured on the patio a social worker was called in.
The parents had lost control. Realized so months ago when their son had punched a wall in an exhausted, irritable state one night.
And as it stood had no means or authority as parents to have corralled destructive behavior and violent language.
Olli had become something of a doll, otherwise unaccounted for in matters of the house, in the instances Daniel sober or not deigned to notice him. Sometimes he was in a hugging and crying mood. Other times he was in a venting mood.
He screamed at ten year old Olli on such occasions.
It was scary.
Even though his screams had demanded him to stay there, in one place, far from him while he was so angry.
His eyes had learned to track the movements of those bigger. Take mental note of how they paced, how long their strides, how measured or how agitated.
And from the very start he'd not trusted Dr. Eddal. Hadn't wanted her there.
From the start a requirement to shelve the entire ordeal as resolved was for the parents to submit Olli to a counselor for care.
Specializing in abused children.
She'd been used to horrible. And in some occasions yes, the children did turn into statistics into her mind.
She could only hope every day, try a little harder every day that those ill-suited tracks of thought never showed.
Dr. Eddal first consulted with Olli late at night, not long after Daniel had been detained and formally registered into rehab. Rather than her regular office it had been in a hospital.
The parents or Uncles, the adult family members were often the most common culprits. But there were always the times-- where, "the brother in his stupors would talk in coarse language, extort the child, blackmail and demand from the child to keep his silence."
"We do not believe physical force was applied."
"Marks designated to be 'with intent' are few and far between. Most if not all are now old and partially healed."
She answered his questions.
She asked her own, of how he felt of what he liked and who he liked. What did he do at certain times of the day and when he ate. How was school? There had been a note that he tried out for his basketball team and had been a rat in the Nutcracker show that winter.
Eddal did her utmost to reassure he was a person. A valued person who'd been undeservedly mistreated. In a way no one deserved to be treated.
And with time, in their eighteen months together she hesitated, but ultimately decided that it wouldn't be unprofessional if he considered her a friend.
If it meant his fear of adults all but faded.
Once he'd graced her with his voice, well, she certainly laughed a great deal. She clapped when he showed her the steps for the rat's solo in the Nutcracker. She listened as rules were enforced and the candy and cookie jars were placed out of his reach.
It was a transitionary period: from indulgent negligence to authoritative.
She reminded him it was out of love. She reminded that it was his decision and his alone to see Daniel, to contact his older brother-- his older brother with an illness who had hurt him, who had known so to some level-- when it was safe. Safe for Olli physically and safe for Olli mentally.
She only saw him twice-more after the eighteen months were up.
Three years later and she'd have to correct that.
Setting her purse on the seat beside her a coffee mug had been slid into her hands.
"Thank you ma'am," Daniel said quietly.
Olli had allowed his brother to borrow his phone to call for a consult.
The boys' parents were at the moment, at Olli's school for a conference about recent behavioral issues. Before they were to realize the younger son had set them up to leave.
"Everyone else thinks I was hallucinating what I saw on that road. I'd be a little less pissed if they at least gave me a chance to speak."
"I'd read about that in the papers. You claim to have seen--"
"A ghost maybe, best way I could think to describe it when my head had been cut clean through with my windshield mind you."
Daniel Moors was terse but otherwise composed. He kept his temper and sighed out his frustrations.
"So," he continued with an obstinate shrug, "I hired three high-school freshmen. Okay, two freshmen and my brother."
[R E D U C T E D]
The first time I saw the young man, known as [R E D U C T E D], subsequently known as ‘the patient’, was when he was brought to me in handcuffs. He had an air of gloom I have yet to see in any of my patients. The photo that was shown to me and the man in front of me were like 2 different people. His lush brown hair had turned white and his attractive face had become skeletal.
The first week was spent without much progress. Most of the hour went on in an absolute silence and observation as he seemed to search the room. As if looking for something hidden. Occasionally he would listen to non-existing sounds and tremble. As it was my job to determine if the patient suffered from a mental illness or if he was sane enough for imprisonment, I decided to give him the time he needed to open up.
On the second week, he seemed to get more comfortable and started to open his thoughts to me. He spoke of the night in the woods and the horrors that had made the headline news that next morning.
His opening statement was, and I quote: “There are things in this world, doctor. Horrors beyond our wildest nightmares. And I have seen one of it.”
I pondered if those ‘horrors’ were manifestations brought on by stress or perhaps a genetic predisposition towards schizophrenic disorders? I don’t remember his parents mentioning anything about ancestors with similar disorders. But who knows. Maybe it happened further than the family remembers.
The patient continued by stating how it all begun during an intoxicated round of truth or dare. One of the victims, known as [R E D U C T E D], subsequently known as ‘victim one’, took out a piece of paper and dared him to read from it. He continues by recalling that he found the page strangely old looking and hideous. There was a text written on it in red ink. The patient questioned the victim what book this was from. But victim one simply told him it’s from some old box he found in his late grandfathers attic. It sounded creepy, so he brought it on the drinking excursion.
So the patient read from it a sentence, one he can not remember, as it was in some foreign language. But as soon as he finished the words, a lightning struck near them on the ground. He swears that he is not lying when he describes it as green and almost soundless. His blood analysis seems to confirm that the boys were not on any kind of mind-altering substance, safe for beer. A greenish black smoke rose from the place of impact and started taking on a human silhouette. From it formed a creature of grotesque shape. The patient seemed to sweat profoundly upon remembering. He describes it as, and I quote: “Barely looking humanoid, with a strange demonic twisting on it’s skin.” If one is to imagine his hallucination, the face only contained a mouth with rows of dull teeth, outstretched in a spiral towards the height of trees. Its hands were intertwined appendages of what he only described as, and I quote: “tentacles from an octopus.” Hysteria soon erupted between them. Screaming and yelling. Only victim one, that brought the page, seemed to bow to the ground for the creature. The creature grinned from one earless side to the other. That is the last thing the patient is able to recall before waking up in that same spot, with a knife in his hands and surrounded by the dismembered bodies of his friends. In a more grotesque manner than any horror film he had ever seen.
After this couple of weeks, it is my professional opinion; after spending all this time with the patient, to declare that the man known as [R E D U C T E D] to be psychologically insane and should be put under immediate supervision.
From some deep part of my mind, I have also decided to include a piece of unrelated information. In spite of the new heating installed in the office, I could feel a cold in the room as the patient told his story.
They’re watching you.
Clouds of smog roll in on the evening breeze, obscuring the view to less than a dozen feet, and filling the air with choking fumes. In the growing dusk, brought on early by the opaque clouds, lights begin to come on in this part of The City. Due to the rapid expansion of the world's population, The City now covers two thirds of the Earth's landmass. The City has spread as deep and high as it has wide. Deep beneath the Earth's surface, sprawling networks of tunnels and catacombs are home to a thriving criminal underworld, full of potent synthetic drugs, a single dose of which can keep a man in hallucinations for years, deadly faction feuds and infighting, and illicit bionic body modification parlours, preying on the disenfranchised who may be prepared to take any risk for a shot at escaping this hell.
The streets at ground level are normally empty. The toxic smog, full of heavy metals and poisonous chemicals can roll through with less than a moment's notice. Few take the chance of being caught out in it, and fewer survive. If one was to take stroll through this apparent ghost town, one would likely notice the occasional movement in the shadows, near long-boarded-up storefronts and abandoned public fixtures. There are those who live in this wasteland. Few live long. Most are cast-offs of the criminal underworld, and would-be entrepreneurs from the bustling hive of activity above whose luck ran out and whose debts caught up with them. The few denizens of this place who last more than a week become hardened veterans of the shadows. They know where to find food and air, and how to move about unobserved by the uninvited voyeur. If you venture here, take care to look out for these folks, for an encounter with one may be your last.
Above the smog-filled wastelands, rise innumerable towering buildings with massive glass windows. These buildings are packed as tightly as the streets below will allow, and many join up in mid-air, forming a continuous aerial thoroughfare. Within this vast expanse of interconnected buildings, the great majority of The City's residents live, work, and die, many never setting foot outside even once. A well-designed internal transport network removes the need for these people to leave this place, or even think about the outside. This is the domain of the business magnates, a small number of wealthy men who own everything, and care about no one other than their own pockets. If one cares not for their greedy rule, the alternative is to take one's chances on the streets or the criminal underworld below.
In this world, population growth has not just been fuelled by the natural reproduction of humankind, but by unprecedented technological advances as well. Robots, or "synthetic humanoids," as they are commonly known, have become indistinguishable from real humans. Researchers were proud when they first made a robot that could pass as human, but soon they lost track of how many they had made. They say the computer with the records crashed, destroying the hard drive, and the backups were lost in an unfortunate fire on the same day. Same say this is too much to be coincidence.
To begin with, the synthetic humanoids were easy to catch if you had a good eye and knew what you were looking for. There were tells. But over time, they seem to have learnt not only to build copies of themselves, but to improve and adapt their programming with each successive generation. The one thing they always struggled with was romance. It was their greatest tell. For many years, one merely had to make an advance and you could tell whether you were interacting with a human or a synthetic by the reaction. Sadly, over time, this tell too was engineered out to near perfection. But one tell still remains. We call it The Test.
~~~~~
As Justin walked along the corridor, he paused. He had the misfortune to be walking on the lowermost outer corridor on a connection bridge. He hated looking out the window, but he hated his job more. So he stood there, and steered at the smog rolling in. As he watched the toxic clouds gradually hide the grey streets below from his view, he pondered on the news that had been announced that morning. Less than a month ago, there had been an election, an impressive feat for a collection of people the size of The City. He didn't really care who had been elected. They were all puppets of the business magnates, as far as he could see. Already though, there were policy changes. This morning, they had announced a new law that all public servants were required to be chaste. Justin thought it was strange law, and wouldn't really have cared, except that it seemed to have put his boss in a particularly bad mood. Justin was pretty sure that his boss was human, as he couldn't imagine a synthetic having such unpredictable mood swings, but he hadn't done The Test to confirm, and really didn't feel that he wanted to. There were murmurings today that something was wrong, but he didn't feel that it concerned him, so he ignored the rumours and continued on his way to work.
Like most residents of The City, Justin was happy enough with his life. He had a job that paid enough to buy food and clothing for himself, his wife, and his two children. He had a family, and he had a roof over his head. He was also not a criminal, or stuck on the streets outside. Life wasn't glamorous, but it could be much worse. He had almost married a synthetic. He cringed internally every time he thought of it. She had deceived him, persuaded him there was no reason to do The Test until they were wed. He had learnt his lesson from that. He knew his wife was human, and he had made certain he did The Test before he got too far in.
As he sat down at his desk, a news article flashed on his screen. He decided that he might as well check it out, as it meant that he could avoid doing work for a bit longer. As he opened the article, a video clip began playing. A rather large man, in a ridiculously formal, tailored suit, and gold earrings was talking. Justin recognised him as the business magnate who owned the company he worked for. Normally, this fellow was busy gloating about his record profits, but today he seemed agitated. Justin started actually listening. The fellow was concerned that synthetics were taking over the government. Justin found this rather hilarious, as this fellow and his compatriots were really the only ones in control, anyway. But the more he listened, the more Justin realised what the problem actually was.
~~~~~
The only way to be sure you have found a synthetic humanoid is to sleep with it. People say it's not bad, just different. This is The Test. If you don't want to sleep with it, you can take it to a testing house. You can let someone else sleep with it and tell you. But beware, if you go to a testing house run by a synthetic humanoid, you may not get the answer you are looking for. You may need to Test the tester.
~~~~~
Justin didn't feel like going to work. He was still thinking about the video clip he'd seen two days. He'd been unable to concentrate at work yesterday, especially after discovering that he couldn't find the article when he went looking for it again to show his wife. He had a strange sense of foreboding, and he didn't like it. Trying to take his time, he deliberately took a longer route through a major shopping zone. He spent as much time as he could justify gazing at each window and deciding what he'd spend his money on, if he ever had enough for more than the bare basics. He decided on a nice, striped tie for himself, and a new set of painted china dinner plates for his wife.
As he moved on, he passed by Madame Toufrae's, the most reputable testing house in this part of The City. Madame Toufrae herself was standing outside, and he offered a greeting as he went past. She raised her hand to return the greeting, and Justin hurried on, now concerned that he would get in trouble for being a little later than his usual tardiness. Halfway across the the bridge corridor, he realised something. As far as he could recall, Madame Toufrae always wore gloves. Generally, elbow-length white lace. Today, she had not had gloves on. He dismissed it, and carried on. People were entitled to try new things and wear whatever they wanted. It was none of his concern.
~~~~~
No one really knows how the synthetic humanoids were able to resolve their shortcomings in romance. One theory suggests that they analysed human-produced media and altered their behaviour to align with our idealised romantic interactions. Opposers of this theory maintain that this would not have allowed them to so swiftly and transparently integrate into society, as our media is too unrealistic. Another theory suggests that they instead fed us with their own ideals so that we came to expect them to interact in the way that they do, and mirror it ourselves. The final theory, of those that seem likely, is that they achieved it by trial and error. By engaging in dating practices at scale they could have collected enough data to improve their performance and gather more data with another iteration. This seems the most likely.
We suggest to you that if you venture into our world, take care who you trust. The synthetic humanoids are their own master. We no longer know what they desire, or who among us may be one of them. How you choose who to trust is your problem, not ours. Good luck.
~~~~~
When Justin arrived at work the following morning, the normally dreary office was abuzz with muttered gossip, and sideways glances. He tried to find someone who would tell him what was going on, but everyone seemed too preoccupied to talk to him. He sat down, rather annoyed, at his desk, and turned to look at his monitor. There, in front of him, was another news article. The article informed him that, as much as synthetic humanoids were normally indistinguishable, you could sometimes tell when they were impersonating a specific human. It suggested to look out primarily for subtle changes in their dressing patterns. And then the article abruptly disappeared. And that was when Justin realised why his wife had gone to work that morning in the dress that she hated....
Getting through it all...
Sometimes there is no coping. All you can do is curl up into a ball and cry your heart out, until you realise you're just doing it for effect. Out of self-pity. Life is still going on, it won't help.
I'm lucky, because living on a farm there is always work to do.
That's what does it for me. Work. Fixing fences, building gates, digging hoes, chopping trees, mucking out, even just watching the animals is very important. And it all helps. To take your mind of things, off everything. To think only about what you're doing at that moment. It doesn't take your troubles away, or solve your problems, but a clear mind is the only way you can get through all the overwhelming stuff.
There are other ways such as walking, sometimes walking up our long lane will calm me down enough, either listening to nature or singing as loudly and as badly as possible to various songs. Playing a musical instrument has a very calming effect on people, if I happen to be cross, playing something loud like an accordion is great for letting out frustration.
That's how I get through a bad time. Different methods for different moods.
Fame, not fortune
I learned one name on the evening news.
Surprisingly, pictures on milk cartons still happen. I recognized somebody and chuckled.
The stretch of I-90 west of Sioux Falls is interesting. It reminds me of movies with signs saying "last chance for gas!" but I guess the midwest figures fuck it, you'll figure it out. Lucky for me, that highway is a helluva place for pretty girls to have a flat.
Youtube has cold-case stuff on familiar faces. I know names from the driver's licenses stashed in my special place.
Sunday School lied. God ain't the only one who makes stars.
Who wakes up next to you
This is where I'll leave your note.
The first one I ever received was pinned to my shirt. It was yellow construction paper, cut out into the shape of a school bus. "832" was written on it in one of the eight most important colors that exist in the world, according to Crayola.
You're still one of the 8 most influential people in my world, according to every woman I've loved since last we spoke.
The first note I gave wasn't folded cleverly. I didn't learn how to do that until well into my teen years, when I had a reason to do the cute little tucks and tails. To her credit, she didn't laugh, but the subtle shake of her head was indication enough that the words she would use after reading would be empty attempts at mollification or hollow apology.
It's alright, though. Because later, I found someone worth walking 500 miles for.
Until she wasn't.
The note I found at your apartment, it wasn't mine to find. It was an accident, really. I wasn't looking for it, but there it was. It spelled out in clumsy verse, in my best friend's handwriting, words that I knew in my heart but hadn't yet seen with my eyes.
You were gone, and he was with you.
Not me.
Until he wasn't.
Oh, I am now fine. I wasn't fine. I didn't think I would ever be, but, well. Time heals, and all that. And wow, it's been a lot of time. A lot of todays between you and me and then.
A problem of mine, though, is that I linger. I still bleed a little when the trees move from green to smokeless flicker-flame. It's spring now, but everything turns to autumn when I remember you.
So this is where I leave the bloody trail, smeared for everyone to see and experience along with me. Pictographs written in clear language with unclear resolutions, red-fading-to-rust, scrawled for pondering and perusing.
I think the issue here is the time of year. I don't love the spring and all its promise, because promises get broken. Fall doesn't lie, it lies in wait. It's coolness is fact instead of false hope. Frost is a guarantee instead of a final, rude surprise. Spring gives way to hazy days, but autumn gives way to lazier days, shorter in duration and sepia around the edges of afternoons. Each morning stumbles in from the dark, shaky and a little weak.
We've force-Marched into April, but you always remind me of October. Fall.
I tripped, once. Fell. Landed hard, battered and bruised and bitter.
The bruises have faded, I think. The bitterness sometimes slips away into more of a bittersweet.
Which brings me to today.
This is where I'll leave your note.
I'm sorry. I can't say I didn't mean to bring you fear, anxiety, worry. I meant to give you those things. I wanted you to feel those things. I did that to you. I wish I hadn't done that; it was hurtful and hateful and born of spite and resentment and resistance to inevitable change.
I was absolutely withered. Everything good and right and just had been chewed up and what was left in me was envious and angry. I was poisonous and miserable, and I wanted poison and misery visited on you, too. I'd been done to, and I wanted to do. I spoke in anger, I spoke with hatred. Fury was my world, and our worlds were parted.
My emotions ruled me, and I should have done better.
You told me you were afraid, and I was appalled. I was aroused. I was proud and I was ashamed and I was disgusted and I was pleased.
Mostly, though, I was saddened.
I never wanted you to fear me, but you did. You were afraid of me because of me. I should have done better. I should have been better.
I have done better since then. I learned from us. You taught me. You taught me so much, and only now can I see the lessons written those decades ago. The words are the same, but now they convey different meaning, like shadows flickering in different light.
I've channeled the anger. I've funneled the pain, I've processed the emotions, I've done better with others. There are scars, there are aches, but they're stories and allegories and ways to learn and do better. Be better.
I am better.
I wish you'd see me. I wish we could talk; I wish laughter was our language.
These things can't happen, because there's no bridge to be built. The ashes all floated downstream decades ago. I understand that, and I respect the borders and the boundaries and the barriers. We're worlds apart now, with the light of years between.
Me leaving things alone is the best case for you and for me and for us.
I'd like you to forgive me.
I'm pretty sure you've forgotten me.
I know it's best that I stay here on my side of the world, so I'll leave a note here for you. A note for autumn in the spring, a note for a deciduous love that tries to be evergreen when 'what if' wanders in and whispers poison.
In maudlin moments, I wish you could know I want to walk those 500 miles that separate us, just to be the man you once thought I was. When clarity sharpens my focus on the here and the now, though, I realize how lucky I am to not wake up next to you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJ6wJqaE6o4