By Rosa Sophia, February 16, 2010 – October 11, 2010
There’s nothing quite so perfect as loneliness. Hold it in between your fingers and you feel nothingness; chilly, pliable, palpable emptiness, a cool night in a tropical paradise. Lights reflect on the water, immobile beacons frozen against ebony blackness. At night it’s so very still, but during the day the wind will whistle and the breezes will rock the palm trees against the window panes. Leaves will flutter through the air and hit the water’s surface.
I wonder if those leaves will sink, will they be pulled down into the darkness, will they shudder into false awareness, morphing into something different beneath the frigid surface. The intracoastal hugs the night sky. Were it not for the buildings and the lights, everything would look like one piece one interwoven cloth lying as night across my painted world.
Shush; stop and listen. 1:30 in the morning and tired people whisper. There’s nothing quite so perfect as their loneliness; they drift and mumble, fall against each other, despite how loud they scream when daytime breaks. Somewhere in the distance, a train is shrieking it chugs along the tracks and crosses roads where cars and trucks wait, their drivers yawning, succumbing to the sleepiness of early morning.
Who knows where that train is going and where it will stop, and if there are people that sit on seats and wait, wondering when the end of the line will come. It could be a freight train carrying empty words and broken dreams. It could be another possibility of darkness dreamt for me. Birds screech on the water; are they being attacked?
Who knows what scaly monsters sift through water’s bottom, unearthing tasty morsels, living beings turned to meat, flesh made into food between long, sharp ivory teeth. I hear the train receding in the distance; no more animal screaming. I feel inside my chest the pulsing void, the gripping pain of loneliness. I wish for arms to wrap around me lips to touch my flesh. I wish for just one night not spent in emptiness.
There’s nothing quite so perfect as concentrated loneliness, like pure poison dripped into a test tube, examined under microscopic lenses. Home is where I am and where I am not. Home is sandy deserts and endless fields. Home is forests reaching toward pristine lakes and ponds. Home is where I create, where words and phrases come to life.
I know not where loneliness drifts when the moon reaches high in the sky. Crawl into bed as the morning reaches its peak, curl up under thick blankets pretend that I’m buried beneath the earth, buried beneath soil, buried beneath rock. I crawl into dreams and waking nightmares, thoughts that preoccupy and shame me. I wriggle as I lose myself in alcoholic dreams and the whiskey breath that leaves my lips rests on my weary flesh.
I wrap my arms around myself and try to hold my heart in; it’s not so easy when the air is cold, and there’s nothing quite so perfect as mid-February loneliness. Months pass and time drones on, becoming October certainty mornings laced with apprehension, tangible like flesh beneath my hungry fingers. I cannot remember the feelings of passion, the fire of first love.
In Florida, day turns to night and night turns to day a repetitious journey, traveling past souls that yearn for something something that has no name, and they fill that desire with money and things and cars and food. I know not what that feels like. The void pulses beneath my ribcage, an animal with a contemptuous approach to life as it / he / she / we know it.
I remember sitting outside the bar on an evening such as this drinking pints of concentrated loneliness, spending my time with friends who are no longer present. Disappeared, traveled on, feet tired on the dusty pavement. I used to see a loving couple kiss and simply ignore it. I used to hear about beauty and think I had it. Now I know better. “Got a cigarette?” I don't even smoke. But I feel the desire rising from below the pit of my stomach each hair stands on end, gooseflesh becomes taut—cold—I shiver, hating the feeling of emotions gone bitter.
So I concentrate on logistics, and the meaning of life in terms of robotics, and everything that I taste—eat—drink—feel—experience—seems empty and lifeless. And everything I see on the horizon seems dastardly empty, devoid of the one thing that I recall is supposed to matter the most. There's nothing quite so perfect as loneliness, hold it between your fingers and you feel nothingness. I stand on the porch and feel the sea breeze bristling my flesh. If only the salt of the ocean could clear my wounds, if only I could drink in passion like I drink in whiskey, a permanent solution to the void that shudders beneath my hungry chest.
Photos are copyright to Rosa Sophia. Do not distribute.
I am still here. It's not easy lately-- thinking of things to write about. I could write about everything that goes through my head, but you would be shocked, or bored to death. I'm going through a lot of personal issues right now, and my writing has fallen to the wayside. I am still managing to have a fantastic book release on June 13-- Check Out Time is coming out! Through Oaklight Publishing. I am very excited! Still, finding time to write is the most difficult thing these days, especially when I spend so much time editing the work of other writers.
Sometimes I feel so very alone. Last night, I dreamt that I was on the top of a scaffolding. There was snow everywhere. It was like a construction site-- high up, vast, and I had to be careful so that I didn't fall. I was supposed to run these wires, communication lines, across the top of this half-made building.
I wasn't worried about falling. I was worried about the two men who were working opposite me. They kept leering at me. One of the men, I knew, wanted to catch me, cut me up, and consume me. The other man seemed to want to watch.
I kept waiting, hesitantly, continuing my work, knowing that I was in danger. But my Dad had promised that he would come help me. He was down on the ground somewhere. I knew I was in danger, and he said that he would be there to protect me. I waited, and I waited, and he still didn't come up. I was growing more and more worried.
The dream ended, and Dad was still down there somewhere, on the ground, so busy that he hadn't gotten a chance to come up yet.
The realization. The memory. The recollection that things are no longer as they once were. I started crying this evening and realized that it was Dad-- I miss him. I've had so many strange dreams recently. I dreamt about Dad. I dreamt that I lifted my hand, and magic sprung forth, and a beautiful rainbow danced from my fingertips. Last night, I dreamt of blood, and I can't remember why. I woke up cursing my alarm clock, as though it were a sentient being that I could blame all of my problems on. Alarm clock as scape-goat.
March 13: I decided to embark on a spiritual transformation.
March 17: I was very depressed all day. Then I realized that it had been exactly a month since Dad died.
March 19: I decided to burn my old journal entries, the ones that reflected a certain desperation buried deep within me, the ones that are no longer conducive to my healing. When cutting out these pages, I realized that they were written on March 19, 2011. On this day, it was exactly a year since the worst of my depression, and I am finally moving away from it.
March 24: A day before the 25th, almost exactly a month since my birthday, I realized that I don't remember how old I am. Dad died the week before my birthday, and although I received birthday cards and well-wishes, it just wasn't important to me. The only thing that mattered was Dad, and when I was younger, my father was still alive. Therefore, on some subconscious level, I suppose I decided that if I remained the same age, then Dad would, too.
It creeps up on you-- this realization that grieving is not yet over, that the shadow has not yet passed. That favorite song I mentioned? Two years ago, I listened to it over and over again, and I cried every time I heard it, because it summarized everything that I was going through. Maybe I'm still going through it. Maybe it never really ended. Maybe everything has only just begun. Only this time, I am a different person, with a different outlook, and a different approach. I just hope that everything works out the way it should. Maybe it won't be the way I want it to work out, but it will be the way I need it to.
There's an odd energy afoot today, and it all started with the rain this morning. It was almost as if the rain was washing everything out, forcing it into the open. I went out for lunch with a couple of friends, and I drifted back in time. No, I didn't drift-- I was thrown. I had one of my flashbacks again.
Rather than merely recall something, I experience sudden and visceral flashbacks. It's as though I'm shoved back in time, and I'm really there. It begins with a scent, or a sound, or a visual trigger, and my face suddenly goes blank. I feel like I'm shifting out of my body, and the present day disappears. Today, out to lunch with my friends, sitting in a cafe, surrounded by classy-looking posters and a French motif, I flashed away.
This also happens in another fashion-- I have flashbacks, but I also have flashforwards. I call them future flashes. Nine times out of ten, my future flash comes true. It's not something I can control. In other words, I cannot see the future-- but there have been times when I have predicted it. There have also been times where my future flash has led me to make a decision to change the predicted outcome. Life is a combination of fate and choice.
In any case, today's flashback was caused by a sound-- music. I heard a few notes in the song that played in the restaurant, and those notes had a striking similarity to a few of the notes in the beginning of On an Island by David Gilmour. That song is very special to me.
My face blanked, everything else disappeared, and I froze. Then, I was in Portland, Maine, in 2007, sitting in the bar, eating my dinner, and drinking a beer. An instant later, I blinked, and I was back in Tequesta, sitting with my friends.
Flashbacks and future flashes occur in accordance with moments of extreme importance. That week in Maine was one of the best weeks in my life, and there will never be another like it. After my flashback, I was overcome with a moment of sorrow mixed with thoughtful reminiscence.
Once home, I slept. I was so exhausted, and for no real reason. I remember, vaguely, dreaming of Brian last night-- a schoolmate who was killed with his girlfriend over the weekend in a car crash. I keep thinking about that. In my dream last night, I remember talking to him, but I don't remember what I said, or what he said.
A strange energy drifts around me today, and seemingly around everyone else. Perhaps it has something to do with the advent of the New Moon.
At school, a strange man talked to himself in the hallways, and sang and danced in front of the windows. He wasn't a student, just some drifter, and he was hungry. Before he left, he discarded two empty coconuts in the lobby. He was wearing a face mask around his neck-- who knows why.
We tried to do a cylinder compression test on a 1973 Maverick. I sat behind the wheel when they pushed the beast out of the shop. I wonder what it would have sounded like, if we could have turned it on? Dad would have gotten a kick out of seeing me in that car.
There was police tape all around the KFC on Avenue S and Blue Heron. Cops with big guns were wandering around the parking lot, and a helicopter was circling a few minutes down the road, shining a spot light into the darkness. Who knows why. Maybe I will hear about it tomorrow. There's strange energy around us today, and it seemed to begin with the rain.
There was a bite in the air that reminded me a little bit of summertime in Maine-- I miss that. Flashback, flashforward. It's all the same in the end. Just another second, in just another minute, in just another day. And it always begins with the rain.
rhaniha
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