No response from the guy. Starting to believe fate is merely coincidence.

Listening to Sonic Youth's version of The Carpenters "Superstar." Genius.

*~*

Here's something I wrote, during the nightmare period:

Tick Tick snarls the clock

When the blueish-black demon steals her happy place

He strongarms her, turns the key to the lock

Fixes his monstrous image on her naive face

She tosses and turns and shivers and shakes

But her winsome attitude isn't enough to loosen his stake

*~*

Here's what I'm thinking about right now: leaving. Escaping, running away. Running to what, I have no idea.

I think a lot about escape. Mainly in the notion of freedom. Or, more in the vein of having no responsibilities.

Being in a relationship - friendship, family, or sex - means you are responsibile to someone. I am responsible to check in with my family, responsible to let them know I am alive. I am responsible to my friends - I must stay in the loop, I must entertain.

But sometimes, I imagine what it would be like to have no long-lasting relationships. To owe nothing to no one. To owe no one a smile at their humor, to owe no one a call to make them feel better when they leave you a tearful message. For my phone to fall silent. To not even have a phone.

It's funny that I wish this, when I have experienced this to an extent. I have disappeared before. Taken off and told no one where I was. Vanished.

I did this one time for a few weeks a few years ago. It was at once the most empowering, most spiritually awakening feeling - it made my heart race with excitement - and simultaneously the loneliest, most alienating experience of my life.

I can remember, during the day, wandering streets much older than any in this country. Cobblestones that had felt the heavy tread of people, centuries ago, being led to their public deaths, and the light treads of newlyweds probably thinking they were living in progressive times. Here I walked, owing nothing to anyone, inconspicuous among the other pedestrians. I walked and walked in the clothes I had been wearing for weeks and found myself at the top of a hill, facing a black steel gate. I looked through the gate and saw a garden filled with nature that looked as if painted by Matisses' masterful brush.

It was too much for me to resist. And just as that young girl in the famous fictional story did, I tried the gate to the "Secret Garden" and it swung open...breaking the silence with its ancient creak. I nervously looked around, and then walked though the gate.

It was as if I had entered a magic kingdom. I stood, stunned, inside this beauty and dared not move and disrupt what to my eyes, was a supernatural galaxy. I looked around and felt myself being pulled toward the front of the garden, until I reached a stone wall that reached my waist. And what I saw when I leaned against that stone wall - was incredible. I looked out and I could see - I could see what I had never seen before. I saw life in ancient stones; I saw exquisite beauty in brick; I saw hillsides smiling at me, welcoming me, initiating me into the secret world that had been there all along.

I had an epiphany. There was so much more to this world than my family or my friends or my small universe. More than buying and selling and being a churchgoer or a whore or a victim or a predator or learning physics and reading the classics - there was THIS. This universe that we thought we had built, that really built us. That allowed us to live among IT.

If I were a better writer I could tell you what THIS was, what THIS is, but I can tell you that I saw it that day.

And THAT, at once, made me the happiest I had ever been in my life, the happiest I could anticipate a person ever being - and it made me feel incredible sadness. My heart hurt when I realized that there was no one to share this with. No one would ever know.

And with that realization, I turned around and quietly left this spot. But neither it nor I would ever be the same. It owned my imprint now, and I, owned its vision. I saw inside of it.

I've thought about that spot over the years and that time in my life. And I wonder, if I had someone with me then, would they have felt it - shared my experience? Or would they have spoken and broken the spell?

I like to think, that I had to walk that road alone, to get to where I need to be. To where I am. And to where I am going.

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