A Hill in Gothenburg | Alexander T. Damle

A true story, all details as accurate as possible within the limitations of historical and public record.

            A man in 1971 Iowa City watches his wife bite into an apple and he hears the sound and finds an answer and maybe a purpose as he sees a forest buzzed low by helicopters and an ex-soldier trapped as a man in Gothenburg walks among the low slung early morning fog up the side of a hill, his body buzzing slightly and his eyes all protracted about wrong as a girl’s last kiss still burns where it fell when his body and mind still felt as his as in 1640 a young man comes alone to New Sweden in the land that will someday be called the United States but is now just untamed wilderness, residents original forgotten to their contemporaries as but savages and we disregard them here because the young man and his descendants were building civilization up anew from the earth itself and as yet another young man lies late in bed on a cool Edinburgh morning and he remembers a night past and then he begins to write but before he begins to write he hears a song and the song it belongs to the man on the hill and he belongs to the hill and what he writes becomes too of the hill all at once as the hill is born up out of shifting plate tectonics in a time long unbecome and the man with the apple belongs too to the hill and as that young man takes his footing in a new land with no past to withhold him to the old codex of a city that would come to be known as Gottenberg and he sells himself and his family forever to the hill so too and the hill owns the words now before this page black on white and it seeps into the hands that turn the page and bleeds out across history from now till eternity, that soulless thing now possessed by a most spectacular human spirit, granted the immortality of love and loss and being young and then not being young and then not being and it all exists at once as yet each relies wholly on the existential precondition of the other.

            Kid. Still a kid as he just comes off the gangplank, hard journey, harder life in front of him and he wanders about still lost finding legs for land and eventually he’s told where to go and the voice is gruff but it becomes as a guide on this unbleached soil, new world, just have to build it, and he mutters his name

            “Peter Gunnarson” and then he’s asked for another name and he doesn’t quite understand why, but he goes with what first comes to him and he sees a hill in his home town and he remembers a girl he once kissed under the trees on the hill’s top, farmland stretched out in all directions forever but here on the hill, free, and then he thinks of the name of the hill and he speaks out a word, taken from the hill but not belonged entirely to it, as all the young men the hill takes and keeps and becomes

            “Rambo. Peter Gunnarson Rambo.”

            He’s supposed to be a musician but he doesn’t feel like much of anything, not anymore, and the album is done and it’s not enough but it’s supposed to be, this was already what made him free, the guitar, the words, the truth, it was supposed to be the truth but can it really be the truth, corporate trash rock but he’s not corporate, not by half, and he tips the bottle back between his teeth and it runs through him and now as again some fourteen year old, died hair, cheap guitar, he feels free as he feels forever lost and there was a girl here somewhere sometime but now there is nothing but trees and the hill and the grey winter sky hanging low and something here with him and the something used to mean something but now it is just a face to hide his own fear behind. And he once had friends and they tried to save him and now he’s here, up on his hill, city on a hill but not this one, they would build one some day

            It was called New Sweden and he scratched about in the dirt, tobacco planter, indentured servant, at first, but eventually he would build something out of that dirt, out of a few seeds in a box, a mind not allowed to fall away and

            One day a girl unsure of herself gets lost in this place and they don’t call it New Sweden any longer, and she’s forgotten here by those meant to love and keep her but then some day a boy who will yet be saved by the hill will save her.

            He wakes up but he shuts his eyes again but he can’t sleep for the thoughts trying to take him, carry him off to some deeper sleep, razor blades, bridges, voices telling him it won’t get better, not now, not ever, and then he can’t he can’t for the voices for they overwhelm and then there is nothing left but ashes and waking dreams of blood on white sheets and he know he can’t for there are still those who would mourn him but then he scrabbles about on shelf for headphones and puts on music and a song, it captures him, and he sees the name but it means nothing to him, written in Swedish, and from the name a word, a single word, and it captures him, and he knows not why or what, not yet, but he sees the razor blade again, but more words now, from the word, and from the words, faces, the immortal left behind, who we fail when we fail as we all fail eternal, forwards and back and the song belongs to the musician on a hill and as the writer takes the word from the song he takes the name of the hill and it becomes a part of him as the older author back in Iowa City but both captured the same way by the name of the hill even before either knows of the hill and maybe it’s not the hill but it’s name, infectious somehow, or maybe it’s something called fate but these are rational men all, builders, artists, thinkers, not men of God, but how else to frame such connective tissue among those inherently disconnected?

            The earth and the sky and the sea and New Sweden and his father's letter and the girl said she would write but she writes not so all he has is this place unclaimed and he feels himself sinking each day deeper into the earth and he one day enters a tavern and one screams at the barman, one last drink, a plate of food, something, nothing but something please but anything, what are we supposed to do this is a land without yet a people or a purpose, you can’t eat tobacco but there must be something to build and still he has his apple seeds and yet still he has years, pre-pledged to the voice and the voice owns him but he knows some day he shall own the voice and then the land itself, hundreds of years down history the seeds will blossom into trees and trees will bear fruit and the fruit will take his name and it shall also be the name of the hill and the song and the words of the boy and the hero of the man

                  As the man’s wife bites into the apple he looks up at the crunch, eyes bleary, distracted but then nothing and she looks to him and asks how it’s going and he puts up his hands and says how can he teach this shit if he can’t write this shit and she smirks at him as he slips over the repeated word and she leans down and kisses him and he shivers slightly at the taste of apples on her lips, reminding him of a girl who once he knew but now there stands a woman and he can’t remember if they were one in the same but then the hill slips down to him as it came to the young man on young earth and he asks his wife what the name of the apple is for the taste is unexpected and she mutters out some quiet, forceful name and it sounds like a hill in a place called now Gothenburg.

            He hangs his head, sweat dripping past his eyes, all his body pulled down towards the earth by some impossible weight and he says that was the one, he’s done with this fucking song, ready to be done with this fucking album, almost ten years and it’s not enough, and about him his bandmates exchange glances for they feel the gravity that pulls him and they want to pull him back but they find it so increasingly hard and they do their best but they too remember the words he’s just sung and one of them asks him almost to fill the empty air, if he has a name for the song yet and he speaks quietly, in Swedish in a studio used now to recordings in English, somehow universal.

           “Från Ramberget ser jag allting som någonsin hänt oss här.” and then one asks if everything is alright but nothing is ever alright not if you feel what he feels and so does he feel as he writes, words to the page and they are trying so hard to save him and they think maybe this album, maybe it can and he mutters that it’s his life work and they trade uneasy glances for he still is young but for how long can one so weighed upon be young?

            Saving a life is a most peculiar institution. But then so is fate.

            On a rocky bluff looking out over the seas towards where he estimates, somewhere beyond eternity, lies what was once his home, a young tobacco planter ponders the rocks below, but then a woman finds him there and she speaks to him and then eventually he speaks back and she doesn’t really say much and neither does he but they need not.

            And from the name of the apple he finds the name of the hero and he defines his hero and from his hero he finds his story, the pieces, fills them in, and it kind of just writes itself and there are patches in his memories but it writes itself and he sees the students before him during the days and he remembers being them and he remembers when he thought the world was his and he remembers the moment when it wasn’t but he feels himself laying new claim on it and it’s the name and the name becomes something more than a name and the hill possess him and the wife sees it and she does not loath it or envy it, proclaiming rather an admiration upon it for what it gives her husband, and his purpose.

            The hill it is born alone but it dies altogether as so all we dream and yet it is not dead yet as still young people climb it every day to fall in and out of love and drop and shoot up and drink and live and write and play and dance, bonfires against cold nordic nights and the hill has its brethren in so many cities, Edinburgh, Arthur’s Seat the name there, another name infectious, taken from a king out of a legend/our greater history, a little suburb called Highlands Ranch that no one remembers but still the hill in Gothenburg has encompassed into its legacy, it too has its hill and it too is the scene of youthful excisions and there is a young man who belongs to the hill and the hill in Highlands Ranch and from the one overlooking Edinburgh he reads out some words that he wrote and gave to which the name of the hill before he knew it as the hill as the girl who was taken by New Sweden but back by him listens, along with a few others, and his eyes flicker in and out of focus and the musician, he too looks across a city from a hill and he finds himself alone though he knows he is not but he can’t let them in as the writer across Europe slowly finds himself unalone, knowing deep dark that alone he shall be again shortly if only for a bus ride, as the planter back in Earlier America finds himself able to as in 1647 he marries and he’s no longer but a planter, respected now, a member of the community, then deputy to the governor and as the land changes hands, Swedish to Dutch to British still he endures and the land is no longer New Sweden but the apples which now grow across the earth bear yet his name and the name of the hill.

            The writer walks younger through the halls of a building that looks like a prison next to a girl and she says while looking deep at him that he saved her from killing herself and he hasn’t yet met the hill but he will and she’ll help him but so will the hill and from that moment he’ll never really again be alone for he ascribes to a particular philosophy about saving a life.

            Sometimes people say distance brings individuals closer together and this is true and it is true of both geography and time, but in the vanishing moment just before security in an international airport, those structures made to flip round the world, heart and time with it, can ever a statement seem more false? as you say goodbye, even for the illusory blind spots mortal time, something celestial, to a considerable part of your best self and then she’s gone and you think on the bus back to the city how she would have loved this sunrise but now it is yours exclusive though sunrises are always collective and you get home and see the couch where she slept and you sit down hard and cry soft and you don’t want to sleep because every time you do the absence will seem but further even as it draws you closer to your next reunion.

            Your best self, the life you save, the life you lose and we all find that point where we see our few true brothers begin to slip away, and what may we do, how can we save those who don’t want to be saved? and yet

            Swinging in a circle back and forth under pale sunrise, pointing past and future east and west and north and south and he will be found and the finder will not know him and know not what his words will mean to a boy in Edinburgh, what the hill over which he swings will mourn as the apples grow into a nation, an empire, as it’s name become another name and that name will be a symbol of those left behind by nation built on the apple of its name.

            Can we be haunted by a word or many words or all words? and the word catches us off guard in even the most sacred of places, penetration, but is it the word or the idea or the idea of the word and can we truly be haunted or is it eternal a conscious decision to let us be defined by these outside ghosts of worlds dreamed of only in the abstract  and can the haunting be cast off with simply the decision to forget the words razor blades hills in Gothenburg or do they possess us, waiting only to cast us off? and what if the word captures more than just the one, the individual, become instead legion, contagion possessor of a protracted generation across time tied together by common existential angst, passing the word between them like an immortal fever?

            The man in New Sweden, he dies old, beloved, rich, respected, from the dirt, something, a new formed nation.

            The authors, they two, fates intertwined with a word, lives built on words, money power purpose all from the words all begun with the one word.

            And yet the musician his body twists at the end of a rope and his chords live on and in them the name of the hill and deeper they infect anew another generation of lost young men.

Fake Empire | Alexander T. Damle

            In the end we all fall apart. A few missteps too many, a miscalculation, a wrong turn on the wrong road. A grand cosmic conspiracy against us all from birth, supernova swirls of cinnamon and honey, ether in a deep void as we all fall apart every waking moment of every waking life.

            I knew as I walked into that liquor store with a beretta under my arm tonight was my tonight to fall apart but I didn’t know what else to do so I did it. I knew I might get caught, I knew the take wouldn’t be great, but I knew I needed the money so I did it. What I didn’t expect was the shotgun from under the counter, the clerk’s blood on the bottles of good tequila behind him.

            From there, I expected a sentence, harsh, murder, probably murder one, and I expected I would deserve it.

            What I didn’t expect was being made an example out of. Mistakes, sure, but that doesn’t make me stupid. So when the prosecutor argued that the violence of my case was particularly egregious, particularly brutal and cold and uncaring I was lost. But then I knew it was quite a time since the last death penalty conviction here, so I figured the prosecutor was just trying to make points for some upcoming election. He said some other things but only now do I understand them but that doesn’t matter.

            When the sentencing came, I braced for the worst, for life, for death, for anything but what I got. A new technique, the judge said, for convicts who demonstrated particular psychological conditions. I didn’t know what that meant but I think I do now.

            The last of the free men. I once knew a man who called me one of the last of the free men.

            Free from what? I asked him.

            I never worked a real job. Never payed taxes. Never bought a house, never had a loan or a mortgage, never got married. Not for me. Freedom, that was my game. Even if I had to buy my freedom with a gun

            But then the judge said the words, and that was my fate, only fifteen years, it seemed easy. I didn’t understand what he meant when he said it was an alternative sort of prison.

            Appeal was rejected.

            First they took measurements. I asked and no one gave me a straight answer and many didn’t look at me.

            Then one night I got taken from my cell and driven by one whose eyes stayed on the roads, a guard with an AR-15, me alone on the bus but for the watchers.

            The building was not like other prisons. There was a guard, but he didn’t look like a prison guard. He looked bored, not the sociopathic eyes that I’d grown accustomed to. He led me down a corridor all in white.

            At corridor's end two more men met us. They sat me down in a chair, and one of them stuck me with a needle and it all went dark.

            Those were the last faces and I remember them, every acne scar and sunspot, every mole and fleck of hair, every gesture and facial contortion. Every millimeter. Because those were the last. Right before the needle went in one of them said almost silent

            Sorry.

            When I came to I wasn’t sure I came to. All was white, flat, unshining, pure. I tried to move, and found my body paralyzed. I felt as though I was lying down, but unsure on what. I tried to turn my head and found it firmly affixed in place. I tried to tell how far from my eyes the white in front of me was but I couldn’t and can’t.

            And that was all I’ve seen and felt since those last faces, at least in the traditional sense.

            For the first period, I tried to mark time, but found myself increasingly unable. I tried to talk, but couldn’t hear the words mouth formed, and figured this was some mechanization of whatever held my head and holds it still.

            I tried to count inside my head, but without sound I couldn’t focus, couldn’t understand even the idea of the words within my head. I tried to make the numbers the only thing in my mind, but every so often my thoughts would wander and if they wandered slightly they wandered completely. I tried to hear, strained myself, realized I could hear static, a TV mistuned.

            I think it was hours but it may have been minutes and then I see the first images and I’m not sure if a time has passed or not since then beyond moments but I saw an image and I see an image, not before me, not between eyes and white, but within, at first simple, horses racing fast across a great field of green underneath vast snowcapped mountains.

            I try to find a reality or unreality to define what I see but I can’t then I hear their hooves clobbering the earth below and I don’t feel it in me but I know the feeling and that is as good as feeling.

            The horses they reach the side of a stream, and they stop and they all drink of the water and I feel it trickle cool down my throat, and I feel the warmth of the sun beating down on the back of my neck, my bare arms, I run my hand through the coat of a nearby beast and it runs as silk in between my fingers and I’m carried back to youth, riding low across the Montana sky, the flesh of two creatures made as one, country unkept by the rider or the landowner or God himself and the animal responds to me as my own muscle. The mountains that beat down upon and around us stretch upwards to the lower reaches of the heavens and they too become as one, then we’re heading fast in towards a little ranch home set out amongst the endless nowhere, and I think I see a face in the window then again all I see is white and all I hear is static.

            I read once somewhere that in conditions of total sensory deprivation, human beings will often experience vivid waking visual and auditory hallucinations.

            They will also lose time.

            Experience a psychological disconnect.

            Lose the self.

            The past.

            A future

            hope

            even short term memory and understanding

and

            time

            and you slip and fall and you can’t get up and it’s raining down on the roof and

            a car pulls up and you get out and there is a gun in your hand and then there isn’t and blood

            wait

            stop

            focus

            can’t lose yourself. think. find a line. follow it

a path

            a way to think

            something to think about

            picture someone, something, somewhere

            It’s January and the night is cold.

            You’re cold or are you warm is it hot are you dressed are you naked are you free or are you caged are you here or are you nowhere how long have you been here or were you never here shapes and colors simulacran forms drift in through those supernova ether pipe dreams pills and tabs and strange smokes and

FOCUS

It’s January and the night is cold, Christmas lights all around you, you’re spinning in circles, you skate around a rink, faces flash by melting together and apart all at once a hundred eyes and smiles, dimples, cheeks red, laughter and the sounds of sweet classical music, Brahms, maybe. You see repeated as you skate by a girl in a red hat and you ponder why then you remember the girl with you, tall, blonde, her hand in yours and you look at her and you smile at each other, and you stumble but she catches you and you mouth her name to her, to yourself and then she smirks.

            “What, need to remind yourself the name of the girl you just kissed?”

            wait, wait, none of this is real what the fuck what the fuck I can’t talk to you because you aren’t real none of this is real and the white is before you again and again with the droning on buzz

            the girl, I knew her, when I was just a kid, I even thought I loved her I think but she’s not here anymore I think she might even be dead or maybe I’m dead I can’t remember, but why did I see her, her of all people, here, the end of all things, here where there is only pain.

            Remember. Stop. I have to stop my own mind, draw it to a halt before me, a carriage. A horse and carriage.

            Another night, this one warm, May, maybe April, and I’m dressed well, a suit jacket with coat tails, top hat, gloves, and across from me is a handsome man dressed with the same 200 year old style as myself, and I think I’ve known a part of him, but not this part. We’re both laughing and I feel a little bit drunk, that wonderful stage of tipsy right before your mind stops working. He begins to speak, and I follow, though I know not how.

            “Oh, and did you see that redhead! Her breasts, my my!”

            “Redhead, oh you and your redheads, always the redheads. If I didn’t know you better, I’d say you had a weakness for the Irish stock.”

            “Hah, well, Catholic girls, you know what they say.”

            “You may, I prefer higher company.”

            “Higher company? Oh please, I saw that brunette you were with, Marie - I’m sure you know the rumors.”

            “Please, I’m sure if she truly slept with a woman they weren’t completely nude.”

            “Haha, you must stay away from those artistic types - they are all so, well, you know!”

            Then our carriage comes out from the woods the horses carry us through, and our driver glances back at us briefly, his features old and refined. The air rushes by and I feel it pull at the hair of my mustache, pinch at my cheeks.

            All around us are stars, then we are crossing a bridge, and I see mansions on a not so far off shoreline. I turn back to my companion, and his face has taken on a tone of slight seriousness.

            “You know where we are, right?”

            “I... I’m not sure.”

            “Do you know when?”

            “No.”

            “Why do you think that is?”

            “Because I’m not here.”

            “Where are you then?”

            “Nowhere. A white room.”

            “How long have you been there?”

            “I have no clue.”

            “Will ever you be free?”

            “Yes, but I’m not sure any of me shall be left to feel freedom.”

            “How did you survive before?”

            “When?”

            “Forever into your past where you can reach. Everyone always tells you all your mind allows, and yet when have you been free, you, the last of the free men?”

            Then the white is there again and the buzz and I try to focus again.

            And I can’t and I can only see what I see, not what I know is there.

            I try not to get lost, try to be as not this room if it is truly a room and not itself a hallucination

            and with this thought it all goes lost to the the ether and the void and the meaningless meaning of it all and I am christ upon his cross condescended down upon by the man in washington as the poor all look up and I look down and it all comes around and back again as the start and again timeless and deliverance forever after dying as we began and as we loved and fucked and prayed as the we all fall in love with our internal notion of death and we let it withhold it and I’m seeing and witnessing and becoming in the beginning and the inevitable heat death of

            the universe as it is always and forever

            forgot

zion a million men chase after but the hooker down the block tells you it’s here baby just a few dollars

            then the girl she walks out on me as a car flips over and over and over an embankment

            blood entombs us as in death

            I see flashes of reason in the un-time before and after

            and I feel a million little needles all stuck into me at once

            steve mcqueen stands before a judge and mutters about a wasted life tom hardy nude wrestles guards as covered in grease paint and malcolm mcdowell his eyes pried open and does he see what I see?

            the gun and I feel its weight in my hand again and this time the blood is mine

            I see his family crying at the trial

            then I’m in a river somewhere and it’s nighttime and I’m walking out into the current and it covers my mouth and then it’s within my nose and then it’s my eyes and they burn and scream out for me to stop and then

            wait

            lost again

            the beginning

            There must be a beginning.

            The white. The buzz.

            And then I stare into the white and I know not for how long I stare.

            Maybe I sleep sometimes but if I dream maybe I’m awake and if I see black maybe I’m dead.

            This time, I go about it differently, rather than finding a world, I construct one, from the white, from the darkness behind my eyelids, from memories and movies and old songs. And my world gradually takes shape.

            First a beach, at night, islands in the water towering up in rocky stone capped in tropical greenery then the beach itself, lit by a thousand burning lanterns, hold onto them, the light, then stars above, paint the Milky Way - no, Andromeda, can’t tie this world and the past together too tight, must build a new world free. The stars, so many, vast swirls of existential universe, an exposure painting cast against the black, a million worlds to explore all within the confines of this world constructed from nothing.

            Then a roof and the walls to match, harsh, modernist lines, concrete, glass, steel, within articles of basic comfort, a bed and table. Not much, not at first.

            Then I draw myself slowly unto the world. Arms and legs and a body, but not the one I was born with but the one always desired, not perfect, but close, beautiful and strong.

            I try to hold myself to the world, feel it, breathe it, paint on the scent of saltwater, plant life, something cooking... somewhere, and behind the house now, a small jungle, but wait, a road through it, and a motorcycle, old and expensive, something else better than the world I had. I think to myself I’ll have to learn what it feels to ride a motorcycle, learn it onto the basic properties of the world of my construction but first I must own the world.

            The sand, I feel it beneath me, under foot, sliding, cool, what does sand feel like, how does it behave?

            I walk for a while. I’m not yet sure how long a while is. I know I’ll have to have days and nights but this will come with time when I’ve come to understand time. As I walk, more islands form up around me, more stars in the sky, more lanterns, eventually create a town with a bay and boats and lights and I create people but then I see one of them and it looks at me and I turn back and hurry back to the house because I’m afraid of what a person who comes from me could be.

            Then I sleep. I’m not sure what sleep is in this place

            I see white then I see black.

            I dream but it’s all a dream and can one really fall asleep within a dream and dream anew?

            Eyes

faces

            pain

            love

            sex

            mine in hers

            And then there is sunlight and I awaken and look out the floor to ceiling windows I built and I see the sea once more, and from the night comes the waters gentle lapping at the shores illuminated now by a bright two suns in a sparkling rippled sapphire and I walk out my back door and take off my clothes - I don’t remember their creation but now I see and feel them - and I run into the water, feel it warm against my flesh, and I dive down and I see fish and seaweed and coral, a million kinds all there immediate for me and from me.

            Eventually I swim back to shore - I consider if I took a breath and realize I hadn’t because what is oxygen but an excuse? and once ashore I let my body lay under the sun and just watch the cloudless blue sky.

            I’m on the motorbike I made from my mind and, having never ridden a motorbike, I imagine the idea of it, half horse and half car, the dreamy proclamation of some friend long ago - “It’s like flying.” And that’s what it is, and each turn feels effortless, the dips and bumps in the road constructed naturally imperfect feel as nothing.

            Then I find myself in the town, the buildings painted bright, key lime and powder blue and salmon pink, the architecture soft lines, comforting to the modern harshness of my home. I look about in hopes of finding a path forward, and I see a little coffee shop with a sign in the window about “Free Pie Today” and I think why not, so I push open the door. 

            There is a girl at the counter, my age, give or take, long brown hair, skin tanned, green eyes.

            “Hey, what can I get you?” I sit down at the counter in front of her.

            “A coffee and a slice of pie.”

            “Sure... let’s see... blueberry with a scoop of vanilla ice cream?”
            “How’d you know?”

            “Heh, it’s an art.”

            “Some art. You read minds beyond pie?”

            “You know, I dabble.”

            “Oh yeah? Tell me about me then.” She slides me a coffee. It’s cheap and oily and it’s exactly what I need in me, the flavor reminds me of somewhere I once knew.

            “Well, let’s see... you were born in the west. Wyoming or Montana, probably. Maybe Colorado? But I’d side with one of the former. You were always unsettled as a kid. Born in the right place in the wrong century, or some such nonsense...” She looks at him. “That’s it, isn’t it - you wanted to be a cowboy. Wild Bill Hickock or some shit.”

            “Not bad at all. But how’d I end up here?”

            “Hmm, well, I’d guess you fucked up somewhere along the line. Forgot you don’t live in the old west. Came here to run away.”

            “Damn. Dabble? You could make a profession of it.”

            “Yeah?”

            “Sure.”

            “So what about you, you dabble in anything, other than trying to find an excuse to shoot someone?”

            “I’d like to think I’m a kind of artist.”

            “A warrior poet? Hah. Go figure.”
            “Laugh all you want... someday I bet you’ll end up with something I made on the wall of your shop here.”

            “We’ll see about that. So what, you a painter or something?”

            “Yeah, something like that.”

            “Well, I’ll tell you what - you paint me something, I’ll take you for dinner.”

            “That your way of asking me on a date?”

            “No way, I just need an excuse to redecorate.”

            Down the street, I find an art supplies store. It seems a little convenient, but then again, little seaside towns like this always seem to have their share of drifting artists. I also pick up some dinner - fresh fish from the market, take my bike back to the house.

            That night, I learn to paint again, like I did when I was still a kid back in Montana. It wasn’t just a line, about being a painter. It surprises me how naturally it comes back, but then, I suppose it should. I consider what to paint for her wall, but then I remember a herd of wild horses galloping under an endless blue sky under mountains of impossible dimensions, and I know.

            The next morning, I manage, somehow, to fit the canvas on the back of my bike, and, true to her word, the girl from the coffee shop takes me out to dinner.

            Time passes, days to weeks to months, and somewhere in there the girl and I start sleeping together, then she moves in, and through it all I’m painting more, getting better. And then the months become years, and, somehow, against it all, I, of all people, end up married. In the back of my mind is some life past, where I hated the very idea of marriage and called myself the last of the free men, and killed a man to protect such an ideal, but this is the lingering memory of a long dead man.

            I’m happy now, here with my pretty wife and my art and my house by the sea, the beautiful cliffs and the wonderful seaside towns. And I’m happy, but I’m bored.

            So one day I say to her that we should see another world, and that night, we lie under the stars twinkling away above, lanterns all among us, sipping good tequila right out of the bottle, my arm around hers, her head nestled against my bare chest. Above us, stars start to fall. And then she points upwards toward the heavens -

            “There. A million other worlds. Let’s go to the stars. Find your freedom.” And I look down at her, into her eyes that sparkle with the falling stars and flickering lanterns, and I kiss her perfect lips.

            In the morning we begin to build, casting the shapes of a rocket ship out of parts bought at the garage in town, and it slowly comes together, more days and weeks and it must be perfect because in it we shall have my freedom.

            One day we know it’s ready so that night we stand together among the lanterns, her face looking upwards to the stars and mine eyes looking downwards to hers because I’ve found now my freedom in her.

            We climb aboard and strap into our seats and I take her hand in mine as the thrusters engage and our bodies are pulled heavily downwards with the g-force and we greet the heavens, stars above and soon below and all around us.

            They are our beginnings and our endings and they are become us and we them, the whole profundity of existence laid out towards an imagined horizon, and as I see their beauty I see more everyday hers.

            We ride the stars for a time that feels immortal, in a place beyond day and night, sun and moon, the little mechanizations of the heavens that we call time as we stand on firm earth.

            And then I hold her in my arms and she looks at me and she smiles and I smile back and that’s what matters and

            wait

            no

            no

            no

oh god no no no

            white

            no

            and I see her face still and I try to hold onto it and her and I see her face and I kiss her and draw her in close to me and the white and I see her face

            a buzz

            slipping, she’s slipping, I can no longer feel her warmth against me but still I see her and the buzz is subsiding and the white is taking over and suddenly I feel something strange, impossible, weight hung down below my head and I try to move my fingers and no longer do they caress the beautiful girl, but they twitch barely at the end of atrophied muscles in a white room and

            no no no

            she’s slipping and I see her face and then I hear her once more

            “Go now and be free.”

            And then all I see is white but I feel my body restored to me and then the grips on my head are slackened and then a tall man wearing white is standing over me and he’s checking my eyes, my arms, my reactions.

            It’s a blur, it’s all a blur, the getting out, my possessions returned, a meeting with a shrink to make sure I’m what they made me and I am.

            And then I’m outside and the sky is not so blue as ever it was on my beach, the stars shine not with the infinite sheen of the heavens so created, the women not so pretty, and she’s gone.

            The usual processes of prisoner release, a halfway house, a job placement and I exist but so does God and Death and you don’t see them bagging groceries and exist is all I do because I can’t live here anymore, but then one day on my way home from the grocery store I pass an art supply store and I buy paints and canvas.

            On the yawning blank before me I see her face so I paint it and I find my hands captured by a deeper force as my mind in that white room and I paint a beautiful girl on a beach at night lit by a thousand lanterns looking to the stars and it comes natural and comes beautiful and then I paint more, each day and pretty soon I’m out of the halfway house and I sell a painting or two and I find a pretty town by the sea and I find a place and in the night I watch the stars and I paint what I see beyond the black and sometimes I see white and hear a buzz as I’m drifting to sleep but I know it’s not real, they told me when I came out it would happen sometimes but I’m not always so sure.

            And then one day I meet a beautiful woman and some day, as lines are starting to appear on my face deep and my hairs are starting to grey, I walk down an aisle and tell the woman I do, and after the wedding, I see a man I haven’t seen since I saw some aspect of him in a carriage in a world that’s not this one nor the one I made, and he looks at me with disappointment.

July 20th | Theland E. Thomas

I thought I could get over this, but I can’t. It seems I relearn every day that emotions weigh more than logic and that the brain is an emotional machine. I drove to see you with a stone in my gut and a lump in my throat, and I started to remember the apprehension I felt last time. The unformed disturbance. The dangerous emotion creeping underneath my conscious logic. My conscious logic says, Yes, this is behind me. We can still be friends. Forgive and move on. My conscious logic is a fool because in the moment it does not realize that it is a thin guise masking the irrational, emotional beast. It’s like a matador who thinks he has the bull under control. The bull will only be patient for a little while until it has enough, and suddenly the confident bull fighter has a horn through his chest.

Consciously, I ignored the patient warnings of the bull. It was saying to me, You need to stop immediately. This is dangerous. I am starting to fall in love again. I said, How can that be. With her? Impossible. After what happened last time, I can’t fall in love with her again.

See, time makes you forget what you once learned, what you once felt. What once was horrible, dramatic, and gut-wrenching doesn’t seem so bad after a while. Your scars heal, and you get over it. I saw you after months without contact, and all the fear I had evaporated. You didn’t turn into the faceless shadow monster I’d conjured in my nightmares. Suddenly, you weren’t so scary after all, and I forgot about the violence and the pain. Instead of the monster I’d made you, I saw the human being again. A human, just like myself, with all my same fears and struggles.

When I saw you, I was terrified at first, then relieved when you embraced me. We caught up. We smiled. My emotional sirens died down, and I remembered what made you so special to me in the first place. When I left, I said to myself, Everything went better than expected. I’m going to be okay.

But my emotions were starting to whisper an impossible scenario: I love her. I tried to ignore this, but I thought of you for the rest of the day. And then, I made plans to see you again. I adjusted my route for this explicit purpose and then told myself I was going to go that way anyway. I saw you again and we laughed and made jokes, and this time it was more difficult to argue logic against my tumultuous emotions. This time, I caught myself enraptured by you and gazing too long, and I hoped you didn’t notice, but then I hoped you did, and my God, how can we be friends if I act like this around you?

This time, I left beaming, unable to control my grins. I continued this way for the rest of the day, but I woke up sober. The matador was beginning to doubt his position, thinking, I need to be more careful. Emotions can’t be trusted.

So, the next week, I thought about seeing you. I thought about how you would react, what you would say. I remembered when we were friends. I remembered what happened when I wanted more. And, as the storm clouds rolled in overhead, I just went home.

This morning, I figured enough time had passed for it to be safe. As I planned my day in my head, I scheduled a slot for you right after work. I thought about you as I picked out my clothes. I wore this suit last time. I’ll wear a different tie. As much as I wouldn’t admit it, I wanted you to think about how great I looked when I showed up. I wanted you to love me.

The closer I got to you, the more sick I felt, so I blasted my music to shoo the doubts away, an ineffective but comforting technique. But the lyrics of the song only compounded my fears: You make me feel like I am worth nothing.

When I pulled into the parking lot, I knew I couldn’t do this anymore. It was time to jump out of the way before the bull trampled me. Then, I knew that as long as we’re together, I will always fall in love with you, and I will always end up bleeding because you’ll never feel the same. As much as I would like to get over this logically, I have to remember that my conscious logic only conducts the emotional engine on set tracks, and the path that leads me to you ends in a trainwreck. I drove in circles. My emotions screamed over the music: Something wicked this way comes! And this time I couldn’t ignore it; I turned the car around and drove away.

So, I’m sorry. We can’t be friends. You see, when someone bares their heart to you, and you rip it to shreds, it can never be fully repaired. It just becomes a patchwork of fragments held together by scars that tremor and bleed with each new injury.