Guide My Steps - A Zak Bagans Story

Sunblock, Spirits and Sonnets

"Somehow, a mist is in the sky,  

The shadows closer, darker lie.

 Since then;

 The days have been so gray and long,

 without a note of cheery song,

 And everything's been going wrong

 Since then..." - Luella Knott 

*

Sunlight pierced the dark shade of my sunglasses, teasing me with deterring rays of surprisingly bright light. I was unable to keep myself from squinting – possibly squeezing my eyelids shut so tight that it made the smile lines at the corners of my eyes wrinkle more than usual. God blessed me with a...three hours rest...and granted me what energy he could offer so that I may actually achieve something, or so I hoped.

Slathered in an outrageous amount of sunblock thanks to my sensitive skin, I trotted the streets of a little Colorado town called Crown Valley. It looked like I finally figured out what state I was in without asking.

Snuggled between two voluminous mountains, the tiny town was a perfect honeymooner's destination with roads upon roads of cute window shops, romantic dining establishments, extracurricular outdoorsy type activities and ski resorts out the ass. According to the nice middle-aged woman I spoke to early at a conveniently placed Starbucks, the summers were supposedly quite rainy, damp and humid. I had yet to see a lick of rain since the night before, and the streets were already dry curtsey of the early morning sunshine.

Shortly after I rejected Bagans – which happened to be a rather sore subject – he left with a brief goodnight, leaving me to lay in bed the rest of the night, alternating between crying hysterically to planning my next few days in Colorado.

Around one in the morning I had fallen asleep, only to wake up around four in the morning with a headache the size of Jupiter. And instead of wallowing in self-pity in bed all day, I actually took a shower, dressed in decent clothes and headed in the direction of the nearest early-riser café for some coffee. Along the way, I was distracted by all the shops the streets proudly displayed. From ice cream franchises to antique stores, Crown Valley had just about it all.

The citizens were loving, generous people. They would stop me once in a while, ask me where I was from and go into this long list of places that I should check out.

Two in particular caught my interest in particular: a new-and-used book store named Torn Ink Page and an antique shop called Grandmum's Attic. After grabbing a latte at Starbucks, I followed the path on a map that one of the gentlemen had openhandedly supplied me with to guide my journey. Both establishments were conveniently across from each other so I just wanted to look at a book or two and then walk across and dig through some oddities or another at Grandmum's Attic. Sounded like a plan. A perfect way to slightly unwind and relax all while enjoying the mountainous countryside all around.

It was seven-thirty on the dot when I found myself right inside Torn Ink Page, sorting through the older classics on the top self in the back of the store. Every now and then I'd pull down a rough leatherback book and revel in its old, unique page scent. Carefully, I paged through about half of Shakespeare's works and set aside a much older, obviously used, book with all of Shakespeare's Sonnets and a few choice poems.

"Let me not to the marriage of true minds," I hummed to myself, reciting Sonnet 116 by memory. "Admit impediments; love is not love when it alliteration finds, or bend with the remover to remove. O no–"