Pale Fragments

vacation

"After Jesse died, Xadrin went home to Alaska, where his father still lived. Brother and Sister Richards got divorced during Anders' third year of high school, and she'd moved across the continent to Florida to be with her other partners, and Xadrin had followed initially," the Goddess said. "He was writing all the time; at the end, when he was writing his final letter to his family, he borrowed from everything he'd ever written, feeling that it all must be used for something..."

*

Suicide note continued:

And what is it about seeing the world and the sun above the clouds? "It's a sea of clouds," a sea of clouds, with God as a fish breaking the surface and His light healing, not destroying; a vibrant wholeness. To be upside down on the other side of it all; seeing everything exactly as it has always been, but the reverse. And seeing how the world is both exactly the same and completely different as you thought, you let go and allow your life to go on until it doesn't.

There isn't anyone out here. The sun rises for no one. It only rises as it burns its life out, unknowingly giving life to beings who are grateful. And the sun doesn't even know what it is to be.

Watching the world wake up reminds you of a child's face the moment before it realizes it's awake. That moment of sublime unawareness, baffled at being alive. There's an unintentional joy, a surprised bliss which is not afraid to betray that it was led totally by a feeling—not by its awareness. In that smile the sun peaks through and your mind steps back, abashed, ashamed at pretending to know what beauty was, playing as one with authority. And you feel as if you're falling and you feel the force of gravity for the first time in your life.

I'm on an airplane and afraid that people will read over my shoulder while I type.

Maybe I want people to; it's lonely to have so many thoughts.

Life is a vacation from not existing. What do you do when you're having a bad vacation? When you have a relationship ending argument with your grandmother at Thanksgiving? When you witness a mother killing their baby in the window across from your hotel? When you're camping and the temperature unexpectedly drops 40 degrees from what the weather said it would be and you only have a summer sleeping bag?

You go home.

"Not to be born is best when all is reckoned in, but once a man has seen the light the next best thing, by far, is to go back, back where he came from, quickly as he can."—Oedipus at Colonus, line 1388, Fagles.

We are all Oedipus, all Hamlet. We call for our sword when we see our mother and wife hanging there in death, either dead to life or dead to us. And then some demon takes us, some demon who reasons with us, tells us to blind ourselves and to fear the worse dreams which may come in death, this demon who delights in our continued suffering, finds nourishment in each tear that it licks from our cheeks. We are all cowards hoping for something better, hoping against hope until we are old and alone and seeing that there was nothing other than the pain we had to begin with.