The Tromonian Revolution

chapter 8

ElIjah woke up that next day to his alarm clock, the clock he set every day at six in the morning to go to work. Though, today he decided he wasn't going to work or ever again. He hadn't particularly thought of this morning the night before but suddenly he found himself there. And it was quite disorientating at first when he heard the buzz buzz buzz of the alarm and saw the sun piercing his eyes like acid through the minuscule window he had forgotten to cover with the curtains the night before.
He threw his quilt over himself now, to blind himself of the light but then found this cover to make his skin boil. Without it his eyes burned, though with it his whole body burned and so he decided instead to cover his eyes with a pillow. He had many pillows on his bed. Usually he would be so comfortable there but today even when he lay behind his eyelids he saw spinning and felt nauseous. And when he took the cover away his body shivered and he had sharp pains in his head. Though they were imaginary pains, that is to say that they were not a pinch or a scratch, he didn't know what they were. They had no particular form, it was just pain.
He couldn't sleep after he woke up, as much as he desperately tried. He lay there for a long while with the pillow over his face and a dirty look beneath it, his organs sinking into the bed with his soul. But he got sick of it eventually; he had too many thoughts and no way to drown them out. “You've ruined your life. You're so terrible. You've always been this way. Your life is over. You're dead. You ruined it again, like every time. It's all over. Hopes gone, she probably ruined too now. She had a shot at life but you blew it for her. You didn't look after her. You promised you would. You said to mum and dad, you said “i'll look after her. I promise, we just need to go.” But you didn't. You lied. You've always lied to everyone your whole life. So selfish. Never done anything good. Always just ruined everything. You're evil. You're just so evil."
It was true. That was what he said to his mother and father. She screamed, his mother, as he stumbled off the driveway the day they left. She tried to chase them but his father held her and so she started to scream. “Come back!” She screeched, her voice so high it was almost inaudible. “Come back!” She said again, this time dragging the “back” out for much longer. Then after some crying as he and Hope watched her, she screamed a thunderous, “Elijah!” His name echoing through the street. That was when he finally felt bad for them. Even though his father wasn't making any sound at all, he felt bad for them both. They were losing what they had worked so hard to keep. What they were supposed to love so dearly and thoughtfully and give them so much happiness was abandoning them. So, though he continued, with no option to do anything else, he called out to her what you know he called out, which made her feel better because he said it so genuinely.
He wished Max would've said something like that to him when he took Hope. That thought made him cry because he had become his mother and father. The feelings he created in them had been brought upon himself. He sniffled and shivered and let out tears from his weary, windy eyes. They couldn't be held in and though the stains of water on his bed would dry they could never be undone. And his life could never be fixed.
Your perspective changes when you have regrets. You do not wish for any more than you already have; that is the gift of it, you only wish that this pain would leave you. He wished he could have left the Tromonia in the water, then he could've been happy, as happy as the Buddha with his ignorant empty bliss.
So he drank beer for breakfast but didn't eat anything. Nothing mattered again but this time it wasn't a thrill. It wasn't freeing. He felt trapped in the dark enclosed mouth of nihilism.
Perhaps it was not that nothing mattered but that he had nothing left. He realised in his introspection that morning that many things mattered to him in his old life, outside Tromonia. There was a meaning to life.  A meaning he felt in the whimsical world of childhood. A meaning so brief you question whether you ever experienced it at all or whether it was simply a dream. And if it was a dream, would it matter in the waking world as much as it did when you were asleep? Would that invalidate the meaning?
His true meaning was next door to him and halfway across the world by now probably. He wouldn't ever get it back, he didn't deserve it but he knew it existed.
He had another beer after breakfast and that sort of emulated the meaning for him and that was all he could ever expect to have now so he continued with another after that. He put on some records with a sing and dance and then after the third beer he threw up and lay down on his couch with a sick bucket in solitary, stationary silence.
He didn't usually throw up after three beers. Maybe he drank them too quickly. It had only been around an hour. He wondered why for a minute or two until he realised the beer was not the cause, he was withdrawing from Tromonia. He had felt like shit all day, the beer numbed it a little but the vomit was a clear sign, he had not for a long time been so distant from the thing and he couldn't handle it. His nose bled after that and his ears rang like bells so loud and irksome that you feel every vibration in your chest. Just as he was coming to fight against all his guilt and fear, everything he had feared arrived in his life, breaking him down to nothing. The symptoms of his withdrawal brought an inescapable lingering dread like the shadow that followed behind him finally engulfing him with its evil. It lit him with formless fire and boiled him in water to put it out. He felt the sickness that was his true nature.
He stumbled down to the bar later on when it was dark in his dirty clothes and was greeted by a warm welcome. He didn't really realise where he was. “You come to play piano again Elijah?” His friend asked him. “Yeah sure, why not?” He slurred, laughing.
“Are you alright man?” Someone asked him but he ignored them and sat at the piano and played a simple jazz melody. “This is called like someone in love,” he told the crowd and they cheered. And so he sang, “Sometimes I seem to feel as though I had wings, I bump into things like someone in love,” he sang. “Each time I look at you, Im limp as a glove and feeling like someone in love.” He played a piano solo and ended the song, getting up to hear a whirlwind of claps and whistles rising slowly out of the emptiness and fullness of the final chord. “Thank you,” he bowed sincerely and got a slight rush of ecstasy when he did. Though, when he sat down at the bar it was misery that replaced it. “Are you Ok?” His bartender friend asked him. “No, I'm not,” he laughed. “Everythings ruined.”
“Oh,” the guy sighed. “I'm sorry to hear that, but it'll get better Elijah, I swear it will. The bigger the mountain, the better the view, right? There can't be a rainbow without the rain, man.” He tried to help his friend but nothing that he could say would change the way he felt.
“You're right,” Elijah told him of course to be polite but he couldn't believe it. Everything was all wrong. He ordered a drink as rain made the street wet and people laughed around him. Soon, he woke up to his friend nudging him. “The bar is closed now, Elijah. You gotta go.”
Sam had an awful day. She went to her parents house but all they did was shout at her and perpetuate her anxiety. She didn't mention Elijah, so the blame was on herself.
When she drove home that night, she played all his songs. She couldn't tell who he really was. He had written these claiming to be better. His guitar played a limitless melody and the lyrics were hopeful and happy. She wanted to believe them desperately, the way a child wanted to believe that their pet would not be put down at the vets and would come home feeling better than ever. But the truth would set in when the father would come home alone and an imperceptible pain would arise from their stomach to their heart.  His father would yell at his mother, that she kept up his spirits so he could falsely hope but the sadness couldn't have been prevented, only displaced.
She went to work the next morning but Elijah stayed in bed. He couldn't move much that day; his body felt immensely heavy, as if it was made of stone. It was stiff like stone too, and rough. And he was numb like a stone. Some people say that's enlightenment but they are vastly misunderstanding the ways of the stone.
“Where have you been?” their manager asked Sam when she traipsed in after her day off. “And where's Elijah?”
“I'm really sorry, something bad happened yesterday and I had to have the day off,” she told him. “Well, what happened?” He nosied but she ignored him and got to work. “And you couldn't have called?” Again, she ignored him and continued to work.
She had run out of tears that day after crying in the morning so after work she wandered through a large walled garden that she met driving home, filled with arrays of colourful comely flowers packed together as if they were pure order created from beautiful chaos. It took her mind off the rest of the ugly world for a little while and when she left, Max and Hope didn't seem so doomed. They seemed to be happy, even when they left. And they had followers, they must've been following something good, even if that crystal was guiding them. “Maybe he's following his dreams,” she concluded, which made her feel so much better, imagining when she would see him again as she drove home. They would have had incredible experiences and the risk that they had taken would have been completely worth it and necessary.
Her night wasn't as terrible as the last. She called a few of her friends and they came over, listening to records and drinking wine. She didn't even mention Max; no one asked, though she thought of him. They just caught up and got drunk, eventually passing out on the couches and waking up, rushing to get ready for work. "Let's take the day off," one of them said, still drunk from last night but everyone was worn out.
"I don't want to feel like this anymore," Elijah spoke to the room and forced himself to get up. As soon as he did, he needed to vomit. He ran to the bathroom and his putrid insides came rushing out of him into the toilet. After that, he sat on it and drank some water out of a jug to cool down, pouring some of it on himself, trying to put the fires out on his skin. "Dear god," he then said. "Please help me to get out of this. I know I've been a bad person, I know!" He pleaded, with tears from his eyes and snot dripping out of his nose again. After a while, he composed himself, wiped his face and continued, "I need you. You're the only thing that could save me. I know I've been terrible, I've chased pleasure, forgot about what's important. I'm so sorry. I've just gotta get through this. I don't need Tromonia, I know that now. All I want is love and stability. Please can you help me with that? I want to reconnect with my parents and Hope and Sam and even Max. He's just as crazy as me, I forgive him. And I forgive my parents. I still hate them. I don't know why. They got in the way of my own stupid shit. That's it. And I convinced Hope to hate them too and now she probably still does. I shouldn't have done everything that I did and I feel so ashamed because of it. I hate myself. I've always hated myself. God, why did you make me this way? Why do I hate myself? Do you hate me? You're supposed to love everyone. Please don't hate me anymore. I won't hold that all loving thing against you like people do. Please help me."
He didn't end the prayer with an amen like the Christians did because he wasn't religious but he needed to be. If he was the sovereign master of his own world then it would be a world full of suffering, a world he would not want to live in. So he turned to God. Whatever that was, he put it above himself.
He went back into his living room then, and cleaned up the seat he had been sitting on filled with vomit and urine. It wasn't a therapeutic or positive experience but it was a necessary one. After that, he could look out of his window and once again see that snow had begun to fall onto the road instead of just rain. He'd certainly lost his job by now but he would never lose the serendipity of winter time. He sat at his piano and played a few notes to God. When he opened the window to let in a breeze, he heard children running and laughing. Then, he noticed Sam was playing with them, sliding along the ice. She would be a great mother, he could tell. He'd love to have kids with her, take them to all the places he'd been as a kid that entered his mind in a stream of rhapsodic nostalgia. And she would show them all the places she had been, and they would set the foundations of their childrens great lives.
Oh how he longed for these dreams to be reality. Every life that anyone had ever lived seemed so much greater than he could accomplish.
He spotted her when he decided to go on a walk, at the door to her apartment. She avoided eye contact with him and he couldn't bring himself to talk so he just continued outside. That played on his mind for the rest of the day; if he could just explain better, she could forgive him.
After a few beers he went home and knocked on her door. His heart dropped into his stomach and a headache began as his ears rang when he knocked the first quiet knock. She did not notice so he did it again and again until she opened the door and sighed, “hello Elijah.”
He had not thought of what he would say in fact he didn't even think he would get to that point. He thought he would die alone in his apartment and be found three days later as his body rotted, though he couldn't think who it would be to find him. He didn't have anyone left to care, or even notice that he was gone. It would have probably been the landlord, looking for his money.
But there he found himself on her doorstep with an opportunity to salvedge at least part of his piteous life. “Listen,” he began, she could tell he was tipsy. “Just listen to me. I'm sorry that I gave your brother the Tromonia. I'm really sorry. I did not realise the severity of my addiction to it and I didnt realise it would make him crazy.”
“He's not crazy!” She told him. “You literally called him crazy!” He yelled but stopped himself soon after. “I'm sorry,” He sighed and continued, “I used to depend on that for everything, life was just a way of getting to Tromonia. I hated everything in the world, even who I was. I was just so lost. Everything made sense there so I just kept going and going and then I got drunk and showed it to Max.” He paused again and collected his thoughts, breathing deeply and staying present as he'd learned to do with the thing in his hand. “I'm sorry, I know you don't like it when I use that as an excuse, that I was drunk,” he stuttered, his nerves collecting around his body as he shook. “Well, it's not that you don't like it. It's not an excuse. It was my fault. I'm so sorry. But Sam, you have made me see the meaning of life.” That sounded dumb but he  kept on desperetely trying to convince her. “I know that sounds stupid, I know all of this is just stupid. I'm so stupid. I was a nihilist or a hedonist. I learned those words and I just thought they were so cool. “All that matters is pleasure” and all of that you know. I thought everyone was so lost, going around doing all this stuff believing in God and everything. So deluded. I'd found the Tromonia, all the happiness and pleasure they were chasing was right in front of me. But it wasn't real!” He began talking faster and more fervently. “When I'm with you, it's real. I don't wake up feeling like shit, I wake up just wanting to see you again! Not just see you but see the world! I have meaning in my life. And the Tromonia now because Ive experienced that, it's fucking nothing. It’s fake. I needed that because I had nothing else, to trick myself into thinking I had something. You make me want to live life. You make me understand. When I'm with you it's like I'm with the whole world. I prayed to God yesterday. I used to hate the idea of God but I see him now, you have illuminated the beauty of the world! It's not all fake, it's not an illusion. It's real! And I'm just hurting so much knowing that I'll never feel that again. I need you in my life. That's how I feel. I'm sorry for everything that happened. I'm gonna make myself better. I'm gonna make an amazing world for us. No more Tromonia. Just me and you and when Hope and Max come home they can have this world too. They'll come home. We will all get through this.”
Sam looked up at him, he stood up taller than she was. She listened to everything he had to say and he appreciated it; when he finished she gave him his answer. "I can't just let this go, Elijah. You're not just gonna say sorry and make everything okay. It'll never be okay what you've done. I'll never see you the same again. I wish I could but… you've just fucked everything up. Just leave me alone." Her tears began again and she shut the door.
And so he left with his chest burning and his head banging as he'd gotten used to and he fell asleep.
When he woke up, he splashed water on his face and made breakfast without beer, just water. He prayed to the same undefined God before he ate, promising to get better and asking for his help. Then he strolled to pick up a newspaper without much thought and after reading a few pages of the newspaper he noticed a story quite significant:
Musician starts a revolution after concert - the headline was and the story read: a musician, recently out of jail his fans told us, has now begun quite an interesting journey. After a sold out concert in a large hall, he announced that with many of his fans, he is travelling the world spreading his music and ideas. His philosophies seem to be quite eccentric and yet have encapsulated so many people, old and young, who consider his values to be important. He is said to be starting a revolution of some sort, clearly a marketing strategy from his team to promote his tour.
Elijah thought for a few minutes whether this could be Max. I mean, how many musicians try to start revolutions? Many i think. "But it must be him!" Elijah asserted. This was the opportunity he had been waiting for, what he had prayed for to fix things. If he could just find Max and Hope and bring them home for Christmas, Sam would surely forgive him.
Though he still felt like shit, vomiting most hours, he stood up straight and organised himself. He gathered what little money he had and decided he would follow Maxs tour until he caught up to them. He would fight through the evil he'd caused and never make the same mistakes again. "I will fix myself," he told God. "All for her," he said and then shook his head, correcting himself. "Not just for her, not for my own desires. I will fix myself for you and for everyone I will meet in my life. So that I will not ruin them," he told him. "And yeah, it'll feel great. It'll make me so happy, I'll live a great life. Please God, please help me to do this. I need to do this. I need to save myself. Bring your armies to me, fight by my side all of our demons, me and Max. get rid of them please my God, tell them to go!" he cried. He couldn't stand the sickness any longer. And by his command God made them leave. That was all he had ever had to do.
He drove for an hour. He was tired but forced himself to continue on and soon arrived where it was said Max had played. The place was empty; he was offered a drink but declined. “Not today,” He said and asked the man about Max. "He played music here right? Long haired guy with a black girl?"
The man laughed and turned to him. "Oh yeah he was here. He had a lot of girls. Played some good music but oh boy he was off his head. Talking about God and all that."
"Where have they gone now?" Elijah queried and the man told him. "Merry Christmas by the way," he cheered when Elijah left all taciturn.
Through this journey to find Max he worshipped the pain. He'd never done that before. He welcomed it, and made his body it's church. For he knew that was what he had to do to cleanse himself. Not just endure the pain, embrace it as you do with love and laughter and joy, and it too will pass with those things.

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