Breath in, Breath out
Til the silence is not so loud
One step, and one more
Til you find better reasons for
The fight, insane
And it’s only me to blame
For all, I’ve done
And I’ve only just begun
Fall in, get out
Of love before we drown
Once more, for show
Even though they can’t know
I can’t, forget
What it was that was said
Now when I’m, in doubt
I Breath in, Breath out
You know that moment, late at night, when you wake up suddenly and you aren’t sure why? Some tiny noise or shift in the light startles your mind awake. Maybe a dream has you falling or running and you instinctively flee the sleeping world for the day time realm of consciousness. This wasn’t that.
The resounding crash had me on my feet and my heart racing before I knew what I was doing. I looked around, startled but nothing seemed out of place. A second scream of shattering glass and falling debris assailed my ears. It sounded like it was right on top of me.
I rushed out of my room and looked around frantically for the source of the sound. Nothing. The house was still and quiet as the grave.
With that disconcerting comparison going through my head I carried on through to the front of the house. I could still hear shifting and creaking, though much more distant now. I stopped at a window to glance outside but there was no sign of disaster. No neighbors rushing out of their homes to find the source of the sound.
I could still feel my heart in my throat. What the hell just happened? Could it have been just a dream?
But no, I was well awake for the second crash. What was going on?
I walked into the kitchen, clean and organized as it always was. Which was to say not terribly. But the roof hadn’t caved in so I couldn’t say the sound came from here.
I walked quickly into my work room. Nothing seemed out of place.
I ran my hands over my face and sighed. Maybe it was just a bad dream…
“No, not quite just a dream. Sorry to tell ya”
I whipped around fast enough that I almost fell over. Standing behind me was a tall man, middle aged. He wore a bright colored suit and had piercing green eyes. His voice was almost sing-songy as he laughed at the fear that must have been clearly stamped on my face.
“Oh, dear boy don’t look so terrified. It’s not as though you didn’t know I was here”
He laughed again, and the sound of it made my blood run cold.
“Who the hell are you? What are you doing in my house?”
He looked down his nose at me and clucked his tongue “Such boring questions. Come on, you’re suppose to be smart. You tell me who I am. Come on, we both know you can”
I just stared at this lunatic, wondering what I had near by that I could use as a weapon.
“Now, don’t go doing anything we would both regret. Hitting me will only hurt you after all” He laughed again and sauntered over to my desk to sit down. “Fine, I’ll give you a hint. If you really want to get to know me, you just have to look in a mirror”
He kicked his feet up onto my desk and grinned an impossibly big grin as I edged away
I swallowed to find my voice then said “What, you think you’re me?”
“No, no no. Nothing like that. Well, actually, that’s pretty close. I’m part of you. A fun little part you’ve had buried deep, deep down for a long time” He spread his arms and threw his back to look at the ceiling “And here I am! In the flesh, so to speak”
I shook my head and kept slowly making my way backwards toward the door. I had to get away from this madman before he hurt me.
I turned to dart out the door and he was suddenly standing in front of me “You can’t run away from you self you know HaHa”
I gasped and fell backwards onto the ground. “Dear sweet god what are you?”
He frowned at me and touched the bridge of his nose “We’ve been over this. You know you don’t like to repeat myself. We are us. You and me, same person, different faces. You run around during the day doing…whatever the hell it is you do. And I’m your subconscious. The part you don’t talk to much. Awake and alive in that boney noggin. Just quiet before now” he crouched in front of me and smiled “Don’t believe me. Then try this on for size”
His form warped and in a flash he no longer had the same pale complexion and bright smile. He was a tall, young women. My ex-girlfriend.
“Is this more pleasant to look at” she said softly in a voice I hadn’t heard in years.
His….her….its form warped again and my mother loomed over me, stern and angry.
“Or this one? Come on, answer me damnit. I’m not here to be stared at!”
I closed my eyes and tried in vain to calm myself. This can’t be real. This can’t be happening. It was the vodka from the night before. I was still drunk and it finally caught up to me.
His melodic voice sounded in my ear “Sorry, but no. Your drinking couldn’t cause anything as clever as me HaHa” I opened my eyes and he was sitting right next to me.
I lurched away made for the door again. He sighed but didn’t get in my way this time.
I ran down the hall and back towards my room. Slamming the door shut I collapsed against dresser and counted to ten. This can’t be real. It’s all a bad dream. You can wake up, you are in control here.
“Wrong again” I looked up with a start to see him sitting on my bed smiling at me.
“Come over here and sit down before you hurt ourselves” he patted the bed gently to indicate i should sit next to him. And lost to the confusion and terror that I must be losing my mind, I did.
“There we go! This is much better isn’t it?” He draped his arm across my shoulders and he felt real. Solid.
“Just you and me and all night to catch up. Oh, that earlier ruckus. That was me. I needed you up and alert for our little chat HaHaHa. Don’t worry, I didn’t actually break anything. Just made a lot of noise. I do love a good start”
I took a shaking breath and looked into his eyes. The bright green was almost unnerving to stare at, but I wasn’t going to be deterred.
“So, you’re me. Or, rather part of me then?”
“Now you’re getting it! Yes, I am you. Ish. I mean clearly you aren’t in control of me but we are one and the same. Different sides, same very sick coin”
“Ok, so you’re a hallucination. A manifestation of an illness?”
He scowled at me sourly, as though I had offended him “An illness? No, no, no. I am part of you. Don’t make me sound like a bad thing. This is great! You and me…you never have to be alone again. I can be here for you, every single moment from here on out”
I put my face in my hands and tried to think. Have I seriously gone off the deep en-…
“Hey, I can tell a lot about you because I am you HaHa, but I can’t read minds. You gotta talk to me. Tell me whats going on in that thick skull”
I looked at him again. He looked so familiar. So real. “I shouldn’t talk to you. That only enforces that you’re really here and you aren’t. I need to get help.”
“You got ‘help’, remember. They gave you those beautiful pills. Do you think that’s why I can talk to you now? How you can hear me? Maybe the pills actually work and they finally started cutting through the noise. Maybe that help is why you can hear me now, instead of just all that screaming and crying all the time”
I glanced over to my night stand where my medication sat. Could this be a side effect? Some times schizophrenics reported worsening symptoms on certain medications. Could I be schizophrenic?
“Let me guess, you’re asking if you’re crazier than you thought? No, again. I’m you. You aren’t crazy, you’re just getting adjusted to your new reality! It’ll be fun, you’ll see”
I looked at him again, his form becoming clearer as I spoke to him.
“If you’re part of me then I guess I can’t just get rid of you. But who are you? What do I call you?”
His bright red smile widened again and his bright, white teeth shone in the half light of the room.
“We are the same person, remember? But for now, you can just call me….Joker”
I keep trying to write here but recently I have been struggling to write at all.
I’ve had to start some medication that leaves me in a fog, dazed and stupid. I can’t focus on much of anything for more than five minutes and my inspiration has dried up.
I keep hoping I will push through it and get back to a place where I read and write regularly. But so far I haven’t managed to make it there.
So I’m writing this more or less just to write something. Anything. Just trying to shake the creative juices loose or get something moving again. With any luck at all I will start to see some positive effect from my medication and get back to where I am writing more. That is the ultimate goal in all of this. Improve the situation. Move my life forward again.
In the mean time, I have no idea what to say. I have a million fractured thoughts that would make brilliant starts to stories, poems or songs. But I can’t follow any of them. I chase these pieces like wisps of smoke. I can see them, I’m almost certain I should be able to reach them. But they slide through my fingers tips, insubstantial.
It’s a frustrating feeling, seeing so much potential that I just can’t make real. Fighting for a hold on something that use to be more readily present to me. But here I sit, ready to punch my monitor in frustration as I fumble words I’ve always managed so easily. I reread words I’ve written and hate them, seeing constant misspellings and errors in grammar or words missing entirely.
But still I try. I won’t let circumstance take my writing from me. And sooner or later, whether through adaptation or sheer force of will, I will see myself writing again. The process is just time.
Patience. Patience in all things. You can’t rush life, so to I must not rush health. Til then, I hope for the patience from others that I have failed to have with myself.
The world around us is made up of more than what we can see. Most interestingly is the different planes of existence that occupy the multiverse. A person could spend their entire lives searching and studying and documenting everything they came across and they would only touch on the tiniest percentage of what actually exists.
I’ve had the pleasure of seeing a large portion of what the multiverse has to offer. But one of the more interesting things I have encountered is a small plane of energy that doesn’t have a name to us at this time. It is occupied by two main species that, until recently, had lived out their lives with a unique balance. The beings here do not posses physical bodies in any sense that we can understand. They are concentrated thoughts given self awareness.
The first species we will call the Lumos. The Lumos are small, bright, fairly simple thought forms. They heavily populate this plane, their numbers appearing to grow suddenly from the growth of consciousness on other planes.
They are communal and are mostly harmless unless their stream of thought is interrupted in mass.
The other species appear to, at least among themselves, be referred to as the Grasus. They are a quasi-predatory species, feeding on the concentrated psychic energy of the Lumos. This doesn’t directly harm the Lumos, but they do find the presence of the Grasus disturbing because the Grasus prefer the darker, quiet of solitude to communal gathering and extinguish light as they absorb the ambient psychic energy.
Recently, the Grasus have faced a threat to their source of psychic food from an aggressive new species we will call the Rapax. This new species came to this plane from the greater Astral. They appear almost parasitic, drinking a place dry of psychic energy before moving on. However their method of harvesting the energy is far more direct than that of the Grasus.
While the Grasus feed off the ambient energy cast off by the gathered Lumos, the Rapax feed directly from them which is ultimately lethal to the Lumos.
Stranger still is the fact that the Lumos have embraced the necrotic feeding of the Rapax, because their influence makes the Lumos toxic to the Grasus, who the Lumos have feared for longer than they can remember.
I’ve begun to see an almost cult like worship from the Lumos, building structures of energy to house the Rapax in so the Lumos can visit them regularly and offer energy in exchange for what they seem to see as protection.
The Grasus have started to fight the Rapax for control of the various Lumos communities to prevent the poisoning from eating away their entire food source. The Lumos see the sudden increase of Grasus attention as an attack on them, leading to greater worship of the toxin that is killing them, but which also deters the Grasus.
The Lumos have also begun to spread the toxic influence of the Rapax by themselves, some Lumos communities even seeking out Rapax influence to ward off the Grasus.
Ultimately, I believe this will be the end of this plane. The Rapax no longer have to fight to stay since the Lumos work so hard to embrace them. And the Grasus are seen as so cruel due to their darker nature that they have to trap and farm the Lumos to isolate them from the harmful effects of the Rapax.
Eventually the Rapax will drain the life from this plane and the Grasus will be forced to leave or die.
This provides a lesson for us. Often, we will go with what appears safer and more comfortable than what is good for us. Often we shun things we do not understand even though they do not harm us at all, and embrace what we see as safety which harms or limits us.
We have to learn to question everything. To never let the lure of comfort restrict our ability to see reality for what it is.
Hopefully, the Lumos learn to do so. Otherwise their entire place will die.
Down the Twisted Way 