ORGANIZING LIGHT

Book V: Return to Me

I told her I’d find her again one day. Another life, certainly not this one - so sometimes I wait for the signs.

I feel the wind and my skin dances to the cold air. It’s almost time so I sit outside, the rain falling, and I watch the grid flicker and struggle - the evening beckoning. I know to stay here awhile, I think, thinking about how I’ll fix all this. The grass beneath my feet tender from the water - the mud a soup of all that came before us. I think about how I’ve told myself about what all my mistakes are and how I ought to avoid them as I wait for the signs but we both know I won’t remember and the loop will live on.

I’ll start out, “okay, try to remember…” so at least it’s said on the off chance it sticks and if I’m lucky it’ll close out then and there. One I can tell you about off the top of my head is that there are folks I just shouldn’t talk to that I talk to and it makes problems and I don’t know they seemed lonely too I guess. The trouble is, one day will be the last day we interact and I never want that to be right now.

Another woman about to fall through my hands (I know I’m not supposed to say it like that), so I hold the picture up, a young girl that would one day become my mother, her green eyes covered in blue. Trying to think, did she have this same problem? If so she got real good at hiding it but I suppose living out Groundhog Day is one way to avoid surprises on your way out. Maybe it was her that passed on the loop, this curse, this never knowing when I should know better. I get started on the letter knowing I’ll have to start over.

Cecilia,

Do I wait until it all passes or wrap myself in it and jump out into the deep, cold water with a large cut drawn over each eye, praying for sharks to tear me apart, this burial at sea?  Let them see the chaos, how badly I’ve wanted to die so many times. Show them every last secret I’d kept from everyone. I just can’t share all that, it won’t work, every question granular exposure, eclipsing every good, becoming bloated sea salt. I’ve seen the outcome of these truths. I’ve romanced every character there ever was worth loving, what they were during filming and would probably never touch upon again, the retroviral identity - that which we worship.

It’s a paralyzing combination of fear and anxiety about how things are and how they’ll be with a sort of seer's-gift-of-sight…I see the marks over my eyes as I watch my falling body from my father’s abandoned office. All the time wasted in a life barely lived. All the years I’ll forget. I’ve consumed too much, they say. They’ll tell stories about me, a scapegoat running through the field, marked up with red paint, his brother slaughtered. He will wander forever in forests turned into mazes - his brother in his thoughts and he runs and runs and runs.

I say I don’t care, but it’s the word “legacy” that haunts me. The term for old: deprecated. The term for what we leave behind as the old, deprecated creatures of this world. I thought I was the hero of this story and I won’t even make it to the end.

They’re all gone now and I can’t remember how I stop it. I have to remember. So I’ll be waiting here awhile…wish me luck.