Your gods abandoned you, and for the first time you open your beautiful eyes and look upon the world's truth. This instance of clarity becomes a minute, a minute becomes an hour. You realize that you're standing in a cornfield and you can't find a way out. There's green, green, green swaying like a wave in a football stadium, undulating like an algae-ridden sea. The soil is loose beneath your feet in clumps and clods that crumble away with each tentative, stuttering step you take. This way—no, no, that way. Or that way. If only you had red string like Theseus to salvage you from this whispering sea of lanky cornstalks, bent over by the weight of the babes in their wombs. You brush leaves and stalks aside with reckless desperation, breathing harsh and ragged against the harmonious hymns of the wind. You are no songstress, no inspired poet, no forlorn lover, no mad artist.
You used to believe in a lot of things—
freedom,
true love,
soul mates,
democracy,
change for the better,
kindness,
selflessness,
courage,
virtue,
innocence, government,
strength, weakness, justice, healing, magic, good, evil, knights, princesses,
patience,
luck, heroes, the power of men, the restrained quality of women,
trust, money, POWER.
They know what they're doing, you see?
Fast cars, eternal youth, nacreous teeth, glimmering eyes, beauty, she's beautiful and wild and that's all that matters until she's someone's wife. Adversity tempers steel. Clothes make the man. Destiny is choice. Priests are good, holy men. Nuns are not violent. Politicians are heroes. Jealousy is a sign of attraction. Columbus discovered America and hosted the first fucking Thanksgiving. Atheists are arrogant. Agnostics are flimsy fools. Jews have big noses, greed, and Russian accents. Christians are conservative assholes who only care about the unborn and wear matching clothes and give everything away foolishly. Muslims kill everyone unprovoked. Honor is a warrior's priority. Corporations improve economic conditions.
Consumerism. Materialism. Classism. Equality.
Love is a panacea. Family can always be fixed. If you dream it, you can do it. Honesty. Morality. Someone will save you if you're hurting enough. We care about you.
You believed in all the idols the Church of America set before you. You weren't the only one. Cognitive dissonance plagued you for your entire life. Now you've woken up and the vast cornfield just seems to thicken with each step you take. You can't find your way. Without your idols, you are truly lost in the earth ravaged by the crops of excess.
You surrender when the throbbing in your legs overwhelms you, crashing to the ground and unleashing a guttural scream to the heavens, upheaving your body and as the air is torn from your lungs you almost feel like you're flying, freedom in absolution. You go dead quiet, and the silence is a pounding in your ears as you gasp for air. You weep into your hands before you resume your trek through the corn.
The sun depletes, parches, burns you in a tide of sweltering heat. You've noticed that you don't sweat anymore, that your flesh is searing like cooking meat, that you cannot properly cry for lack of tears. You meander the cornfields until you collapse.
You don't need clothes anymore, so you dump your reeking and tattered pajamas and undergarment. No one notices, and life goes on.
The heat recedes and rain slaps at your bare skin. A chill crawls across you and no matter how hard you curl into yourself, the warmth refuses to spread. Mud slips over your feet like a second skin, coats your ankles, and spatters and splashes against the backs of your legs. The ice creeps into your bones, contracting your shriveling, wrinkled body into a bird-like delicateness.
Your gods preached toyou that to be slender was to be beautiful. Starvation, you've learned, feels hideous. Having water to drink…that's beautiful.
The cornfield is soon barren, withering away under the blast furnace sun. Fatigue overtakes you and when you come to, flies are whizzing about your head. Your throat is so parched that you begin to wonder if the rain was only a figment of your addled imagination.
A spark becomes a blaze and the cornfield begins to burn that night, whiffs of smoke reaching you before the heat.
All your life you've worshipped beautiful blue-eyed gods and drowned in the stomach-seizing tidal waves of muted passions, the regret of a thousand years' worth of words being gulped back, moments unconsummated, love untasted, unknown, untested, and soon came the truth, that love could never set your soul ablaze and engulf you quite the way you'd dreamed—it wouldn't ever kiss your flesh or devour your core, kill you half as well as you need. You've spent your whole life believing in every god in the Church of America. You got lost in the forest because you were too frightened to look past the cornstalks again for fear of finding some new lie. The truth is just as deadly in the right hands, my love.
You were made to burn in this smoldering world—you, your aspirations, your gods, your dreams, your youth, your rights, your strict morals, your gods, your dreams, your youth, your beauty, your standing.
For the first time you can see the world from your perspective all while knowing that you are right here, right now, in this one, glorious, scintillating, moment, you are present, you are alive, and the scream that soars from your navel to your throat rips through the silence as you writhe with the impish dancing flames leaping about you, melting straight off the bones, searing your flesh, charring your dripping innards, and you've never looked so beautiful to me.
For the first time, your feral eyes behold me.
"I believe in Nothing," you spit. I smile. You're the first in centuries. I kneel by you, take you into my arms, and cradle you against my naked breast. A pitiful groan stumbles from chapped, ragged lips. I kiss you and your eyes widen, fire streaking out from your pupils and kindling your irises. Come alive for me, just for me. You whimper, nestling closer to my midsection.
Reborn in the darkness of the night, you too must rise from your ashes and look upon the universe above you. We are of the same ilk, you will realize upon glimpsing the truth. And when you realize this truth, you shall become me. You are a wonder stricken babe as you gaze upon the firmaments, and when you search my eyes, our faces draw closer. You leave me breathless as you snatch away my final claim to life. You wear my armor better than I ever did. I still hardly think it fair that it was deigned by the fields that you of all the husks would awaken. You were supposed to die in your world but you found your true self, and by proxy, me. I never stood a chance against the savage will to conquer, the pitch black terror, the rippling emptiness, and your ravaged beauty.
We could have been lovers, but I knew you the instant you woke.
You quaked at the thought of relative invisibility, losing your past and future, becoming lesser in every way. You could never bring yourself to play the fool, for if you lost your intellect, you would be unsalvageable from the wreckage of your former pride. You were always ashamed of your thickset body and boyish musculature, your upward curving nose, your weak chin, your disheveled coiffure, your lack of height, your pudgy thighs. You ran like everyone else and tried so hard to resist the temptation to clog your mouth with food. It never worked. You were cursed with a universe of ambition but none of the will to speak through action. You never thought it was your place. For all your remarkable will, you were no different from the roiling multitudes.
You leave all those blue-eyed angels behind, and it pains you. But you cannot value something unless you let it go. So you do.
You storm from the cornfield's ashes and you don't remember your name.
"Mom, I'm home," escapes your lips as you realize you cannot even recall the face of your own mother. You cover your moth before it frosts over, ash speckling your unruly hair. Tears streak your cheeks and for the first time you realize how bared you are to the world, naked as the day when you clawed your way out from your mother's womb. Child, where is your home?
A house. Bricks and beige stucco, a crimson basement and a disheveled attic. You used to live in the attic. You shove the past aside. It doesn't matter to you, it is as ancient as the stars in your blood and the ravenous emptiness consuming your insignificant history, and your burning eyes reduce the past to debris, for that is all it is, and you turn to see a blazing path before you, your future, your present, your gift.
Cub, you were a half-feral bloodthirsty child without scruples once, or did you forget? Smashing your wiffle bat into your father's fingers, laughing as you desecrated the walls of your neighbor's home with crayon, biting that boy's shirt, hurling that blond boy to the ground after he drew blood from your arms, thrashing against your two best friends when they wanted you back, to tame the girlish nature that they as boys couldn't understand, pitting them against each other, grinding down against your best female friend as four-year olds (remember how good that felt), fighting that boy in the park, throwing your weight against your friend's in fourth grade when the hunger for that missing piece growled, you've always been a disaster, and kindness is a language that you've never understood, the pleasantries lies and you loathe the liars, their silver tongues that'll burn, just you wait, your hollow caverns will swallow the whole world and just to ignite that passion in you I'd raze the world to the ground, Cub. Your eyes breathe gold and Nothing will own you, like the stars in the night sky.
You are the child of the cruel nights in the north, stars reaching out to lovers eons away shattering walls and screams so loud that the sky crashes to the ground at your feet and you reach back with your tiny fingers across a galaxy of glittering supernovas and quiet white dwarf deaths and you can never understand why one man's death cries would not split the galaxy like they did your heart in the quiet shadows of your room, slinking across the face of the grinning slut you became when no one else was there to watch you.
You are the child of the sun, snow, rain, hail, wind, and clouds, of a daring day that shines before it bleeds into treacherous, steep-angled blackness, you are a dancer as you trudge through your wearied responsibilities, awaiting the freedom that solitude in the dark affords you with a mordacious audacity. Clouds fly and shift across the sky and the light of the golden exploding world fits between your thumb and index finger, you could crush it if you so pleased, grass tickles toes as you run from your life, never good enough, never loved enough, and you get so good at running away that you can run at my zooming pace. I could outrun the light of the stars, Cub, would you join me.
You have. You are terrified behind your dragons and lions and tigers and wolves.
You always chose the predators and hunters despite hating the touch of raw meat. You loved the taste of your own blood and scratching scars into your dry skin with your blunt nails, couldn't resist the itch of the bugbites, couldn't resist disturbing scabs.
You wear the colors of a conqueror so well.
You're still convinced you're a special Something.