by M. B. Julien
His father recently passed away and his mother finally found the courage to come see him. She says that she would have done it whether his father was alive or not. That she was tired of not being able to see her own son. Before I leave, for some reason she gives me her phone number and address and then asks for mine. I don't get people sometimes.
Who is Joe? Does someone's sexual preference tell you who they are? Some men are killed because of the fact that they can fall in love with another man, and when someone is killing someone else, they usually kill that person because that person is associated with something that identifies them.
When a soldier kills another soldier, it's not because they know each other. It's because the other one looks different. Talks a different way. Is a different race. Has a different uniform. If someone murdered Joe because he was a homosexual, that person is murdering him because he thinks he knows who Joe is, when really a person's sexual preference doesn't tell you who that person is. It's just as useless as the way someone looks or the way someone talks. Difference is murder.
I'm thinking about Joe, and the thought that runs through my mind is that homosexuality may be literally wrong, in the sense that one plus one equals three is wrong, but homosexuality is not morally wrong, in the sense that murdering another human being is wrong.
However, many people will say that that the normalization of homosexuality opens the door to the normalization of incest, bestiality and the many other lifestyles we have yet to conceive.
Chapter 23:
THE CITY OF ANGELS
The anthology complex. It's a disease. A psychological build-up of fiction. I have to know that there is a better life out there than this one. There are people who write down their dreams, it's nothing unusual, but the degree to which I have taken it has been from a habit to a lifestyle. An obsession and an addiction. These are the words of a therapist I was suggested to see many years ago. "I did what I could." Those are the last words of a dying writer.
Years ago I had a dream where I was in an apartment on a very tall building. I was on the balcony overlooking an entire city. If you looked down from it you could see all the people below you, they looked like ants. A plane flies by and it has one of those advertisement banners attached to it. "Welcome to the city of angels." Los Angeles.
I go back into the apartment and on my bed there is a shotgun there waiting for me. Just like most of us have a dominant hand or a dominant foot, we have a dominant eye, and in the Bible it says if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off, if your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out. My question is what if your entire life is dominantly evil.
I'm sitting on the edge of the bed with the shotgun pressed against my chin. My right hand starts to shake. Do it. Just kill yourself. It starts to shake even more and the shotgun is slowly rising up on a surface it calls home, my face. Pull the trigger. Just do it.
I see my mother's face and for a second I am aware that I am dreaming, but as soon as I realize this the shotgun slips and goes off at a weird angle, and then it's just darkness and silence.
Lots of times after we wake up from dreaming we may remember more than one dream, as if there were two or more parts to the dream, and these dreams were connected by an intermission, even though they don't always relate. A black silence. This is what the silence and the darkness felt like, then later I found myself still alive laying on the cold floor of a hospital building with my entire lower face missing. I'm in so much pain but I can't yell because I have no mouth. I guess I'll be doing alot more thinking than talking now.
The pain becomes unbearable and just when I think I'm screwed, I see that same shotgun laying there a few yards away from me. I crawl to it and I press the shotgun against bleeding flesh and bone and I pull the trigger in attempt to finish the job and and find salvation from this pain, but nothing happens. I can't die. Then again I don't think any of us ever really die.
If the mind is separate from the body, then perhaps even after the body has died and withered away the mind continues to live on.
Despite the fact that I didn't die the second time around, the pain is gone now. There is no added damage from the second firing but the damage from the first firing is still there, and I'm bleeding all over this cold floor. As I run to find a bandage of some sort, pieces of flesh hit the ground. Meat hits the ground. I find a room with bandages and I wrap my entire face to conceal this entire night, and then the black silence returns.
Now I'm sitting in a car looking through my windshield and I see two people arguing across the street. I sit there and think about why I couldn't kill myself, why I couldn't die. I ponder if I'm actually still alive.
The thing about being a free thinker, or an "enlightened individual" is that in the process of becoming these things you may either succeed in finding wisdom or the wisdom you seek will cause you to have a mental breakdown.
I'd like to believe that's the sole reason why parents or society don't approve of those who do not want to conform because such a path of isolation causes one to be different, and difference is murder. This isolation causes the individual to think and he or she becomes aware of the world around them. Truly aware.
This awareness, or this truth, it can become so overwhelming and while certain people will be able to absorb it, there will be those who cannot, and those people who cannot, they realize that the road not taken is not taken for a reason. They realize why so many people conform to its society and abide by its standards.
One of the two figures is completely shadowed in darkness, and the other seems as if it has a white light casted on it. After a while the dark figure withdraws a gun and points it at the light figure. I look down at the other seat for my shotgun but it's not there. When I look back up the two figures are now completely visible, two ordinary men arguing but the argument has escalated to what could become murder. I get out of my car and walk towards the two men hoping I can make things okay.
Fear is what keeps many of us from living the lives we want to live, so when fear is no longer an obstacle, what becomes of a person? His or her true self? The only thing that would have kept me from walking towards the men is the fear of losing my life, but right now I'm almost sure that none of us ever really die, so I walk up to the man and stare at him. I try to speak but I can't.
He looks at me and asks me what I want. That him and his pal here are ready to settle this dispute on their own terms. I continue to stare at him and I try my hardest to mutter any words I can, but I still can't speak.
He tells me to take off my bandage and talk or to get the hell out of there. I walk up to him and try to take his gun but he shoots me twice in the center of the chest. This man knows that the heart is not located on the left side of your chest.
I fall to the ground backwards, but I don't feel anything. I look down to where there should have been two bullet wounds but there are no wounds. The other man, the one who was once casted in white light, he stands there and starts to laugh. The man with the gun becomes angry and begins to shoot at me again even though I've already fallen to the ground. Even though I'm completely helpless.
Eventually he runs out of ammunition. The man with the gun walks closer to me and stands over my body, and he sees that I am still alive. He is in disbelief. The man who is laughing stops laughing and also comes closer to me, and then he kneels down to whisper something in my ear. He tells me that the Lord has spoken.
Chapter 24:
ECHOES FROM THE SUN
There is a story of a group of people who have spent their entire lives in an underground cave and their knowledge is limited only to what they can see and hear, and then one day they are let out of the underground cave and for the first time they see the Sun. They see powerful rays of light and trees and birds and realize that there was so much more to learn. Maybe you know this story.
At night, some of us gaze at the dark sky and wonder what is beyond what we can see and what we can comprehend as human beings. Things like God and Satan, if there i
s life elsewhere. Even if we are one day able to see and comprehend these things, we will have to accept the fact that there is still even more to discover. No matter how much you think you may know, you will never know it all.
However, one might argue that because knowledge presumably has no limits, it therefore cannot be compared or measured to or by anything.
One person might know that an object's mass plays a role in how strong that object's gravitational pull will be and another person might not, but because there is so much to know one might also say that regardless of how much more knowledgeable the first person is than the second person, both individuals are equally unintelligent. Or equally unintelligent. This is why a wise man will tell you he's a fool.
There is a theory that a single cell can represent, or is, a universe, and that a universe can represent, or is, a single cell. The basic fundamentals of the idea are influenced by significance and perception. The human body is comprised of cells that will help form a body part or an organ, and these parts of the body will help form systems such as the reproductive system or the respiratory system, and these systems will help maintain a functional organism.
Likewise, the universe is comprised with many similarities. There are planets. Cells. There is a star with a mass that is great enough to have a dominant gravitational pull and force these nearby planets to revolve around it, such a system is called a solar system. Organs. There are many solar systems throughout space, and the compilation of these solar systems form galaxies. Body systems.
Furthermore, many galaxies form a universe. Organisms. A universe is followed by an omniverse, which is all possible universes, and who knows for how long this can go on, however if you tweak your perception, imagine that a cell in your body is one universe. All these cells help make up your heart, just like all these planets help make up a solar system.
If we were to shrink ourselves down to a size where just one of our cells were more significant, or in other words bigger to us, we might find that the place we are in follows the same exact standards as the place we were when we were normally sized. With this in mind, is it logical to assume that everything is the same? That without the perception and significance that is constructed by the human brain, a single cell is the actually identical in every property to a universe.
That even if you meet a giant who is a million times bigger than you, it means nothing because there is another giant who is a billion times bigger than the giant who is a million times bigger than you, and to him you are both small and stupid just the same. And then you find out there is a giant who is a trillion times bigger...
Anyway it goes on and on and on. Maybe this is all just the rambling of a part of me that has lost its sanity as this has happened to me before, but I've found that even in falsehood you can dissect some parts of truth.
Often times our dreams are never resolved. We might find ourselves running through a storm but we never find out why. We might be searching for our first class on the first day of school but we wake up before we see if we find it or not. We might be parked in front of a house but we don't know what or who we are waiting for, why we are waiting there and how long we've been waiting there.
A long time ago I used to have these dreams where I was kept in solitary confinement in a prison. In a cold, dark corner in a small piece of the universe, I have to spend these days of penitence in a penitentiary.
Time goes by and I suffer. Sometimes a guard will walk by and I ask him why I have to suffer, and he tells me that some of us are just meant to suffer for the things we've done. Sometimes I ask him how I can make things right, and he tells me that the only thing I can do is offer the people I've wronged my suffrage.
The one thing I can't solve, the one thing I can't figure out about those damn dreams is what crime I committed to be put in there in the first place.
Two things that have always fascinated me in my life are warfare and prison. Not necessarily the soldiers or the prisoners, but the idea of sending one group of humans to kill another group of humans, the idea to segregate certain people in compliance to a few rules on a few pieces of paper. The one especially interesting aspect, or question, of war, is who exactly is at war? You can have a war with several countries, several people or even a war with yourself; a mental struggle.
The Civil War was a war where one nation fought amongst itself. Who is at war, who is being imprisoned. Once a prisoner becomes institutionalized, once they become so comfortable to the society within the prison walls, when you set that prisoner free, you may actually be imprisoning him in the outside world. Just like that piece of rock in space, a prisoner sometimes wants to stay a prisoner. Maybe that's why most of them end up going back to prison after they are freed.
On the news they say they caught the person who murdered that man not too far from my apartment building. It was over some drug situation, and the perpetrator is going to be locked away for a long time.
The victim was intoxicated at the time of his death, and the assailant was caught and it is speculated that after being shown that they had forensic evidence on him, he confessed and provided details about others in his organization in an attempt to reduce his prison sentence.
One thing we will all come to realize eventually is that we will always want more until we decide we want nothing. We are always waiting for our plates to be filled, but even when they are there is always an empty side-dish.
We tell ourselves we'll be happy and content when we get that job. When we fall in love and get married. When we have a house. When we have children. The thing is it's never enough. It will never be enough. Not until enough is enough.
Chapter 25:
THE MOTH EFFECT
I open the front door to the apartment building and the Sun's rays hit me as if I had been in darkness for years. I notice that the plants are beginning to grow, and I can only hope that they grow properly. I start to think about how the Sun's rays, as powerful as they may be, how they don't reach the garden, and how sad the zinnias that were there before must have felt.
In the distance I see Mary getting out of a parked car with a bouquet of red roses, and this image reminds me that it's Mother's Day, but I've never figured Mary for a mother. Maybe the roses have nothing to do with the holiday.
Mary passes by me with a fur-coat that probably cost an animal its life. Insult to death. I'd like to think that the animals that are killed for their fur were primarily killed for their nutritional value. There can't be any righteousness in killing an animal simply for its properties in appearance. Only to gain in the selling of fur or leather.
I can also tell that she's drunk when she walks pass me, and that she's not conscious enough to notice that her driver is yelling out her name because she forgot something. I end up having to help her in that department.
Lynne told me that red roses symbolize love and romance. These red roses remind me of Maria, but in particular, they remind me about two dreams I had about her a couple of years after we met. Maria and I both worked at the same place, and often times we would end up working at the same times. I usually walked to work, but one day when I was halfway there to work, it started to rain. It really started to pour. Maria, who drove to work, saw me walking and she stopped and gave me a ride to work.
We had been together for at least two years and then one night I have this dream. I'm walking down stairs. I hear this woman sitting at the bottom of a staircase crying. I ask her what's wrong and she looks up at me with big watery eyes.
The scene shifts like dreams like to do, and we are inside of a house. I look at her hand and I see a tattoo. I ask her what it is, and she tells me it's a butterfly in the shape of a heart. I ask her why, and she says to me, "Because it's through fate that we find our soulmate." I didn't have as good a memory then and I didn't start writing down my dreams yet so I can't remember the dream so well, but I can remember what she said about finding your soulmate with the help of fate clearly.
The butterfly effect theory basically state
s that one event, no matter how big or how small, can effectively influence the course of the future. One question often associated with this theory asks if the flap of a butterfly's wings in one part of the world can cause a natural disaster in another part of the world.
I gather that her tattoo meant that regardless of how random or senseless some things may be, coincidence has nothing to do with us finding our one true love. Our soulmate. That we find the ones we are suppose to live the rest of our lives with through fate.
The next thing I know, I'm lying in bed with the woman. Sometime later there is a banging on the door, and all I can hear is the name Diane ringing through my head. The woman gets up out of bed and goes to see who it is, and it's Maria on the other side of the door.
A few months later after having that dream, I have it again, but different things happen. It's the same woman in the same house, except this time I don't cheat on Maria. I tell Diane that I have to leave, that I'm not attracted to her flame, and she becomes furious, but before I go to turn away I notice that her tattoo is on her right hand this time. It's plagued me for years. In the first version of the dream, the tattoo is on her left hand, and in the second version, it's on her right hand. That one little change.
