Monday, February 4, 2013

~~I Go to Seek a Great Perhaps: Thoughts Post~~

The labyrinth. Of life, of pain, of agony...What is it? We breathe it. We live it. We know it. What is it? Where do we go, what do we do?

We live inside it. We walk through it's turns and through its whirling movements, as if we know where we're going. We're all inside it, but we don't always walk together. Sure, we combine forces sometimes and follow each other's steps, but we all make our own choices. We may turn the same corners at the same time, but the time will always come when we are walking alone once more. All of it is alone. No matter what, we are alone.

Even those of us who have those who have pledged to never go, we walk it alone on our loneliest darkest nights, when we fall and when we break. We are always alone. Ian, Dylan, Ted...So many have said they are always there. My Figments have said they are always there. And sure, some of you do walk with me, but there are always times when I walk away from you. And you walk away from me.

The labyrinth is made of our darkest dreams. It is lit with our victories. It is shadowed by the memories of broken hearts and scars. This labyrinth is every moment of our lives, every part of our consciousness and our souls. We walk and we walk, and there will never be an end. It is dark in there, and there are ghosts, but we will not always be alone. However briefly, yes, there will be company.

There will be company.

We feel lost and powerless in its depths. Every corner we turn is a choice we make, and every move we make takes us deeper inside it. We lose hope, our torches burn out, and still we walk....

Still we walk.

We still live.

We still breathe.

"I go to seek a Great Perhaps," Francois Rabelais said as his last words.

A Great Perhaps....

A world of maybe's, of hope and light, putting faith in things no one knows is certain.

A Great Perhaps...Another labyrinth. Another place where all could be lies and all could be false. A different Labyrinth....

A different life.

I have spent almost sixteen years walking this world. I ignored it for eleven years, losing myself in books, or at least trying to. I ignored it and drowned myself in a world of imagination, pretending everything was different and I was different, that I would wake up and find myself blinking in sudden sunlight, outside of the labyrinth. Outside of the hell I forced myself into, a self-imposed isolation built by shame and a desire to be apart from everything. I was forced out of that labyrinth and into a different one, for once filled with people. Choices were harder and I hadn't the skill to deal. I still lack the skill. I try and I try, but the world is new and every turn I take takes me further from the place I spent more than a decade in. A decade of lonely, pride-losing, hopeful, broken childhood.

For the past almost five years, I've been trying. Labyrinths have changed like cards in a sick game of poker, memories fading, and places new. Faces, names, nothing changes but nothing is the same. A labyrinth anew is almost the same as the labyrinth I departed, but yet not. Every moment is hard now. But, even back in my eleven years of near-continual isolation and almost permanent silence, was it any easier?

Now, I have friends who care about me. Now they pull me into their own wells and hells, places of tears and fears I have never tread before. I walk with them but I stay apart, scared and horrified at the things I find. A murderer, ghosts, demons, things I never believed in now seem to watch me from every mirror I pass.

A mirror....

Mirrors are the truest way to see the lie you live. Look at yourself. Look at the queer note of sorrow in your eyes--the mark the labyrinth leaves on everyone. The scar of knowledge. Of loss, of failure....

The labyrinth is the world we live in.

Every turn may bring joy, but it can also bring tragedy. We try to drive it away with religion, speaking of a Savior who will come and bring light! Break down the walls of the labyrinth and light us with sunshine. We try to drive it away with prayer, focusing on the gods above as if they will care about us. We try to drive it away with forgetting, but there's always a rock bottom; a bottom of the bottle; an empty syringe. There's always the end to the forgetting. Always a memory, a repetitive requiem for the broken...A dirge sung at dawn for the ones who made the wrong turn in the labyrinth; or chose the straight and fast....

The straight and fast...Alaska Young chose it. She chose to end herself, driving fast and hard, heavily drunk and right into a police cruiser. She chose to. But did she? We can never know, truly...Her last words were "To be continued?"

"To be continued."

To be continued....

I'm lying here in bed, a weight upon my shoulders and my eyes are haunted. I'm wrenched turn after turn, dragged deeper, and rarely get a moment alone with my thoughts. The words I speak are true, wrenched from my throat dry from screaming. I'm exhausted. My day was good, my day was long...And now here I lie, Looking for Alaska completed by my side, unwilling to read another book. Unwilling to speak to someone else.

I think I should choose to do something. Run until I can't feel, run until I can't think, run until I'm dead....

No, not until I'm dead.

I will not choose the straight and fast.

I will not choose the pills.

I will not choose the knife, the gun, the river....

I will not.

That path is not mine. I will not go down that path. I will not make that turn in the labyrinth, for that place is a place I will not survive.

I will not go where angels fear to tread. I fear to walk there, too.

But just because I do not choose to leave the labyrinth of this world by dying doesn't mean I don't want to leave it. I simply choose another method.

I have already attempted the forgetful, imaginative, hopeful and broken isolation. It failed utterly. I was lost and, worse yet, I was lost alone. I didn't even have the company of the fellow wanderers I lay claim to now.

I don't think I want to leave the labyrinth through forgetting it's there. I don't want to do that to myself. I want to leave it differently...

But how do I leave it?

I'll tell you how.

You don't.

You don't leave the labyrinth, because that's letting it win. That's letting the labyrinth take you.

You stay within it, and you flourish. You live, you laugh, you love. Not lit with the sunshine of the foolish, but lit with the shortening candles of the wise. You speak of days in the future with fragile hope that you cling to with all your might, because it's there. The labyrinth can't take that away from you unless you let it. You cling to hope. Because hope is yours.

You stay defiant. You stay strong. You stay loving, you stay laughing. You might call the labyrinth home, but only because you choose to stay there. It's not your prison, it's your choice. Let the good outway the bad. Take the right turns, rely on yourself because you're the only continual company. Grow and be good, because in the end, that's how you'll be measured. Not by how much you've done, but by how much you've withstood. Strength, in the end, is what's important.

Because, according to the views of Stormy Lewellyn from the Odd Thomas novels, this life we live is boot camp. Our next life is service, where we fight in the war against good and evil and we prove our worth. We win, we die...And then it's our reward.

Labyrinths ever changing. I like the idea. Three lives...Three lives. Three turns, three choices....

"Damn it, how will I ever get out of this labyrinth!" screamed Simon Bolivar, in the final moments of his life.

You don't. You don't ever escape.

"Yin and yang, my friend. Opposites swing back and forth. All that matters, kid, is if you learn how to cope." That's what my friend Jack told me once.

You learn how to cope. Loves, that's the only advice I have to give you. I'm ending this post now, because I need to get some coffee, and I need to talk to Ian again.

I'll see you in the labyrinth....

I go to seek a Great Perhaps.

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