Death at the Door.

“One has watched life badly if one has not also seen the hand that considerately — kills.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.

On the day before she left, I’d driven my shitty blue Mercury Topaz down that familiar dirt road and pulled into her driveway. As I went inside, I brought along my cigarettes and my microcassette recorder, which I faithfully carried along with me everywhere at that point in my life, not unlike Linus and his blanket. That night we sat on her bedroom floor with some guy she’d just met that day named Steve and drank a bottle of peppermint schnapps that we mixed with two liter bottles of 7-Up and Coke. It was I who drank most of the Schnapps, or so I heard. Memories were fuzzy until sometime early the next morning, when I awoke to a peculiar mixture of pleasure and pain.

I remember the sensation of Anne’s hands massaging my back as I saw nothing but white — a pasty-colored void that I promptly painted with chunks violently shot out of my mouth as if from a fire hose. I remember the horrific odor of peppermint vomit relentlessly attacking my nostrils as I heaved and emptied myself into that white bucket that Anne had kindly provided for me to bury my face in. I vomited so intensely that morning, as a matter of fact, that I burst a blood vessel in my eye; it was a freaky sight upon looking in the mirror later on. I also vomited the peppermint schnapps so intensely that to this day the flavor of mint — even something vaguely associated with it, like cinnamon — makes me gag. Mint chocolate chip used to be my favorite ice cream, but not anymore.

Oh, the plights of the circumstantial Pavlovian dog subjected to unintentional classical conditioning…

After I managed to purge my system, I felt as though I’d been to the brink of death and back. My throat felt raw, though my back felt nice. I followed her into the dimly-lit kitchen, where she had made us some coffee, and we sat across from one another at the table and talked. She warned me that after today, things would change. That she would change. As we sipped our coffee, she added that the tape in my microcassette recorder was full. Last night, while I was in an inebriated slumber, she’d left me a message she wanted me to listen to, but only after she left, and only when I was alone. I promised her.

As often as I’ve written about that day, trying so desperately to do the experience justice and accurately express its many layers, nothing has ever satisfied me. And so I try again.

As evening approached, my anxiety rose, a cocktail of depression, anger, and fear hanging over me like a dark and heavy cloud. We had locked ourselves in her room, laying on her bed, doing our best to comfort one another. Involuntarily, my eyes kept shifting back to that clock of hers, blood-red digital and ever-approaching five, and she kept pulling me away from it, distracting me with her sensual expertise. When she looked at me, I could no longer deny it as I so often had: I feared her with a fierce intensity. When it came to me, fear was the shadow of desire, but in my undeniably weird world shadows were as real as those which cast them. The bigger the desire, the greater the fear.

She once claimed that she never cried, that I’d never see it. On her bed that dawning eve, she told me that she wasn’t scared, but I saw the fear swimming in her moistening eyes. I told myself that I was prepared to see her go, that I didn’t hold her choices against her, and that I’d be right here waiting with open arms upon her return.

Then the knock on the door came, and with it an abrupt shift in her gears. She swiftly got up from where she lay on my stomach, straightened her posture, dried her face, and took a few deep breaths. From beyond that paper-thin door we both heard them call her name, and she announced she would be out in just a minute. With one last kiss she turned around, her back to me, put her hand on the doorknob and with one last, deep breath she turned it, pulled, and stepped out into the hallway.

There they stood, all proud and proper in their uniforms. Smiling as they fixed their eyes upon her, like hawks zeroing in on pristine prey, like fishermen reeling in one hell of a catch. I couldn’t deny that she was.

Anne exchanged a few words with them. She hugged her mother, and they grabbed her bags, which were leaning up against a nearby wall. She motioned for me to stand beside her, a request I wouldn’t deny, and I offered my hand and we shook. I tried to wish my emotions away, or at the very least how my body could betray them, but to my dismay the scowl remained on my face. They asked if I was her boyfriend, a question that at any other time might have led me to chuckle, but I felt possessive as fuck now. Far too fucking late, of course. Now it was her turn to laugh at the suggestion as she explained to them that I was just a really close friend. And there was absolutely no justification for how her response killed me inside.

“We’ll take good care of her,” one of them told me with a big, entirely punchable grin on his stupid fucking face. I wanted to rip his throat out with my bare hands, bathe in the blood that jettisoned from his wounds like a feral animal caught up in fury, but moral restraint, good sense, and, most of all, a deep respect for her kept me from attempting to act out that fantasy, which clearly wouldn’t have ended well for me.

Just their posture and the way they looked at me seemed to convey a million unspoken words. In their eyes, I was ill, and they had the cure, and she was far stronger than I because she was self-aware enough to proceed down a path I was passionately determined to never, ever embark on.

They walked through the living room, out the door, down the steps, with her following, her mother and I trailing close behind. As they guided her to their car, I thought to myself how it might as well be a hearse.

Things would be different after today, she said. She would be different.

I sat on the trunk of my shitty blue Mercury Topaz as the fatigued Grim Reapers proceeded to drive her away from me, their hearse obscured in a cloud of dust as she began her journey to be all she could be and all that rot. Her mother — that sweet, polite, and strong-like-an-ox old lady — stood just outside the trailer door and politely asked if I wanted to come on in, if I wanted to have dinner with the family. And I should have. It was just out of sympathy, it was just because she knew how very much I cared for the girl and how her leaving killed me, but I really fucking should have. Instead, I thanked her, but said I had to go, and politely bid her farewell.

Then I hopped off my mobile shit-box and drove away, hoping to high hell I was lost in the dust behind me as tears streamed down my stupid face and I proceeded to scream my throat raw all the way back toward home.

The Little Death.

10/99

It was fairly late by the time we got back to her sister’s place, and though I wanted to go home, Anne convinced me to stay. I had no car to drive home with, as she had driven me, and she told me it was too late for driving, anyway. She promised she’d take me back in the morning, and pushed me to call my parents to tell them where I was. I really didn’t want to do so, but I did, just to satisfy her. I ended up waking them up only to tell them what they would’ve assumed anyway: that I wouldn’t be home until probably noon tomorrow.

Anne and I pulled out mattresses from the kid’s room and put them on the floor of the living room for us to sleep on. Her sister, Janice, took the couch by the window, and Shelley went into her room with the creepy green light, along with her friend.

Anne and I lay on the mattress, with her head at my feet, and I looked down at her closed eyes and sighed. There was no way I would be able to get to sleep, thanks to my chronic insomnia. It would be hours if I got so much as a wink at all. My mind couldn’t help but fixate on Shelley and the story her sister had told Anne and I regarding her having dreams about being abducted by aliens, or being freaked out by the face of the standard Gray, or the story Shelly had told me her self about seeing those lights dancing in the night sky outside the balcony where she once lived.

And then there was Anne’s strange, little friend, Ella, who believed she was an alien. Then there was me. Why did Anne tend to attract weirdos like the three of us?

In any case, maybe Anne was right, and there was no way to know for certain whether any of this was real, if the government was covering it up. There seemed to be no sure road to truth, and even if I knew that truth for certain, I couldn’t ignore the fact that she was also correct in declaring that there wasn’t a damn thing I could hope to do about it. The answer, she said, echoing the Dizzy character I’d heard so much about but never met, was to stop thinking and start living, to live in the Here and Now.

”What are you thinking about?” Annie said from the other end of the mattress.

“Nothing,” I told her.

Nothing, nothing. How many times had I myself asked questions like that only to receive the response of “nothing,” knowing full well that it was a blatant fucking lie? How many times had I, myself, given that response, as I had just then, when it was the farthest distance from the truth? How much love, happiness, misery, hate, fantasy and memory, truth and lie, thought and emotion, confusion and enlightenment throughout the course of human history had safely hidden behind the guise of that bloody contradiction of a word, “nothing”?

That’s what she’d been preaching about, though: nothing. No thought. Stop thinking, stop conceptualizing, just sink into feeling, into sensation. And here I was, thinking about thinking about nothing.

I looked back down at her. All the time I’d known her, all that we’d been through, and she was still here with me: just one more relationship that was hard to explain, pin down, or define. One more relationship that, if logic dictates, shouldn’t have lasted. Yet I’d learned long ago that logic isn’t the guiding force in the universe, and if there was any doubt the evidence lay right there at my feet.

“You can come down here and talk,” she said, and so I swung my head to where my feet had been seconds earlier. We both had a cigarette and talked for a long time about things.

As I looked in her eyes, I thought I sensed something — but I told the animalistic fool in me to shut the hell up and to maintain some self control. We put out cigarettes and lay down beside each other, our conversation working it’s way into reminiscing. In the process, we rolled our heads closer to one another, and I was wondering how close I was permitted to get to her. I tried to read her, to ascertain what it was she wanted. In the end I just up and asked if I could kiss her.

“You don’t have to ask,” she said, and I tried to justify my asking, but she cut me off and kissed me instead.

I pulled back after a while and just looked at her and smiled. “Been waiting awhile for this…”

She put her finger to my lips. “Do you always have to talk?”

She didn’t say it in a sweet, sexy voice, either. At least to my ears, it seemed as if she was honestly annoyed. I was a bit confused, because that was one of the things I’d always liked about her: we could hold deep conversations while we were otherwise engaged in doing things to one another. I took the message, though, and I tried to shut my trap.

It was a long time that we played, too, and I got to do the things I hadn’t done in a long time. Then it got more heated. It got more heated than it had ever gotten between her and I, more heated than it had ever gotten between me and anybody. On reflex, I went to say something, but no sooner had I opened my mouth than her finger again went to my lips.

“Just feel. Try to stop thinking and sink into the moment.”

She unzipped my fly and her hand went down. I tried to do as she had instructed, to shut up and stop thinking, and just enjoy it all. I felt a warmth, a comfort, a trust sweep over me that I hadn’t felt since… when had I felt that?

And then I felt something different. Something unprecedented. Something strange, beautiful, wonderful, and ultimately foreign.

“Is this okay?”

The feelings sweeping through me put me in a state of indescribable awe. I shook my head almost violently.

“Yeah,” I said, and took off my clothes.

Any fear regarding what I had just agreed to was annihilated upon my guided entry. I lay back, and she moved atop me like an angel of the god I don’t believe in. It was smooth, warm, and rhythmic.

She was fucking beautiful: adjective. I was fucking beautiful: verb.

It wasn’t long, though, until I knew what I needed. I spoke up and asked her if I might try the top, and when she said okay I apologized like I’d just robbed her of her rightful throne. She insisted it was okay, and seemed to have no aversions. It seemed to be a courageous move on my part, for this was absolutely foreign territory. I tried to go with the flow; grow with the flow. I did the best an amateur can do.

As I was atop her, I closed my eyes. I truly put all my effort into not thinking, just focusing on the feeling. What happened somewhere in the rhythm, somewhere in the electric sweat between her and I, is a kind of thing that had often happened to me: I saw things.

I was soaring above a dark, desert plane at a steady speed, looking down from a bird’s-eye view at the desolate landscape, occasionally spotted with what I assumed might be people far, far below. The vision felt so real, the sense of motion felt so real. It felt as if I was bi-locating, as if I was in two places at once. Looking down upon that dead, desert landscape, I wondered if I had finally lifted from the pessimistic, futile, narcissistic wasteland I’d been stuck in the previous four years. Perhaps what I was seeing was a metaphorical hallucination regarding that.

Had this been all I had really needed — ironically, something I had feared?

“Who are you looking at behind those eyes?”

“No one.”

If I tried to explain what I was seeing in my inner eye, it would just come out total gibberish. Even if I had enough focus to talk in a comprehensible manner, I’d just sound crazy again, and she probably would’ve told me to shut up and sink back into the feeling anyway. Besides, how could I explain how she was obliterating all my preconceived notions regarding sex? That this wasn’t just some primitive, animalistic act? Sure, I knew damned well that it was a primitive ritual carried out by an organism’s most basic impulse — to survive, at least genetically — but I had never believed it when my punk rock friend told me it could also serve as a conduit to a spiritual experience. I never understood Annie when she said that it was her favorite recreational exercise. Yet here I was: I felt the snake rising at the base of my spine and biting my brain, intoxicating me with it’s magickal venom. Every pore of my being was irradiating in this sensual fire.

I had been so wrong. This was nothing like jacking off.

“Focus on me,” she said. I had closed my eyes again, but I opened them now to look down on her beautiful body. I escaped that picture-show behind my eyelids, and gazed upon my amazing companion.

After we went on a while, she grabbed the sides of my body tightly and told me to stop moving in a very sudden, urgent voice. At first, I wasn’t sure what to think. Had I done something wrong? Had I hurt her? Was I such a fuck-up that I’d even fucked up fucking? Fuck.

“You’re about to feel a female orgasm.” I will never forget how she said it. I will always admire how blunt she was. “Don’t move.”

It was the most bizarre thing — the way it felt like waves, like ripples, like I had stuck my soul in an ocean. She had hers and then told me to “finish up.” As I did as she had asked, I closed my eyes again and I saw Picasso-like still-lives in my mind’s eye, of lamps and couches and other such things. The images were wonderful, colorful and vivid. If only I could save these pictures in my head to file, I thought. If only I had paints and brushes and a canvas beside me.

“No thought,” she said, as if she could tell that I was glimpsing something in my inner eye. “Just feel.”

Indeed, I had nearly forgotten to practice the art of no thought, so I ceased to speak. I ceased to think in words, even in pictures. As I sped up my rhythm atop and between her, everything within me rushed to a point of silence, into static, to a blissful blur. It was nothing but pure sensation; pure emotion. When I reached climax, she grabbed my sides.

“Stop.”

As I swelled in her, I felt the most awesome thing in all my life. I had thought my nocturnal habits of taking matters into my own hands had brought me to orgasm, but it was nothing. It was truly a foreign experience until that night. I dispersed into everything. I was pure energy. I permeated the universe; the universe permeated me. I was at peace with everything. I was the universe.

I made noises beyond my control. She made the noises of a pleased, intrigued girl.

She got up and went to the bathroom.

I think I had this look of amazement, of shock, of total confusion stuck on my face. What the hell had just happened? I could, like, have that every day? Is this what normal people experienced on a routine basis — was sex supposed to be like this? Is it this cool because this is the first time I’ve ever experienced it? That I waited two decades? Is it because I’m a quadruple-Scorpio?

She came back, then I went, and upon my return she asked me if I‘d like to smoke. I was out of cigarettes, so she offered me one of her Marlboro lights. I still can’t smoke one of those without reflecting on that evening. We smoked, we talked, and I was numb and wonderful. We drank water amidst the fumes and utterances and pleasant emotions that enveloped us.

She asked me if I’d liked it, and I shook my head in a most certain affirmative. I wasn’t sure if I was sure about anything else as much as I was sure how fucking beautiful that had been and how great I now felt. I’d glimpsed beyond the horizon of the morbid state I’d been stuck in the last four years and had seen what could be. I felt entirely cleansed and energized. I felt as if I had gone into the depths of the dreariest sleep, and had suddenly been awakened — as if I had gone into the deepest pits of hell, and then been given transcendence -‘ as if I’d gone through the bridge of death, crossed it, and came out reborn as something new.

They call sex the little death, and I finally knew why.

“You know,” she said as she exhaled a stream of smoke, with a sly little smile dominating her face, “for a guy who doesn’t believe in god, you sure call out his name a lot.”

Maria Cox & the Statue of Baphomet (3/4/21 Dream).

I was in a building composed of different rooms, almost like big bedrooms, where different parties of people gathered, and it seemed to be connected to this department store. I was looking for something in the store — shoes, I think — and I asked Maria Cox, who evidently worked there, where I could find them. She directed me to the last isle where I didn’t find any shoes but instead came upon a tall, circular, glass display case with various statues in it, though the only one that caught my eye was this statue of Baphomet.

Later, I was trying to find my room with my people and I was unable to find the right one. I kept intruding into the wrong ones, accidentally waking someone up in one case. I think this is where I can across Maria for the second time. We were in a room, standing across from each other, just talking a bit, though what we spoke of largely escapes me. She was easygoing, playful, and actually quite nice to talk to. I brought up the statue of Baphomet and how strange and cool it was that they had one in the store. She immediately agreed and that seemed to add fuel to the conversation.

As I’ve written of before, Maria was a girl I went to high school with and who I am currently friends with on social media. I never spoke too much with her, but she was friends with Gerty, a girl I was rather close with for a time. For the most part I recall the school dances I attended, when I’d always find her in a dark corner or against a wall, in tears over whatever jackass she came with. I denied my attraction toward her for some time, specifically to Gerty, but eventually it became unmistakable. As I’ve written previously:

“It took some time for her to become a point of focus — and there are levels to it. For one thing, she has transformed into a rather alluring goth over the years, a feel and look that has always inspired my passion with respect to women, at least when it’s authentic, and in her case, it most certainly is — hence Gerty’s insight so long ago that she was right up my alley.

Physically, to state the obvious, she’s hot as fuck. I have cast her in the starring role of countless kinky fantasies of mine over the years. She is also someone who, as seems clear to me from her Facebook posts, actually thinks for herself — a depressing rarity among the human population, it seems to me — and she is a rather rebellious soul in general, which only increases her attractiveness as far as I’m concerned.”

She is also a superb artist and has a certain fondness for Lady Luna and her sea of stars, which makes me want to get high with her some warm evening, sit back with her beneath a cloudless sky, and just talk about weird shit. This isn’t likely to happen, but its crossed my mind more than once.

Aside from that, I always felt Maria was kinky, exploratory in that sense, and was the type to go to fetish parties. I also failed to shake the suspicion that she was involved in Paganism, maybe even Satanism, or at least dabbled in it. And this isn’t Satanism in the sense that your average, Christian-minded person would consider it to be, either — just to be clear.

So why was Maria in my dream? What did she represent? Well, for one thing, it likely relates to goth culture.

A fair question to ask is in regards to my personal relation to goth culture. As far as I’m concerned, I’m on the outskirts, as with so many things. A detached spectator. A distant observer and appreciator. According to one man, however, that’s not nearly all.

A long time ago my good friend, Channing, moved out of his parents’ house and into a condo with a few friends of his. One of these friends was a skinny, black-haired boy striving to be a writer. He identified as a goth. He had a hard-on for the culture, and he seemed to resonate with it quite strongly. He had bouts of depression that reached the extremes of suicidal impulses and there were countless dramatic, emotional moments throughout the time he lived there. Though I can’t say that I got to know him too well, I was around the guy often enough — and heard of incidents involving him through Channing often enough — to know that I sincerely liked the guy. And, I should add, that I shared the worry his roommates had for his well-being.

Once he got to know me a bit, and before he flipped out in a major and characteristically dramatic way that sent him launching away from Ohio and landed him back with his parents in Connecticut, he said something to me that has, I confess, kind of lingered in my mind ever since.

When I denied being goth, he passionately disagreed. He said that when it came to the goth culture, I was a natural. That I was what they wished they were, what they could only hope to become. That I was what the average, run-of-the-mill goth aspired to be.

He could be dramatic, as I memtioned, but in a way — and yes, perhaps one hell of a sick, fucked up way — I took that as a compliment. Even so, I’m allergic to pledging my allegiance to groups. I am what I am: nothing more, nothing less.

My first real introduction to the goth culture was through my friend, Terra, who, especially in the early days, I often jokingly referred to as the Evil One, the Queen of Darkness, and perhaps more recently, simply, and accurately, My Dark Friend. She was never one of those hokey, I-Wanna-Be-a-Vampire goths, either. She wore dark cloths and often had on a spiked choker, but it never seemed like she was wearing a costume — this was simply a reflection of who she was within. She just needed to wear it on her sleeve, perhaps as part of the creative, artistic impulse we both share.

Though there was undoubtedly some conflict between us early on in our friendship due to my deeper desires for her and her seemingly contradictory feelings toward me, the friendship always held strong, and it became clear to me that I valued that more than anything — and I still do.

We’re both introverts, we’re both rather moody, anxious, depressive, and dark. We both seem to enjoy writing and engaging in artwork. We share what I consider a deep yet unconventional kind of friendship, a special bond that I’ve always cherished. She is one of those people that always makes me feel better when I’m around her. Her energy is soothing. I don’t have to hide my darkness as I do when interacting and communicating with most other people, or feel embarassed, dramatic, or ashamed about it. I can let it flow without fearing judgement, and it makes me feel unspeakably wonderful that she seems to feel the same way towards me.

We have often exchanged letters and emails over the years, and in her letters she tends to ask me for advice or a fresh perspective, particularly when it comes to her issues in relationships and feelings towards the male gender in general. This may be relevant because the day before I had the dream I had finally responded to her mist recent email, and it was on that very topic.

Unlike Terra, and even myself, Maria seems more confident, more personally empowered in general, and I think that’s one of the things I most admire about her. It could be an illsion, as I certainly don’t know her personally, but she seems to have found the kind of balance I seek in myself, and which Terra seems to seek as well — the reconciliation of the opposites: the dark and the light, the often false dichotomy of what is considered good and evil, the cultural notion of masculine and feminine qualities of the personality. She may not be the ubermench with a pussy that my ex-girlfriend Anne constitutes, but she’s certainly a strong individual. She’s certainly got a swath of admirable, undeniably alluring qualities that, like Anne, seems to get major aspects of my overall being aroused, including but by no means limited to the shroom-tipped, ever-spitting trouser-snake.

And to get back to the dream, this may be where that glass-encased Statue of Baphomet comes in.

Rather recently I finally read the Satanic Bible, which confirmed my sense that it was essentially an atheistic religion that embraced personal freedom and the development and expression of the individual. I was surprised to find that they also embrace magick ritual, however, which increased my fascination, though the portion of it that teaches curses doesn’t settle right with me. In any case, I could see Maria dabbling in this religion, as well as Pagan practices, which in turn increases my fascination with her. Again, I don’t know her personally, though, so this could be a ridiculous assumption.

Until my research today, spawned by the dream, I failed to catch on to the fact that I was confusing The Church of Satan with The Satanic Temple.

So far as I’ve been able to discern given my little research, The Satanic Temple embraces atheism, science, body atonomy, empathy, and peaceful protest — all of which resonates with me — but they seem to be monists in the philosophy of the mind and wouldn’t so much as entertain notions of out of body experiences, reincarnation, or psi phenomena, inside or outside notions of magick, which sets me apart from them. The Satanic Church, however, seems to incorporate all of the above for the most part but also embraces magick and, with respect to the inclusion of curses in magickal practices, is more than a little light on the notion of empathy.

The image of Baphomet I had in the dream — the statue — seems to derive from the Satanic Temple, not the Church of Satan, not the Satanic Bible. Even so, it seems that what the Levi-inspired statue resonates rather well with the values embraced by both — though I will certainly have to do further research into both and what distinguishes the two to be confident in this perhaps premature impression.

In any case, the image of Baphomet in the context of the Satanic Temple was evidently inspired by the “Sabbatic Goat” drawing of occultist Eliphas Levi in 1856. Here, Baphomet is depicted as an angel-winged, hermaphroditic humanoid with a goat’s head — both human and animal, both male and female, both good and evil. Between its horns sprouts a torch, symbolizing the pursuit of knowledge, and upon its forehead, a pentagram. Upon its arms are the Latin words Solve (separate) and Coagula (reform), familiar to anyone who has read up on alchemy in the context of Carl Jung’s analytical psychology or otherwuse. The right hand points two fingers upward, the left bears two fingers pointing down, meant to suggest the alchemical notion “as above, so below.” Baphomet also has titties — or, alternately, two children, one a boy, the other a girl, to either side of the human-beast, staring up at her/him — to suggest both masculine and feminine qualities. The tummy bears the symbol of the caduceus: two serpents winding around a staff, symbolizing the reconciliation of dualities, which anyone interested in Jung and his notion of a psychological Transcendent Function should appreciate.

In essence, the statue signifies the reconciliation of the opposing forces within and between us in our quest towards totality and the pathway of greater understanding through questioning and experimentation. Perhaps its presence in the dream suggested that I see Maria Cox, in some way, as just another manifestation of that ideal, and that this accounts for my fascination with an attraction towards her.

On Whack-a-Mole Memories.

On December 5th, I awoke with a short, final scene from a dream in my head. I was walking passed a table of three in a crowded restaurant and heard a familiar voice. I turn and discover its Mickey and Channing, two friends of mine from high school that I recently learned have a child on the way. We all hug warmly and I congratulate them.

As of late, for whatever reason, I’ve been spontaneously remembering and thinking about a lot of people from my past. Most notably, however, are the memories dealing with Anne, an exgirlfriend, as they keep popping up in my mind. Its like there’s a frustrating insistence behind it, too, as if some part of my mind keeps trying to remind me of these moments.

I don’t dwell on these memories as I used to, having made a deliberate attempt to stop. When it comes to my more anomalous experiences, that is a different matter, but in that case it isn’t about emotional reminiscing, but a desire for greater understanding, and I try to do this in tandem with research that expands beyond my own, personal memories. Unless it ties to something in my present, be it a real-life experience or a dream, or at the very least brings something new to the table, I try to avoid mulling over the same old memories. I want to move forward, not drift backward.

At least with respect to Anne, however, the thoughts and memories keep recurring. Its always along different avenues of thought, too, and its beginning to bother me. I thought I was done with this, done living in the past, but the present keeps opening doorways that lead me back there.

The past is always present, this I know, and I’m not one of those people that constantly blasts others for focusing too much on what’s behind them or trying to look too far ahead of themselves. Its important to remember, it pays to anticipate, and given the time lag inherent in our sensory perceptions, we never experience the objective “here and now” anyway.

Sorry, Buddhists. Facts are facts.

Even so, on a personal level, I’ve spent a good deal of my life thinking back, looking into the past, and its long overdue that I focus on moving forward in my life. I don’t want to get distracted or hung up on things, good or bad, that happened years ago, decades ago, lifetimes ago.

Now I’m forced to wonder why I keep getting led back to her. Yes, I realized relatively recently that if I should have stayed with anyone and actually nurtured an intimate relationship, for countless reasons it should have been her, but that is long since over and done with, dead and gone. And unless it relates to something at present or presents something that will help me build a better future, I can’t waste my time and energy digging into it. Yet she keeps popping up. Its like I’m playing some psychological game of Whack-a-Mole, or like I’m Bill Murray’s character Carl, fighting that goddamned gopher in the movie, Caddyshack.

In either case, I realize, that rodent of a thought inevitably wins.