On The Edge

 

My life is not the particular life that I have lived but the one that I remember, the one that I dreamed here and there, the one that I created out of nothingness; it resides in the way I remember it, the images that swirl through my mind as I look back on what I now call the past, the sounds, the people, the landscapes, the rooms, the words, the songs… all those visions I have somehow recorded within me or I create them again from scratch in the moment that I invoke them, and I only invoke them so that I can tell the same stories over and over, even if only to myself… Sometimes I attempt to push the past aside, to make it go away, to erase it completely and leave me alone with the quiet present; and sometimes I try to cling to it with a kind of uncomfortable desperation, I attempt to force it to stay with me forever, I cling to the remains, the books, the photographs, the pieces of art, the recordings, and to the emptiness left behind by the mementos that have been lost forever… For brief moments, I can see that the two habits are the same: the clinging and the banishment; both I see as secret methods I acquired long ago to make myself disappear, to hide from what is right in front of me and fade away into a private exile. Whether I focus on banishing the detritus of my particular history or I attach myself uncontrollably to every last bit of what has been left behind, I am no longer present, I am no longer the “I” that writes these words, as in that moment of determined projection I identify completely with what I once did, with what I once saw, or with the hopeless effort to stop being attached to it, to make it vanish… The first time I saw her, she was running towards a dark corner in a large room full of people, laughter and movement, a loud party, people in brightly colored costumes, thick deep bass making the walls tremble, colorful visuals projected on the walls, the smells of incense and marijuana and sweat mingling into one… I saw her leaning over in the corner of the room, away from the dancing and from her circle of friends, with her right hand she held onto the wall, her left hand was pressing against the center of her chest; she was clearly hurt, they had laughed at her over a simple comment, a generous offering of honest advice; I came in at the tail end of the interaction, she was warning them about what she called energy vampires, evil embodied entities that were all around us but may not be easy to detect, she was saying that we must be careful to protect ourselves from their influence and they made a joke out of it, they laughed and did impressions of old movie monsters and went off on tangents about discredited fears and paranoia and she walked away from them holding back tears and trembling with anger, they went back to dancing and laughing and drinking, not even taking note of what had happened; they didn’t realize she was sincere in her warning, they didn’t understand that it all came from lived experience and a heartfelt wish to help… I walked towards her and stood a couple of feet away, watching her tremble slightly as she cried alone, bent over towards the wall; she was wearing a kind of black tank top, army style pants and black boots; without thinking, I placed my hand on her back, along the line of her spine, this was not something I would usually do but somehow my intuition took over; she turned around quickly when she felt my presence, surprised at this sudden intrusion, but she immediately understood I was trying to help her, she instantly knew that I had listened to her explanations and that I was sympathetic to her words, she knew it as surely as I knew that she had been sincere in her comments and I was sincere as well in my offer of help; she could feel the warmth spreading through her, concentric circles of heat pulsating away from the place where my fingers had touched her back… That moment was the end of one lifetime and the start of another, the end of who I had been without her, the end of a world where she didn’t exist and the start of a new one where she was the only being that could claim true existence… It happened so quickly, the world that I knew was over, the old sense of calm and relaxed comfort was gone, together we had entered into new and dangerous territory… Weeks and months went by, day after day where we couldn’t help but focus on each other; at some point we both started using the word love, I can’t say exactly who said it first or when it happened… So intensely and obsessively did I identify with that word, with the simple sound of it and the way it echoed back at me from the depths of her eyes, so intensely did it resonate each time it was spoken by me or by her that in effect it became a kind personal universe of secret meanings, a hermetic country that only allowed for two residents and banished all others to oblivion; outside of our small bubble of fixed attention, reality had become unintelligible and inadequate…  To others that had known me for years, and saw me now drunk by this vision of intimate unification, by this unbridled romantic obsession, single minded, reckless in its abandon, closed off to them and to everything I had ever known or wanted, I appeared inexplicable, irrational, insane, there was clearly something wrong with me, I was in need of help, of advice, of some kind of intervention…  An old friend from college asked me to meet him at a coffee shop one sunny afternoon and, after some miscellaneous questions and pleasantries, he looked at me with a somber look on his face and said: “Look, I’m going to tell you something that you need to know. When you fall in love with a girl, the way I see you falling now, you lose all your power as a man. Listen to me. All of it. As soon as you fall in love, it’s all gone. It’s gone just like that.” And he snapped his fingers in front of my face, startling me… “If you don’t manage to escape before that happens, there comes a point when the only way out is to push forward, to embrace the disaster… That’s why you have to marry them. The objective of the wedding ritual is to regain all the power that you have lost to begin with. Once she becomes your wife, you can say to yourself that you have her, you have become a man again, your power has returned…” I thanked him for his advice and then we laughed over shared memories for a few hours; but I knew that I would never feel that I could have her, in every moment that we spent together, there was an irrevocable promise of losing her forever, sooner than later, and that made each moment that much more delicate, unique, exhilarating, precious… I was always aware, even from the very first weekend we spent together wrapped in each other’s presence, swimming in a space of broken limits catalyzed by LSD and orgasmic ecstasy, how much she covered up of herself; I knew she was hiding her most common thoughts, her vulgar insecurities, her pedestrian fears, (all in an attempt to safeguard that aura of exceptional self-assurance that had attracted me to her in the first place) I always knew it but I stayed silent; I could see how much she worked to protect herself, to remain unseen; I was always terribly aware of how often she became terribly defensive (at first, she had tried to cover this recurring attitude with a veneer of carelessness and disdain but my attention was on her so firmly that even the slightest shift in her eyes became a clear giveaway, a doorway into her secret domain; eventually she came to accept that I could see her and that, as much as I could see, I still loved her… and yet instead of opening up to me, and finding solace in my unrelenting devotion, this knowledge drove her to a deeper hiding place, a chamber so unreachable that eventually it began to swallow the light that had once embraced us…) I knew that it was all unconscious, all her efforts, all her barriers; I knew it and I knew what it was that she thought that she was hiding, all of it, as much as I needed to know… but they were only habits, routine loops of ingrained behavior, an acquired taste for self-inflicted suffering, masochism as precious melodramatic melody wrapped in terminal sadness; all of it, habits and nothing else; I knew all along that sooner or later she would run away, it was clear from the first time we kissed in her apartment, when I saw her close her eyes and tilt her head backwards and our lips met, even in that moment I could hear the distant call of future heartbreak, maybe even from the first time I hugged her to say hello in front of the BART station, I knew I was destined to lose her, I was sure of it; and when it finally happened, I would find myself alone, in a very dark place devoid of warmth or happiness, a place with no hope, no escape, no glimpse of redemption… But for now, I had her attention, and in her divine and golden presence, I had found a new kind of freedom, something I had never experienced before, something I was not willing to surrender regardless of the risks involved… She turned on the stereo in my room one night, turned it up loud, an album of dark industrial music that I had bought recently, heavy electronic rhythms punctured by sharp high frequency noises and a heavy deep voice slowly intoning a kind of speech-like melody; then she stood up in the darkened room and danced naked for me, spinning round and round, gliding over the intricate beats, her arms swimming in the shadows; from the bed, I stared at her body as she moved with the intense music, her smooth white skin, her short black hair, the few tattoos on her back, her narrow shoulders, her thick hard nipples, her carefully trimmed pubic hair, her muscular legs, her shining eyes… “If you love me,” she told me without speaking, “just watch me, watch me carefully, put all your focus on me… If you don’t look, if you can’t fix your attention on me and on nothing else, then that tells me you don’t care, and if you don’t care then I don’t matter, and if I don’t matter, then I don’t exist, and if I don’t exist now, then I never did… Right?” She wanted to be the one and only focus of my attention, she wanted me all to herself, (she openly told me this once during a particularly intense moment of intimate revelations- she said it clearly and meant it as a warning to me- but I had known it all along and it was too late for me to heed any warnings) but at the same time, she feared the intensity of my obsession with her, my unrelenting need to feel her presence and the feeling of magic buoyancy that came along with it; (I called her constantly, I drove her and waited for her when she had a late appointment at some client’s house, I recurrently checked on her emotional state when she was with me, every slight change in her eyes could be a reason to check again…) Not enough attention would become a lack of heat, a cold death, a dark oblivion; too much attention would become an overwhelming fire, death by incineration, a climactic explosion with no survivors left behind… At one point, during one of our many psychedelic trips, I saw it all very clearly and distinctly, colorful shapes slowly tangling with each other in cold and empty space, two habits which were one and the same- both predetermined methods unconsciously designed to prepare the ground for her to eventually disappear; kill your dog in time, kill him before the night has even started, kill him long before it has a chance to howl… In that imagined future, where she would no longer be present, where she would become another fading memory, I would also be gone, the “I” that now loved her obsessively would be forced to disappear forever, it would die in silence and shame, and everything I had come to love and understand through my contact with her I was afraid would be gone as well, as if it had never happened… but tonight I watched her naked body swirling in the twilight of my room, a glowing shape of pure beauty responding to complex vibrations of stylized urban decay, delicate grace born of futuristic destruction, a kind of loving sensitivity emerging out of careless darkness… I allowed myself to identify completely with the beautiful apparition that was manifesting before me, an angel of pure light dancing among the shadows, holding a gift of unstable mercy high above her head… At times we traveled very far together, through the use of the psychedelics, through the deep synchronized breathing, through the ambient music, the overwhelming sensations of recurring physical touch, of flesh against flesh, presence imposed on presence… I felt that we had been transported to a very different place, somewhere completely new for both of us, somewhere that the world as I had known it could never reach… The most fundamental interaction, the only one that mattered, was between us and only between us, these two specific people that were now intertwined with each other in an emotional web of need, love and desire, and our expanding imaginations, our waking dreams and lucid encounters, awash in colors and sounds… what would happen later, where would all this lead, what would we become for each other after enough time had passed, none of it mattered, an entire universe was being brought forth out of a single touch, a distinct and particular future was cascading into being… For months I tried to write in my journal every day, trying to capture this experience, this moment of sheer wonder and exhilaration (the way she looked when I kissed her cheek while standing on the old Pacifica pier, the way she laughed when I stumbled over the stairway of her building and barely hung on to the banister, the way she brushed the side of my face when she detected a hint of sadness in my eyes…) but there was no way of writing enough declarative sentences to describe in full all that was happening, this unexplained event swirling around us, a speedily moving target, an entire world was changing as I wrote, too fast to hold, too liquid to contain in solid language… When I finally fell into a dark place, out of fear, anger and old resentments, she laughed at me, she laughed while standing over the side of my bed, and I tried to hide my face in shame; (embarrassed by my own anger and melodramatic self-pity) she spoke carefully and slowly, with a cold assurance that I found frightening and final; she said that I had at least some of the blame, if not all of it, for where I found himself now… “It’s not because you are a bad man, but because you are an idiot… you have allowed yourself to be pushed around by a woman,” and as she said those words, she leaned into my side and placed the weight of her body on me, emphasizing her female presence against my masculine body, “look, it is my place to seduce you, to pull you away from your plans, to destroy all that you have built over so many years; that is what I do… It is your role to resist, to make sure that I don’t break you, to insist on your carefully designed discipline, regardless of what I do to distract you; but you haven’t done a very good job of maintaining your world, you have allowed yourself to fall away from your clearly delineated path, you have allowed entropy to take over, you have fallen into a senseless distraction…” I felt completely beaten when at last she was finished with me; I could see the truth in what she had said, all of it made complete sense, but I didn’t like to see it, I didn’t want to admit it, I didn’t want to acknowledge my role in the game; it was the kind of truth that hurts too much, it was better to hide from it, it was better to forget it and place the blame on bad luck or evil intentions… Our love affair was not the day to day process that we lived together but the story that I would remember after she was gone, the way I would remember it, the specific moments; standing by a foggy window in front of the ocean by Stinson Beach surrounded by candles, kissing her atop Twin Peaks overlooking the yellow lights of San Francisco while a plane flew overhead, laying naked under a blue sky and staring at her face as it shifted from simple pleasure to orgasm to contentment to rapturous embrace… all those moments would now be shaped and framed by our final goodbye, they would be defined by the darkness that had always been waiting at the end of the road… in this lonely future, when I would sit down to tell her story, it would all be framed by the sight of her slowly walking away from my car under dark clouds, holding a small backpack with her left hand, the sound of a sports announcer in the distance, the smell of meat cooking sliding over to me from a nearby house… This was the end that I had expected from the start, this was the end that had always been unavoidable, this was the end that had been implied in every single moment we had spent together; finally, I could sit alone in my room and acknowledge it, “it has finally happened, it's over. It's over.” I asked myself night after night: what did I get from all of it? After so many days of intense adoration and surrender, what was left behind in the aftermath if anything? One time I asked her about the music that she particularly loved and she carefully explained how she listened, how she had a different way of perceiving these recordings… For her, when she listened to free jazz or improv or industrial noise, she was listening to pure sound, raw vibrations, the world itself was speaking to her through tangled frequencies and disharmonious intervals, a direct message without any intermediaries, the most basic ground of unmediated communication with the infinite… After that conversation, sometimes we would listen to music together and I could sense that she was listening in this unusual way, I could see it in the way her face moved around even though her eyes were closed, I could feel that she was taking it all in from this very deeply grounded perspective that was so mysterious to me; I did my best to emulate her, I tried to join her in receiving these transmissions from the most vulnerable and open position within me, I tried, as much as I could, to set aside all my preconceived notions of form, harmony and melody and simply receive, swallow, process, transform, breathe… Sometimes I got her to listen to something else, to more straightforward old fashioned jazz, to bebop, to old romantic songs, to classical symphonies; she enjoyed them and thanked me for sharing them with her but ultimately, for her, they all seemed too stylized, too abstract and artificial, too cooked in comparison to the rawness she was accustomed to embracing… when I made the effort, I was sometimes able to listen the way she did, even if only for very brief moments, eventually those moments would become longer and longer, and they opened an entirely new doorway, a new relationship with sound and music, a new way of receiving the world itself in a raw state, detail within detail, a fractal infinity of restless living change… And I asked myself, after so many questions and so many multiplying answers, what did I learn about myself, if anything? Often, I had the impression that she was trying to keep up a certain image for my benefit; I always hoped this was not true and yet the impression kept on emerging from the back rooms of my mind, little gestures she would make that seemed calculated to elicit a certain reaction from me, recurring phrasings and stories that seemed to be somewhat fictionalized for my benefit… After so many years that she has been gone, so many years where I’ve only wrestled with my own memories, I have come to accept that she was in fact carefully creating an image to seduce me, and that I fell for that image to a certain degree, as much as she might have fallen for the partially artificial image I myself was projecting for her; the one that she met and she ultimately rejected was as much an artificial creation as a carefully composed piece of music, a random work of popular art… In watching her create an object of desire for me, I came to understand how I was doing that myself for her benefit… when I lightly touched her back, when she felt that sudden warmth spreading all over her body, just as I felt it coursing through my arm and my fingers, she turned to smile at me, in a way I had never seen anyone smile before, it was light and warmth and surrender, and it all came from her and flowed through me like liquid fire… right then and there, I felt that I could allow myself to get forever lost in the alluring seduction of her presence, I felt myself disappearing into a million fragments, what had seemed impossible for years was suddenly tangible, close, within my grasp; this was precisely what I had always heard about, this was what they meant in so many poems and so many songs… A few months later, sitting on her futon in her apartment, listening to a kind of rough ambient improvisation, a mix of pregnant silences and a hint of shifting rhythms under the surface, she suddenly kissed me intensely without any warning, and she whispered something in my ear and I could feel her hot breath against my face and I could feel the warmth of her small body pressed against me but I couldn’t hear what she had said, I couldn’t make out the specific words, I could only feel it… So intensely and obsessively did I identify with that single unintelligible whisper that in that one moment, she became my entire personal universe; outside of her, the whole world had become unintelligible and inadequate, a gray and fading reflection of the world I had known before… To others that saw me in those days, driven by this vision of ecstatic love and romantic surrender, I appeared lost, confused, unwell, utterly derailed from the path I had so carefully outlined, something was clearly wrong with me; (some of them thought I might be doing drugs and they were correct when they thought that; a lot of our time together was spent under the influence of strong doses of psychedelics, feeding each other improvised suggestions and nonsensical poems while swimming in an ocean of open possibility; some of them thought she had put a spell on me, some kind of witchcraft; they were correct about that as well, I had felt it happening when the magical operation went into effect, and she had known what she was doing every step of the way; the signs were there and I knew enough to recognize them; she was in control from the very first moment she turned around to look at me; she was in control and I wouldn’t have it any other way…) When I asked her to stay with me forever, to set aside any other plans and solidify our basic connection, ensure our unified future against any other mundane eventualities, she made all kinds of arguments against my proposal, all of them without logic or clear reasoning, all created and dropped on the spot, an effusive outburst of words to avoid saying the obvious… It happened so many times in the final months we were together, a moment of decision, a single question, a few hours of arguing (in my car parked by the beach with the sound of the waves behind us, in her apartment while kids played outside, laughing uproariously for no apparent reason, in a restaurant while other diners tried to not stare at us and we tried to be quiet…) sometimes there was much screaming and much fighting, there were allusions to the past and to possible futures, allusions to objectives and multiple unknowns, then she would calm down and I would calm down with her, and we would hug and kiss and everything was fine again for a moment, but it took a lot of effort on both our parts, and each time it happened, it became more and more difficult to come back, to step away from the edge of catastrophe; the next day she would say once again: “I might have to leave soon. I don’t think this is my place any longer… I love you but it might be my time to go…” And again, I couldn’t believe she could even think this, I couldn’t accept that this was even a possibility (even though underneath my refusal was a clear knowledge that there was no way to avoid this terminal diagnosis…) There was one clear recurrent habit I had observed in myself often through the years, maybe the most fundamental habit of my entire life: when I thought that I might fail in any given objective, in any endeavor, I would decide it was better to not try at all, I would rather give up before even starting, and yet here, with her, I knew with absolute certainty that I would fail and I couldn’t resist the unspeakable pleasure that came with every moment of falling, every moment inching closer to a final disaster… When I touched her back that night, when she turned around and smiled at me, in a way I had never seen anyone smile before, and I felt that I could get forever lost in the alluring seduction of her smile, in the blinding warmth that slipped into me through her presence, I faced a clear choice, a singular moment of true decision… We were just two strangers at a party and nothing else, and nothing needed to happen between us, nothing was predetermined or laid out; I smiled back at her and there was a moment when neither of us said anything, neither of us moved at all, suspense, tension, expectation, invitation… and then I walked away. As intense as our contact had been in those few seconds, I never looked back. To lose her so soon was to find myself alone in the middle of a party full of strangers; to lose her before I ever got to know her was to find a special kind of freedom, a pearl so precious that it has no price; I had found a way to close the shining chamber before it fully had me in its grasp.

Secret Pathways

 

Up or down, light or heavy, right or wrong, big or small, real or imaginary, good or evil, sleep or awake, left or right, the distinct truth or an ambiguous lie… all these carefully determined distinctions, all foundations built upon the shifting sands of flimsy words; a thin veil separates one from the other, a veil which at times seems impossible to find or touch (making the distinctions seem insurmountable) and at times it vanishes as if it was never there to begin with… Our common language creates a recurrent illusion of permanence, nouns in themselves point to stability and affirm it with intoned finality, the promise of an ending implied at the start of a melody, the final cadence hidden in the very first note of a song… our common reality changes all the time and language and its meanings change as well, from year to year, from hour to hour, from moment to moment; but the illusion that each given moment is permanent, that each given concept is eternal and final persists, in spite of the transitory nature of its carrier signals, the illusion is maintained by the sound of the grammar, by the cadence of its hidden music, the secret medium of its invisible power… I was laying down in the middle of a large round room with a tall ceiling, I had my eyes open and I was breathing slowly, in and out, in and out… there was a large drum circle going on around me and I was trying to make sure that my breathing would stay synchronized with the music, with the insistent rhythm of the drums; I knew that my old friend was also here and there were a few others with him, members of his esoteric work group, they were all sitting somewhere behind me where I couldn’t see them directly; they began to sing a song together, I could recognize their particular voices, their sound as a group had a certain air of familiarity that filled me with a sense of nostalgia; they sang a very old song, something that was already here before the conquistadors came, an old song that had been roughly translated into Spanish many years ago but had somehow retained something of its old archaic magic… I heard them sing it forcefully and I could feel the intensity of their commitment to the simple melody as they sang, the raw emotions that spilled through their mouths, but they were having trouble synchronizing themselves to the drums, to the music, and as they attempted to fix their problems of timing and harmonic resonance, they each went in separate directions… I could hear and feel that they were on the verge of falling completely apart, an ominous chaos was implied in the collision of their various sincere impulses… I woke up choking, gasping, inhaling forcefully. It took me a while to recover as I took in large gulps of air, trying to calm down and regain a sense of stability; the clock said it was 1 in the morning, I could still hear the echo of the drums and of the old song in the back of my mind; I closed my eyes again and allowed the ancient rhythm to take me for a ride… I have been carefully acting out a long story that has been repeated over and over for thousands of years, sometimes I can recognize it (a doorway, a style of hair, a smile, the sound of an old woman laughing), sometimes I get lost in it (a sudden reversal of fortune, a knock on the main door of my home, a single gunshot in the distance, the howling of a pack of dogs…) the basic story is always basically the same even if it’s also slightly different (different enough to be unsettling, similar enough to be uncanny); the script has been carefully written ahead of time but it is always slightly improvised, there is an ongoing open invitation to be part of the improvisation but I often refuse to participate, I would rather stay safe within the known guidelines of my habitual shape for no apparent reason… She woke up and called for him in the middle of the night, a soft voice in the darkness calling for help; it was my fault, I had opened her door and then closed it again, somewhat violently; it was a careless unintentional move on my part, I was only starting to get my bearings in this new place and in my wanderings, I had come to the wrong room by accident… But regardless of my lack of intention, the sudden opening and closing of her door had startled her and she had jumped up from her bed in a sudden wave of shock and fear, she knew that there was nobody else in the house besides the two of them, her and my old friend who was now her partner; nobody else could have opened and closed her door, and yet it had happened. When I heard her calling my friend’s name, I jumped backwards rapidly and flew into a very thin crack in the wall, a narrow space barely visible by human eyes; I remained still and listened to everything that was happening around me, the wind outside, the vaguely rhythmic sound of the windows being shaken; my friend came out of his room quickly and asked her what was wrong; the two of them searched throughout the house to see if someone was hiding, they searched one room after another, they looked in the many closets and bathrooms, they looked in the same place more than once; my friend had always been methodical in his approach to any challenge, but of course, in the end, they determined that nobody was there, they were alone and safe, and yet they knew that her door had been opened and closed distinctly and forcefully with a clear sense of purpose. My mistake. I saw it all from my impossible hiding place in the crack in the wall… Eventually, they went back to sleep; I had the sense that my friend was thinking of me as he slipped into a dream, he had a vague impression of the doorway through which I had traveled, he could almost envision it in that twilight space before losing consciousness, he could almost see it glowing not too far away, the little amulet that I sent him through the mail, the little piece of me that was now a guest in his home… At this time, I can’t physically go to where he is; the human dimension has taken control of my body and is holding it hostage; but I can visit him in other ways, I can find my own passageways through the labyrinth that normal humans can’t trace or even talk about… When I first found myself here, I stumbled around the house, from stairway to living room to the windows at the front and even into the attic, all of it was completely unfamiliar to me; eventually I accidentally found my way into her room… For a moment I saw her sleeping; a middle-aged woman with long black hair and smooth white skin; after some time had passed, I fell away back into darkness and I found myself in the old house, the large house back in El Salvador where I lived for so many years, my childhood home; I was in the living room, the furniture was all completely different but I could still recognize the place; there was a little coffee table in the middle of the room, not the same one I remembered but very similar and almost in the exact same spot, there was thin sunlight coming through the side windows, there was the sound of a loud mechanical clock counting off the seconds as they passed by, a kind of soft insistent drum… I heard someone coming in through the front door, the voice of a man that sounded very familiar to me and yet I couldn’t place it, I couldn’t give it a name; a man in his thirties, a bit heavy set, brown sweaty skin, thin alert eyes; he was walking into the living room with a younger woman, I had the sense that they were coming to get something they had left behind, something they had somehow forgotten in this old dusty uninhabited house… The man stepped into the living room in a forceful, intentional way that called attention to itself; I reacted to his sudden movement and slipped beneath the sofa and pressed myself against the floor; he then spoke up loudly to the entire space as if perceiving that someone else was invisibly present: “Whoever is here, whoever you are, don’t be afraid, we are only here to get a few things… we will not disturb you… we will be gone before you know it…” They then lifted something big and heavy together, a kind of old-fashioned chest made of metal and leather; it had been sitting off to the side, close to the windows and the doorway that led to the old backyard; slowly and with some effort they carried the heavy chest towards the main doorway of the house; I watched it all from the floor, safe in my hiding spot; the man turned around once more before closing the door; “We are leaving now. Thank you for allowing us to take this with us. We won’t disturb you any further.” I know I have visited that house many times through the years; so many nights wandering in these rooms and hallways… such recurrent strong attachments, particularly to a place that I am apparently not interested in consciously, can be likened to a small flame, a flame that could easily burn out at any time if smothered or ignored, but somehow it refuses to go away completely, regardless of my conscious thoughts, regardless of my seeming desires, I still find my way back here more often that I even realize (it’s only sometimes that I manage to remember…) Whenever I come to visit, I feel that I am standing at a crossroads, a threshold of change, a vortex of possibilities; I am about to see something that I have avoided for decades, I am closing in on an uncomfortable realization…  The myths that have grown around these nighttime experiences are all stories, legends, exaggerations, linguistic constructs of one kind or another, all of which can only vaguely suggest the actual experience, tentatively point to the real possibility of such an unlikely event, something that would otherwise seem impossible, a feint of pure imagination, a tall tale, a lie… Sometimes I find myself surrounded by my old friends, both living and dead, the one that went for a midnight walk with me, screaming hard rock songs into the darkness while everyone in the neighborhood slept, the one with whom we would talk endlessly for hours after the time we were supposed to go to sleep and I would concentrate on his voice while I stared at the shifting shadows on the wall, the one that read horror books with me and smiled at me in a way I had never seen anyone smile before and I felt that I could get forever lost in the alluring seduction of her smile, the one that taught me to love the hidden phantom, the secret musician that hides behind the walls, and explained the meaning of the words that he sang, the one with whom we ran around over the neighbor’s roofs oblivious to the dangers of being shot or beaten for no reason at all; I find myself surrounded by all of them, and together we move around the old city, sliding through secret pathways, the kind of pathways that only children are aware of, narrow tunnels, broken fences, forgotten bridges, abandoned walls… I lead them as well as I can and I try to not surrender to any kind of hesitation; I know the way to some degree because I used these secret pathways when I was a boy and I still vaguely remember them (This is not the city where we all grew up together. It’s another city that is strange to them and yet somehow familiar to me.) Last night we found ourselves looking at a pair of enormous stone doors, three times as tall as a man, four times as thick as regular walls; in my memory I could see them as they had been once, I had been here before, standing in front of doors just like these; but they had been wide open, that’s how I remembered them, imposing, heavy, intimidating, but open; and tonight they were closed and there was no apparent way to pull them open, there was no way to call for help; the entire space seemed changed in radical ways that seemed impossible to me; there were now large new barriers that stood in front of us and separated us from our apparent objective; large underground rivers that we could only see from an angle, the heavy current slipping under large veined stone planks that formed the floor, sprinkled here and there with green vegetation; I looked at it all from above, several floors up; even though we could still see them, the large stone doors were no longer accessible, something had changed and the change was apparently permanent… I looked up over the edge of the tall walls that loomed over me and I saw a great shining white pyramid not too far away, I was so close to where something wonderful was happening but I would have to learn to fly in order to get in to see it, to be a part of it; flying freely was the only way I would ever get over these walls, the closed doors would become completely irrelevant if gravity was not an obstacle… I had engaged with so many constructs through the years, street legends, video game simulations, cinematic approximations, all of which could only point to the actual experience, all of which were only a vague fading approximation to the real thing… Pattern is the only order I can trust now, the only shape that matters, these days I care only about specific details, tiny decisions, minuscule adjustments, microscopic flurries of creativity; the overall composition is unimportant, the underlying meaning is implicitly dead and false, if it can be spoken at all; the fundamental inner structure will reveal itself eventually, like a sculpture that slowly emerges from a large virgin rock, blow by blow, adjustment after adjustment, choice after choice… Certain details of my voyage were specifically characteristic of mythical infernal descents; for example, the black dog and the old porter that we all saw as we passed by a large seemingly abandoned warehouse in the old city, on our way to the stone labyrinth where we would encounter the large closed doors… Even as I saw the two figures out of the corner of my eyes, I remembered their significance, I could almost hear the voice of the Magician speaking calmly as he sat next to me on a white marble slab in the middle of an old cemetery in El Salvador; “Look at them over there. The old man with the hat and the large black dog licking his paws…  they are there to guard the entrance to the realm of the dead. Look at them closely and remember how they look. Someday you will encounter them for real… someday it will be imperative that you recognize them…” When people told me about places and people like these when I was a kid, they had inadvertently changed almost everything that mattered in the process of their telling, all the most important details had been removed, all the sensations and the textures had been forgotten, they had neglected to mention the music that was present through most of it, what had seemed stylized and abstract in my imagination, almost translucent and flimsy and unreal, here it all became rough and sincere, heavy and ominous, too ancient to be an invention, too real to be denied… There are so many myths that have grown around this kind of voyage; stories, folk tales, poetic descriptions; but they can only outline the treacherous pathway towards a true encounter with the underlying mystery; the kind of unobstructed movement that I was currently experiencing would only seem barely conceivable during my regular life; I found myself in an atmosphere saturated with delights, all fear was absent, particularly fear of abandonment or death, as if such possibilities had been transcended long ago when I wasn’t paying attention, a kind of doorway that can only be crossed when one is not facing in that particular direction… the whole mood of this place implied something magical and inherently meaningful, at the very least,  and among other things, it implied a kind of restless eternity, a living permanence of infinite potential change… I thought of the couple moving the large chest out of my old family house; I had an immediate reaction as soon as I knew that they were gone- a kind of relief, another night where I can avoid opening the chest, another day when the secret can stay hidden; I rested against the cold floor under the sofa and curled up into a tiny ball, something smaller than a coin; I recognized the movement, it was the same thing I had done before in a similar situation in a completely different world… I looked up at the walls again, everything was shining and new and overwhelming, there was a kind of recurrent music all around me, a simple music, both rough and sincere, endlessly predictable yet recurrently improvised, that repeating pattern is the only reality I can ultimately trust; here, where I found myself, I cared only about the details, the ultimate meaning of everything I was seeing was unimportant… How would I talk about it later? How would I describe it? What meaning would I come up with after the fact? It would possibly reveal itself eventually, after days or weeks or years; but I wasn’t eager to find an answer; an answer is just flimsy language trying to achieve certainty, and here there is only the eternal insistent rhythm and an infinite underlying drone… A place like this, alive in every detail, constantly shifting before my eyes, vivid and bright and overwhelming in its complex and intricate beauty, such a place only seemed conceivable in fantasies, mine or borrowed, a glimpse of eternity, a pulsating space beyond time as I have known it, beyond the ongoing sequence of years, life, history, evolution, beyond memory or anticipation… I can say, at the very least, a lot of my regular perceptual habits were gone, particularly anxiety over abandonment, loneliness or death, regret, attachment, nostalgia, yearning…  I was now immersed in a recurrently reborn vision of shifting permanence from which all apparent fear was absent, an atmosphere saturated with delight and child-like wonder, a mood of open curiosity and alluring possibility… the structural linguistic order, the rules of the game by which our innermost thoughts are built, grouped, arranged and forgotten, that most intimate of structures which makes us particular, certain, defined… the order changes all the time, it can sometimes change so slowly that the changes are barely perceivable and easily ignored, it can sometimes change so quickly that our mind is barely able to catch up; but the overarching illusion that each given moment in time is somehow permanent, that each thought describes a concept or space or object that endures beyond the ravages of change and becoming… that illusion persists. My nighttime voyage, this deep dive into a hidden world of seeming unreality, has been repeated, must have been repeated, for thousands of years, always the same, always different, always predetermined, always improvised on the spot, always striking and surprising, always vaguely familiar… When I woke up, I was feeling very tired. I sat up for a moment and wrote down some of what I remembered: a drum circle, a pyramid, a wall, a river, a man talking to a woman, a house from another time… As I wrote, I knew there was so much I couldn’t capture, so much I couldn’t describe, but I wrote down what I could write and accepted that some parts would be left to be forgotten. Then I laid back down and breathed deeply for a moment. I watched TV for a couple of hours and slowly forgot everything. There were some people arguing on the screen. I think it was a show I had watched before. I shook my head and I laughed and I shook my head. And I slowly began to fall asleep again.