I think that's it, I tell her. And I dread tomorrow because I know what's going to come. I have put so much of myself into this, all of me and all of it without fear that deep fear, for the first time not holding back, slowly learning that I didn't need to hold back, to keep apart. Destruction had no place in this one. On the eve of its end I am shattered but not the emotions because they are a boil, rolling against and across each other, shifting and ebbing, tides phases seasons changing. Shattered in learning how to sleep, exhausted and unable to sleep, hungry and uninterested in eating. She tells me to be a whole person but I'd never been more of one.
So she tells me about God. God and God's place in a loving relationship. God's role in every successful relationship she's known, and God's role in hers that steadfast thing, that great and beautiful thing and the great and beautiful people in it. I say of course God's in the relationships she knows because she mostly knows relationships that involve God but that I think her faith is a precious thing. I've never known faith in God. In a Catholic house I did the rituals but I never knew faith and I thought it was a lie for so long.
I had faith in this one thing that I built, that I helped craft and I'll say so tomorrow. Doomed tomorrow. I'm wrong here. The difference is that God might exist and might not and the faith is that God does or does not but that in which I place my faith does not exist at all. So I am wrong, and at some point that thing I built I was building by myself and I never noticed, laboring alone on a lie.
She asks what happens when it's all over and I say in the end that is all, it ends and there is oblivion but she cannot accept this. It says there is no meaning but there is. It says the meaning means more, that a limited thing is lovelier for its scarcity and not to be squandered. That good is done for its own sake and not a cosmic cookie. That it's all the more important to cause an impact because nothing else will be left.
There without meaning to she's led me to a much better path, this friend I never thought would mean so much to me and one of so many to this lucky low man.
I've been a fool to think myself so strong and unbreakable, and more a fool for thinking one relationship makes me so. It's the connections. All the myriad, confusing, glorious connections.
I think that you may not realize it, but that's poetry.
Quote from: Mrs. Nigelson on November 12, 2013, 07:33:37 AM
I think that you may not realize it, but that's poetry.
So is the dreadful hours. :lulz:
I just needed to get it out of me, and fuck the result. It was very helpful. Thanks for reading it!
Anytime.
Other than the works of Kitty Parson, I pretty much only write poetry when I'm heartbroken.
Quote from: Mrs. Nigelson on November 12, 2013, 03:21:03 PM
Anytime.
Other than the works of Kitty Parson, I pretty much only write poetry when I'm heartbroken.
I read it when I'm feeling Holy™.
Quote from: Dirty Old Uncle Roger on November 12, 2013, 03:45:01 PM
Quote from: Mrs. Nigelson on November 12, 2013, 03:21:03 PM
Anytime.
Other than the works of Kitty Parson, I pretty much only write poetry when I'm heartbroken.
I read it when I'm feeling Holy™.
For me, those two conditions might be the same thing. :lulz:
Seconding Nigel's poetry comment. Beautiful writing, EOC.
Quote from: Mrs. Nigelson on November 12, 2013, 03:49:05 PM
Quote from: Dirty Old Uncle Roger on November 12, 2013, 03:45:01 PM
Quote from: Mrs. Nigelson on November 12, 2013, 03:21:03 PM
Anytime.
Other than the works of Kitty Parson, I pretty much only write poetry when I'm heartbroken.
I read it when I'm feeling Holy™.
For me, those two conditions might be the same thing. :lulz:
Rudyard Kipling gets my jihad gland going.
Part I.
I've been walking. Just the parks and the bike paths. They aren't the prettiest places in the city but they've got people and I need that, even just that passing nod to a jogger it's been meaning something lately. It's mostly older folks, during the day when I have the time. Retired, I imagine.
There are the people and their dogs. I like dogs and I like watching people who go to a park to walk them because they seem to really care. They look like they're really enjoying it and that's good. Simple pleasures. I'd get a dog myself if they were allowed in my apartment. I'd move to a place that allows them if I could afford it.
Today was the biggest park in the city. Duck pond, zoo, it's where the fair grounds are in the summer and most of the big events that aren't downtown. A younger guy walked by me wearing sunglasses and a little hunched over. I could almost feel a stare coming from behind the dark lenses and it felt familiar. It felt like the other young guy from Fairhaven on Monday. He was deep in a hood, then. And on Sunday at the park near my house with a huge cell phone pressed close to his face, hand and arm obscuring his features.
"Wait!" I said as he went by. He stopped fast. He stopped like he was expecting it.
"Eater of Clowns," he said, not turning.
"So you're the same one from the last two times. Should I know you?"
"You do." He turned around with an old smile, yellowed like well used piano keys, weathered like antique scrimshaw, dimpled and cracked. "Walk with me," he said and he breezed past me.
I sped up to catch his stride. Sped up a lot. "So who are you?" I asked him.
"I shortened your friend's fingers for him. He was lonely. I took a bit of bone from your father's left knee. He ought to be more careful with money. And then there's that trouble with your mother's foot, for the bit of peace she wanted so badly," he said. The words were wistful and hungry. Reminiscent, fond.
I stopped. "You're him."
"I am what you so crudely named The Marrowman," he smiled again proudly, elephant graveyards and week old shattered eggshells, steer skulls and sepulchers. He was still walking. I hesitated. Then I caught up to him again.
"Whatever you want, I'm not interested," I said flatly.
"Oh I think I can convince you," he said. We turned a sharp right away from the park and crossed over down to Chestnut St. "I have a special service for you. Among my most popular and certainly a favorite of mine."
Part II.
"Listen, I said I-"
"You can have her back," he interrupted, stopping this time. He took off the sunglasses but his face was still obscure. I could feel the gaze as clear as anything, though. He faced me and leaned in a bit, a sympathetic little worry appearing across undefined features, a salesman in his element. A fisherman setting a hook.
And a stupid, weak snapper said to him, "I can?"
"An inch. One inch from your leg and she's yours, and look," he gestured. A middle aged couple walked toward us, hands held tightly. Easy conversation passed between them and they leaned in close together. "Satisfied customers," he said. "Jeanine left David fifteen years ago. Poor David. It's a good thing I found him when I did." He paused and shifting, colorless eyes locked onto mine briefly. "Who knows what he would have done if I hadn't found him."
The pair of them stopped a dozen yards or so away, just to the left of the sidewalk. David had to tie his shoe. Jeanine was gently pushing him as he stooped down, wobbling him as he tried to balance. They laughed lightly.
"I don't take that bit of leg for myself," he said. "That's not how this particular deal works."
"So you do this one out of the kindness of your heart? Where does it go?"
"The other person gets it. In this case," he waved his hand to the couple up the street, "Jeanine has it. Crude humor aside, you have to admit there's some amount of romance in it. A part of you becoming a part of her forever, seamlessly."
"What do you get out of it?"
"Support," he said. "In all the other cases I get the slivers and chips of bone, but they're never thankful. They resent me. Me who simply delivers what they want. Me who keeps them going another day. But here, with Dave and Jeannie, he calls her Jeannie, they don't think me so bad. Maybe they consider my offers again down the road when the wallet is short or say," he looked meaningfully at Dave and his voice dropped, "have a turn of health." He laughed, hollow. "Fortune forbid."
The couple stood again to walk on. They'd switched places on the sidewalk. As they passed they did not speak to each other or make any acknowledgement to the pair of us watching them. They scowled and they seemed to lean away from one another.
"What do you think?" He asked me.
A deep chill and fear ran through me as I read this.
That's some good writing.
This is somewhat terrifying.
Part III.
"You can't make people love one another," I said quietly.
"Evidence points otherwise."
"No. Jeanine had no choice."
"Does it matter? She's happy. Don't be naïve. Things happen to people every day that they have no control over. Car accidents, natural disasters, theft," he said.
"You're naming only bad things."
"The...lottery? Look, nobody's going to force anybody to do anything. She'll just realize her mistake and she'll come back to you. That's it. You've been putting other people before yourself and where has it gotten you?"
"What if I don't want her back?"
"You're fooling yourself, now. In a week or two that wave of sympathy, oh and tell me again how much you love everyone's pity, that wave of sympathy will dissipate and all your close friends and family will want to just move on with their lives. You'll still be alone and it'll still hurt and you know that. In a few months when every day of climbing into the cold bed cuts you worse and worse you'll get bitter and resentful like you always do and you'll be a chore for them. They won't want to spend time with you and it's night after night in your apartment."
I shuddered. "It won't be like that again. I'm a better man now."
"He's fucking her like crazy, you know. Like an animal. Like you haven't done in over a year. Like she needs. And she's screaming her head off and she doesn't need to think about someone else because he's right there with her."
"Stop," I pleaded. My hands shook and I could barely breath.
"She's happy, really happy, for the first time in months and doesn't have to pretend day to day."
"Please stop," I begged. His figure was as wavy as his face as my eyes welled up.
"She tells him she loves him, and she means it," he said simply, honestly. "Do you want to know exactly how long it's been since she meant it with you? I can tell you where you were standing the last time any of it was real."
I stared at a spot at the ground and I glanced up at the terrible man. I looked back at David and Jeanine, turning the corner now to walk parallel to Buttonwood Park, hand in hand. I flexed my leg absently.
No! Augh! Don't give in!
Part IV.
He smiled boiled pork bones and the whale skeleton in the museum downtown.
My phone vibrated in my pocket and this time, I smiled. He recoiled and in that awful face, a glare.
It was a boiling sea of hopelessness and doubt. It was all the biting, incisive words he'd spoken made real and certain, horribly certain and inevitable. I doubled over onto the cement, clawing the ground. I retched and hoped and hoped something would come up because it hurt, as though I could vomit the hollow, heavy lump in my chest and it would pass but it didn't.
I laughed. It wracked like a sob and some of it might have been one but I laughed at the thing before me. I hauled myself to my feet and I laughed at its twisted face until that, too, hurt.
"You're an apparition," I told him, "you're a ghost. You're a niggling thought that hits at the weakest moment and everyone feeds it eventually and you'll always be powerful but you'll never be strong because all you are is states of mind. You're a filter on reality that can be stripped away. You are between me and the real world and right now, at this moment, I can see you and I can remove you." I laughed.
The Marrow Man drew himself up, looming as only an ancient thing can do. He spoke with shaking fury, "I cannot be removed forever. I am of the moment because you are a thing of moments, and in one of these you'll want nothing more than the briefest respite, the hint of a hope. They always do. You shall find me again there."
"I know," I said. I turned my back to the thing and I walked back toward the park. When I looked back he stood there waiting.
As he always does.
This is so good, EOC. So good I'm afraid to go to sleep tonight.
Thanks. It felt great, I just wrote and wrote until it came out. I had to think about the ending a bit because version one pretty much ended when the phone rang and it came across as an after school special with the bad guy beaten by the power of friendship.
EoC, that was amazing.
It made me feel feels.
That was not true, but it was true.
That's what happens.
I am terrified of the Marrow Man.
Because he wants pieces.
But we never know which ones before it's too late.
Thank you. I'm glad I was able to write The Marrow Man again, even if it was for this purpose. I can't even remember the other thread his stuff is in so I wasn't sure how I described him before. I'm sticking with the bone teeth for future use. Not enamel or calcified layers, bone. Like what's left after you eat a good smoked rib.
Edit: Found it. (http://www.principiadiscordia.com/forum/index.php/topic,33730.0.html)
It turns out I ended both of them almost the exact same way!
Quote from: Eater of Clowns on November 14, 2013, 05:14:23 AM
Thank you. I'm glad I was able to write The Marrow Man again, even if it was for this purpose. I can't even remember the other thread his stuff is in so I wasn't sure how I described him before. I'm sticking with the bone teeth for future use. Not enamel or calcified layers, bone. Like what's left after you eat a good smoked rib.
Edit: Found it. (http://www.principiadiscordia.com/forum/index.php/topic,33730.0.html)
It turns out I ended both of them almost the exact same way!
We need a Marrow Man short story collection in the future.
Fucking amazing!
This is so so good. I love the marrow man, he's scary as shit.
Holy fuckballs
The Marrow Man.
He says he's taking a piece of bone, but what is he taking really?
:fnord: (http://www.principiadiscordia.com/forum/index.php/topic,35852.msg1314436.html#msg1314436)
Quote from: Kai on November 17, 2013, 11:12:45 PM
Marrow Man. ? He says he's taking a piece of bone, but what is he taking really?
Love it. Can hear David and Jeanie as they exit the park, walk past the Butcher shop and get an impromptu Marrowbone and Cleaver performance. Bravo!
Prepare yourself for vented drivel. Murky inane self-absorbed garbage that I just need to let out:
I don't know how to act, even these some four months later. The initial flood of support washed nothing away and in its wake a rot slowly settles, thick ugly foundation stuff, choking mildews and malignant molds. I'm on a constant search for fresh water. I feel like a beggar.
A single winter isn't long enough to reconcile the life I thought I had ahead of me. There are too many individual things to sort out, too many parts malfunctioning in the engine. There's the rage in all its directions. Inward for letting so precious a thing slip away, for accepting defeat so quickly, for this great heaping horrible pride, pride of kings and gods and too much for me. Pride dangling a body from a marionette's strings. Outward to the one I trusted more than any other person I ever dared. Outward to the other man.
I let go altogether. I've seen her twice since the breakup while she picked up things she left behind. We texted back and forth a little bit, talked on facebook. Nothing real. A year ago when her brother's girlfriend of four years left him, she didn't agree with how the girl was keeping him so close; like it'd be easier for him if the break were clean. I know she's doing the same with me. I haven't attempted contact because, hey, pick a reason: I hope it will help to move on, I hope she'll see my illusion of doing well and it'll hurt, I can't be some sad wretch clinging onto that great unreal ghost of two years.
I've been running and writing letters. Both help, to some degree. I've been writing to a pretty woman I've known for a while and things looked promising between us, like maybe a new beauty to nurture and a move forward. We met up a few times, even. I don't know if we both wanted something to be there, but there didn't seem to be. A great relationship, maybe, but not one of love.
I'm still in love with my ex. That's all there is. There hasn't been a day where I don't think of her. Lately I feel, absurdly, like I want her to know that. That's all. Just to know it, and nothing else. What's so unhealthy about some small knowledge?
I'm tired and tense. I can feel muscles tightened and coiled but I don't know how to let them go. My vacation to Colombia is coming in two weeks and I keep thinking how easy it would be to disappear in that country. My step mother has family that owns a cattle farm and I'll just be vaquero Americano, yeah? Never learn Spanish, just never speak again, living on coffee and beans. I don't believe in fresh starts unburdened by the big messy piles we keep building. New beginnings are only made once in a lifetime. But I believe in new air and sweeping grandiose change, in stupid romantic false futures. I chased one for two years.
"When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see that it is safe to fart."
― Helen Keller
That's tough. Especially without contact...Which seems like it would be easier, but it usually isn't.
I have found that for myself, the hardest thing about moving on is reconciling with the idea that the future I planned is not the future I'm going to have.
Before Friday, I was fine. Even during the date, or whatever, I was having fun. I went to bed happy that night. Then for the last five days I've been a fucking wreck.
Anyway, thanks all. I may just be conflating all of this with an overall depressive state. I just broke down over a couple of medical bills that I am more than capable of paying. Small things are getting to me in big ways.