"I see you cause you won't get out of my way
I hear you cause you won't quit screaming my name
I feel you cause you won't stop touching my skin
I need you, they're coming to take you away."
-- BREAKING BENJAMIN, `Away'.

ANIMATORIAL.
by Rewired,
12/04/04,
4:55 AM.

Something strange is going on.

Over the years I have noted remarkable similarities in the girls I found myself attracted to. Some of these were blatantly obvious things that could be easily explainable by the instincts that make sense now thanks to my growing knowledge of evolutionary psychology. It is certainly incomplete as an explanation, however, because unlike animals we have a complex psychology. Our nervous system has the ability to `learn’, to be conditioned and imprinted, to absorb complex patterns that make us distinct as individuals. And due to our programmability (by variables of intensity and repetition, it seems) our genetically hardwired instinctual programs become flexible to a degree; we can even wage a war against them. Lost in the depths of thought, we forget to eat and sleep. Morals can inhibit the drive for sex.

And the unique patterns each of us aquires also makes human relations, and certainly our sex life, very different and much more complicated than other species who reproduce sexually. Why? Because we don't only look for a mate who fits the criteria demanded by our instincts, but by the criteria demanded by our society and culture as well as our own, unique personalities.

And in our personalities we find the real mystery.

Though not all of the qualities consistent in the girls I've been insatiably attracted to were initially `hidden' ones, enough of them were for me to note the parallels and begin wondering about it all. By `hidden’ qualities I mean to say things I didn't discover, at least consciously, until well after I was attracted to them and had engaged in lengthy conversations and interactions with them. Not everyone on my list of previous fixations or relationships have all the same things in common, hidden or otherwise, but so many strange things seem to tie them together that it becomes harder and harder to ignore as time goes on. It's like certain groups of them hold pieces to a puzzle, and if you put the pieces together you find a personality binding all of them together. It's as if through these women, I've been chasing some invisible girl -- some girl that in a more psychological and less occult sense, `possesses’ them and perhaps obscures my sight, disabling me from perceiving these specific women as they really are. She has a dark side and a light side, too. And with her, she brings not only the puzzle-pieces of a personality, but of a story, a circumstance, a situation.

Anyway, I call this girl my Phantom Girl.

Many men I know seem to be haunted by their very own Phantom Girl, and many women I know also certainly have their Phantom Boys. I've been possessed as one every now and again. People, I have noticed, tend to not only be attracted to the same personality types, but the nature of their relationships with these `significant others' tend to have remarkable similarities as well. For either sex, it's as if there's some continuity error in life; as if aspects of the same story are being played over and over with slight modifications. You find yourself falling for similar Others with similar histories, and between you and the Other there develops familiar situations, often with predictable beginnings and endings. It is predictable, in the very least, from those outside of the relationship; it is often more difficult for one to see from the inside. (And as a side note, here might be a reason why working with Johari's Window can be of great aide.)

How is it possible, though, that we are attracted to people with remarkably similar personalities and lives, even when we do not know their personalities and lives until long after we find ourselves attracted to them? Part of this might be explained by the apparent fact that on an unconscious level, we can often profile a person by sight alone.

Take, as evidence, a repeated experiment conducted at the Institute of Family Therapy in the UK on their new recruits. Before they get to know anyone else, they are asked to walk around a room full of people and, without talking with anyone, pick out a person who they think could be a missing member of their family. This couple then picks out two others, making a family of four, and then they go in to talk with a psychiatrist. They soon discover that they all have remarkable similarities in family background.

The explanation given to us by these psychiatrists is that in childhood we learn to give specific reactions in a given situation and over time these stimulus-responses get `fixed’ into a system of habit patterns; they become unconscious and automatic responses to our own internal conditions. So just as the body itself betrays the nature of the genes that produced it (as evidenced by evolutionary psychology), the way in which we use the body -- the gestures, the expressions, the tone of voice, the `body language’ -- betrays our subjective nature by reflecting it. In the gestures of a person lies the reflection of the emotional, the intellectual, the historical. And just as our own body language is `spoken' without our awareness of it, we can `hear’ and translate the body language of others just as unconsciously and automatically.

So perhaps to be drawn to someone before talking to them -- just by watching them, just by looking at them -- does not necessarily mean you are a shallow, materialistic, superficial fool with nothing but a hunger for the skin and primitive instincts aimed at procreation with which to justify yourself. Darwin doesn’t explain everything. Alchemy fills the gap in their expression `as above, so below; as within, so without.’

It may be difficult to accept that you do this, but we can see it take place with much more ease between other people. Again, it's easier to see from the outside looking in. Go to a bar and watch people. Watch them on the street, or at work. Close, receptive `people-watching' (which is analogous to bird-watching, but much more entertaining in my opinion) betrays these silent, unconscious, wordless conversations between people.

Then, however, another question arises. Evolutionary psychology indicates that physical attraction serves some genetic, evolutionary goal -- genetic survival, through the child. Could attraction to specific personality types serve some psychological, even spiritual goal? The psychologist Carl Jung thought so.

Jung explored, among other things, the masculine and feminine principals of the human psyche. To provide context: he believed that while growing up, as an adaptive measure, we emphasized certain portions of our internal personality, which he called the Ego, while the portions of our internal personality which we failed to actualize collected in the personal unconscious in sort of anti-ego, which he referred to as the Shadow. The Shadow therefore compensates for what the ego refuses or fails to manifest in conscious recognition, and we tended to project the Shadow onto others of the same sex. In every Jekyll, then, there resides a Hyde; in every Banner there is a Hulk. In every Dorothy, a Witch. In every top-dog, an under-dog. In every submissive, a dominatrix. When exploring oneself, the Shadow is usually the first figure to be wrestled with and integrated.

I think I’ve spent a good many years wrestling with my Shadow in his various projections and his manifestations in my artwork, poetry, and writing. Read my story Again, as an example.

Once one has journeyed far enough into the Shadow, one comes across another `personality’ -- the sygzy. Specifically, for a woman this would be her Animus, or the male aspect of her female psyche that she projects onto man; in a man's case, this would be his Anima, the female aspect in man that he projects onto woman.

Our construction and identification with the inner Ego gave rise to the compensatory Shadow, so it makes sense that the Anima developed to maintain psychic balance out of our construction and identification with the outer Persona, another conscious portion of our personality. The Persona is that conscious portion which is involved in the external world, the social personality which Jung viewed as a `mask' or medium for the ego. The Ego is our self image; the Persona is our public or social image -- the mask we wear for the herd. We may hold back quite a bit with other people that we do not hold back from ourselves; we may even forge a personality among some people.

The Anima compensates for the Persona, so that the more intellectual a man is, for instance, the more emotional his Anima becomes. And the more we stress our male persona, the more we project our anima onto the significant women in our lives.

With the Animus and Anima come many misconceptions, however, as it has come to be with a lot of Jung’s work -- mostly, I assume, because the guy was often very vague and his concepts tended to evolve throughout his writings. To clear up one misconception among many: the existence of the Anima and Animus would not imply that deep down every woman wants some lesbian action (oh, how I wish it were true) or that every man, deep down, in the words of Kevin Smith, really `love the cock’. Girls with an animus can be `strictly dickly’, and guys with an anima can have an exit-only pooper. All Jung’s concept of the sygzy really means is this: that in every culture the male is expected to play a certain defined role, and the woman is expected to play another. Obviously, being a man involves something universal, as does being a woman -- and this obviousness comes down to plumbing. But when we think of what it means to be a man, we don’t just think a human with a penis and an Adam’s apple, we find particular personality characteristics associated with man as well. And for the most part, this isn’t species-specific, this is cultural.

We are all born with the characteristic qualities society designates as masculine and feminine, but society teaches the individual to associate certain qualities with the male and other qualities to the female and to identify with the qualities assigned to a person’s sex-type and disown the other. And as, for instance, a man associates these buried qualities with a female, when his instincts drive him towards the female of the species in general he will specifically gravitate towards females who have the greatest amount of his buried `feminine’ qualities -- the socially-acceptable method of achieving wholeness.

Somtimes, however, `socially acceptable' isn't an option.

This I discovered when I had moved from my parent's house in the sticks to a college town full of diverse individuals. Up until this point in time, I had pretty much bought Jung’s concept of the sygzy. But among those diverse college-town characters were homosexuals. Right away, I had doubt that Jung’s concept would work with them, and I was suprised Jung had never considered this. I decided that the concept of the sygzy must therefore be inaccurate -- but upon closer inspection, I found I was wrong, and it was due to one of those common misconceptions. Here's why: put simply, homosexuals are born with a sexual drive aimed at the same physiological sex. This, however, is put too simply, as homosexuals can either have a psychological sex at odds with their physiological sex or one which is atune with it. You can have, then, an individual with a female physiology and a feminine psychology who desires women (the femme lesbian), or you can have an individual with a female physiology and a masculine psychology who desires women (the butch lesbian). Jung’s concept works because in, for instance, a lesbian relationship one always takes the masculine role of butch and the other always takes the feminine role of femme. They are both still seeking their `other half’. The femme finds her animus in the butch, the butch finds her anima in the femme.

This just emphasizes that what Jung was talking about were the roles we are culturally conditioned to associate with the male and female sex, and that it is these roles, not the sexes themselves, which give rise to the Persona and the compensating Anima or Animus. If the female is straight, she desires males. If the male is straight, he desires females. If the female is gay, she desires females. If the male is gay, he desires males. But either way you slice it, if the persona is male, there is an anima; if the persona is female, there is an animus. There is always that duality to be reconciled.

What are these qualities that we assign to the masculine and feminine, however? Typically, in our patriarchal culture, to be a man means to be in control, to be less emotional and more rational, to be competitive and aggressive as opposed to cooperative and empathic, to drink our beer and scratch our balls and belch and fart as we watch football. The qualities our culture has assigned to women, on the other hand, may include such things as tenderness, patience, sensitivity, receptivity, gentleness, the emotional, closeness to nature.

And granted, times are changing -- my Anima is certainty evidence of that -- for the roles aren’t as strict and distinct as they used to be in our world. This becomes evident when we look at the feminist movement and women in the workforce, when we see a metal band like Metallica embracing male bonding and taking hug-breaks between head-banging, screaming and thrashing on electric guitars. I’m not saying this is necessarily bad. My beliefs, in fact, are to the contrary. All this really means, though, is that we have numerous different choices as individuals as to what we expect from the opposite sex and how we perceive them; it doesn’t eliminate the dualism at all, it just gives us the cultural thumbs-up to choose into which category we can throw certain qualities. And if we define our masculine persona as cooperative, then we are bound to see woman as aggressive.

The Anima’s influence on a male resides behind his emotions, ideas and attitudes. She is the force behind relations with others, especially the opposite sex, and tends to falsify and intensify his reactions. As a whole, there are negative and positive aspects to the Anima -- she can be a beauty as well as a bitch.

As a female figure, she can be, in dreams, visions and projections, everything from the mother, to the crone, to the lover, to the seductress or spiritual guide. As an inner, subjective experience she can give rise to what has been referred to as `anima moods' which can manifest as: irritation, depression, insecurity, touchiness, uncertainty, nihilism, pessimism, boredom, fear of death, disease and accidents, and full-fledged all-around bitchiness. Possessed by anima qualities, the man makes brutal remarks in which he devalues nearly everything in life, finding morose satisfaction in twisting the truth cheaply. He is never spontaneous. He dwells over things dead and gone, reflecting on his life so much that he finds no time to actually live it. He has gone from an active participant to a passive witness in life. His relationships with others are rather childish.

For those who know me: sound familiar?

The development of a man's Anima is reflected in how he relates to women in general; how well he can note and pierce through his projections onto the women in his life and his situations with them. Jung believed there were four stages in the development of the Anima, which he personified as Eve, Helen, Mary and Sophia.

The Eve stage is molded by the personal mother and his relationship with her; if a male grew up not knowing a mother, the image is still present there -- the image of the mother as the one who provides nurture and security. He is dependent on a female and without her he cannot function; when with her, he is easily controlled by her.

The second stage is expressed by Helen of Troy; here, the Anima is an image of the sexual ideal, and man is caught up in her spell. He is prone to elaborate sexual and romantic fantasies. Even if he is looking for a long-term relationship, they will always be short-lived affairs or sexual escapades, because no real woman can live up to his idealistic expectations.

Stage three is Mary, and this is where he has genuine feelings of devotion to a particular woman and there is good potential for long-term relationships. It is at this point that he can pierce through his projections and see a woman as she is, independent of his positive and negative emotions. Sexuality is not an autonomous, instinctual function that drives him, but is integrated into his life in a healthy manner: he knows of the difference between love and lust, cooperation and dependence.

Sophia is the fourth and final stage, and here the Anima is raised up to unbelievable spiritual heights. She functions as a guide to internal life, acting as a mediator between the conscious and unconscious, cooperating in the search for meaning, motivating one to work through philosophical issues, pointing the way out of nihilism, becoming the creative muse. And sex? Here, it is spiritual.

According to Jung, the Anima in man should grow in development from stage one to four as he grows older and exhausts the possibilities inherent in each. We naturally integrate the anima, then, through a kind of catharsis. This is not to ignore the fact that some men never escape the grips of Eve, however. How does one evolve the Anima if one gets stuck, then -- and how can one speed up the evolution if he has the inclination to do so?

According to Jung, the goal here is to integrate the denied contents and qualities he has stored within the Anima into consciousness, not to embody her. It is not the goal to become the other any more than it is to deny the other -- its the goal to blend with the other; to be 360 degrees, to be complete. The route toward evolving and integrating the Anima and becoming whole again is to confront her squarely, not by running away. He must learn to take her seriously and express her contents creatively, but at the same time to be careful not to follow her blindly -- he should create an environment oriented towards cooperation and honest consideration as opposed to battles based on the unwillingness to compromise. True, honest communication must be achieved. As we exhaust and reclaim the elements in one stage, we move onto the next.

Elsewere, it has been warned that if the transition from one stage to another happens at all, it rarely occurs without great struggle. The reason is that the human mind is so naturally ambivalent to change, associating it with a kind of death: as much as one's mind wishes to grow, it is also very frightened of the unfamiliar and unpredictable and therefore resistant to change. A psychological crisis is often the answer, as it thrusts us into chaos, into the unknown in a way that is inescapable. This goes well in accordance with what Campbell explained; that is, that ritual, specifically rites of passage (of separation, initiation, and return) are the means by which we are born for the second time, out of the womb of dependency and into the world of self-dependency or self-responsibility.

And this fact may shed light on sex, too. Though sex is an act that is instinctual and for the purposes of creating a child and continuing the species, it is not only this in regards to human beings with their developed minds. Sex becomes not only an instinctual structure, but one to be filled. As with any ritual, sex is characterized with the intent or emotions behind it. If we were only animals, having sex with one member of the opposite sex would be the same as any other. In my experience, at least, this is not the case. Instinct demands the structure of the act; psychology demands the substance behind it. With the right person, sex can be a ritual that brings about an experience of unity, the experience of being whole or complete again. Between sweat and skin, we can touch the soul. It’s a shame some major religions look down upon sex.

Where am I? At what stage is my Anima, my Phantom Girl? I don’t know exactly. I look around and I see faces of Eve, but I can see the rest of them as well. None the less, I believe this concept is worth exploring and experimenting with. What seems clear to me is that Phantom Girl continues to haunt me in horrible and beautiful ways, and I need to see beyond her. Whatever I have stored within Phantom Girl, perhaps once I receive from her -- once I read the message in the bottle, so-to-speak -- she will disappear, and the control she has over my mind will become a distant memory.

It’s worth a shot.

"Sex ought to be a wholly satisfying link between two affectionate people from which they emerge
unanxious, rewarded, and ready for more."
-- Alex Comfort.

"I want to tell you a terrific story about oral contraception. I asked this girl to sleep with me and she said `no.'"
-- Woody Allen.

"Procrastination is like masturbation, they both feel great until you realize you’re just fucking yourself."
-- TheCritic.

SEX, MORE THAN SEX & MY LIFE AS MASTURBATION.
by Rewired,
12/28/03.

I used to really like parties. Now I just want them all to just shut the fuck up sometimes, you know? I like Vern, but he can be a piss-raving lunatic sometimes. And Terra? She's too fucking sexy and she knows it. It pisses me off when she turns to Vern and the dynamic between them gets working so well. And I know it'll never happen between her and I. Fucking goth girl. But that's not the point.

"Isn't any sex better than no sex?" She asks, as I sit down in the living room, happening upon a conversation I was not paying attention to.

I shake me head. "No." And that's a slap in my own face. Yeah, that's right, it's not just sex. Wow, that might indicate I'm not just a fucking pervert and I want something more. Like a dynamic or something.

"Really?" She seems surprised. Surprised I see a fucking difference. A fucking difference between just sex and more than sex.

"Yeah, the first girl I had sex with, I don't regret it," I told her. "The second girl, the one were I didn't finish... it just wasn't the same."

"Why not?" She said. "Was she a dirty whore?"

I cringed. I almost got a bit pissed off there. "No," I said, "it just wasn't right. It was all about... convenience."

It's pointless, though. She just doesn’t get it. Her or Sandra. It’s discomforting to have friends who are supposed to be this close to you provide evidence that they’ve hardly taken the time to scrape the surface of your soul.

Other evidence of their ignorance came through two evenings previous. It was on our way home. Sandra, Terra and I had gone to a bar to watch a punk band do covers and some drunken man with no front teeth tell really bad jokes. I had a Smirnoff and didn't even finish it. I smoked a billion cigarettes. I eyed attractive women. So anyway, we were on our way home and had just pulled up to that long red light at the five-way intersection. Terra was in the back, Sandra driving, me, shotgun. Sandra and I began arguing about something trivial. Then she started that patronizing, `calm down' thing, where she acts as if I over-reacted way more than she had, which translates to way more than I should have. She told me how I was so tense. So intense. How I couldn't just relax. I was so aggressive. She started massaging my shoulder, because she knows my weaknesses. A woman who can do that can own me. My head dropped, she massaged my neck and back with one hand. Terra echoed Sandra's comment, how I'm always so intense all the time, how I should just relax and calm down. Same bullshit she'd said in the cubby hole. Then, the familiar sentence.

"You need to get laid."

I'll take NO SHIT for 500, Alex.

So here's the thing, which I would've hoped to have been obvious: I'd like to get laid, I'd like to fuck like a madman, but I don't want to just fuck anyone. I'd like to fuck someone I have a deep connection with, as anything else seems cold, mechanical, empty. And I've been trying. Ironic it is, that the `you need to get laid' comment came out of Terra's mouth. Not that she's alone in this opinion, mind you.

During the party at the Kent house, someone had taken the magnet-letters on the refrigerator and spelled out my name. Then Sandra and Nick had decided that `needs to get laid' should be added. It's like they can see the HELP WANTED sign hanging over my fly but they can't see the SELECTIVE ENTRY ONLY written in fine print below it, or the neon VACANCY sign flashing on my shirt around the chest area. And as for any hope of actually being understood down the road: I should've noted the DEAD END sign years ago.

Sandra's getting laid by her boy. Terra? She doesn't say much about it, but I have the feeling that she's getting some from her ex. She wouldn't consider me, but she'd let the jerk-off in her again. Me? Twice, the same evening and morning, a little over four years ago now. Last century. Fucking pathetic. I mean, I can't even talk with a girl. Can't talk to strangers in a bar. I need to be comfortable around a person first. So I meet people I know through people I already knew. At the base are the group of people who originally approached me.

Convenience. Won't take the challenge or initiative.

Sandra recommends I use the device bought for me, for 50$ by a friend, at our Spice of Life Party. You know those candle parties and Tupperware parties that girls are always throwing? Well, a Spice of Life party is kind of like that, only they sell sex toys and things of that nature. Vern -- out of some form of guilt, I think, for going after Terra the Goth Girl, who he knew I was interested in -- bought me the sex toy as some sort of compensation. I was okay with the him-and-Terra thing, really. She's obviously not interested in me for one reason or another, even though she was in the past, even though she tortured me with my desires and her act of feeding them through being allowed to do tiny things but not the Great Deed that night so long ago in the cubby hole. So I was okay. No real grudge. But he still felt a bit guilty, I think, so he bought me the whacking-off-device. I opened it a few days ago. But it was in the wrapper, not clean, I was sure, so I cleaned it. In the process, I also cleaned off all the lube. I don't have any lube on hand. So I stuck with manual labor.

I tell Sandra, she says I can use soap or anything. Yeah, I know, rub my hands together and build up a lather, I said. Whatever.

Masturbate your mind with books and ideas never put to the test. Masturbate your heart with hopes that can never be fulfilled. Masturbate your yearnings with sexual fantasies of every deranged form and flavor. Masturbate your nether regions.

Masturbation is substitution for the real thing. Like watching a movie instead of living a life. Taking a drug to be happy instead of making yourself happy. Jacking off is what our lives are all about, I wanted to tell them.

Our callused lives. De-sensitized. Lubeless.

Our so-called lives are masturbation.

I'd kill my ego sometimes for something real.

"Why is the cat sleeping in my underwear drawer?"
-- My Wobbly Roommate, in an e-mail, 7/26/04.

AFRAID.
by Ninex,
7/26/04

I find myself being torn
between my two greatest fears
My mind drives away
grinding at the gears
Something that I long for
that I'm scared to go without
But why am I still scared
as this fear leads to doubt
There are two roads before me
and signs showing the way
But I stand here looking forward
choosing neither one today
To my left lies a dark forest
and a path to take alone
To my right is the sunlight
happiness I'm being shown
But I’m afraid to make a choice
I procrastinate once again
I lean towards my left
the path with nothing to gain
For five years I've put this off
I'm more afraid to choose
But why can't I turn the other way
knowing I have nothing left to lose
My true fear draws closer
yet I still walk this way
Why can't I turn around
and find something to say
I told myself to wait
until I thought I was ready
I have waited long enough
but my legs become unsteady
My second greatest fear
is this choice I have to make
But now my mind is made up
it's a chance I have to take

"In us the will to live and the will to die should be equally strong and free, should be recognized as complements of each other, neither complete in itself; and the antithesis between them a device invented for our own amusement. All energy implies vibration. Man is miserable in the last analysis because he fancies that when what gives him pleasure is destroyed, as he knows it must be sooner or later, the loss is irreparable; so he shores up his crumbling walls instead of building himself a better house. We all cling to outworn customs of every kind and lie to ourselves about love when we know in our hearts that there is no more oil in the lamp, and that the best thing we can do is to look for a new one. We are afraid to lose whatever we have. We have not the sense to see that whatever it may be, it is bound to go sooner or later, that when it does its place will be filled by something just as good, and nothing is more stupid than to try to set back the sun upon the dial of Ahaz. As soon as we learn that everything is only half, that it implies its opposite, we can let ourselves go with a light heart, finding just as much fun in the red leaves of autumn as in the green leaves of spring. What is interesting is the complete cycle. Life itself would be deplorably petty were it not consecrated by the fact of its incomprehensibility and dignified by the certainty that however petty, futile, baroque and contemptible its career may be, it must close in the sublime sacrament of death.
As it is written in The Book of the Law, 'death is the crown of all.'"
-- Aleister Crowley, Confessions.

“I need a sunny day.”
-- Igby Goes Down.

RISE & FALL OF A CALIFORNIA SUN.
9/14/04

I had seen her come into the fast food restaurant where I work a few times. She was my favorite customer to watch, and I was always eyeing her. She came in her work uniform, so I knew off the bat that she worked at the fast food place right across the street, and I assumed she had developed the habit of coming over to our fine palace of grease on her break. Through word of mouth, I learned soon thereafter that her name was Kate and that she also worked at the same place I did, only she was part time and worked mornings, whereas I was full time and worked nights. I obsessed over her. I didn't do a damn thing about it, and sure, I thought of other girls, but the spotlight in my mind was hogged by her from the moment I first laid eyes upon her.

Then I came in one day to work, early as I usually do. On routine, I come in about an hour early, get my free coffee and chill outside, usually reading or writing for an hour and a half or so before my shift began. Well, on this particular day we were having an inspection: all the big-wigs, higher-ups and corporate shitheads were coming, and so they had everyone working. The shifts kind of crashed; worlds collided. So when I went up to get my usual coffee, there Kate was, on register.

Her eyes were vivid, penetrating, maddeningly beautiful. I was paralyzed when I went to order. I literally couldn't talk, I couldn't move for a second. I was like a deer caught in headlights. She had her red-dyed hair in pig-tails, and her hair was wet. With her hair up as it was, I could see, as she turned around, that there was a tattoo on the back of her neck. It was of a sun. I was vaguely reminded of the large sun tattooed on Claire’s back, the emblem from the Sublime band. The one on Kate’s back as small, however, and it resembled the Celtic sun that was an emblem from another band I really liked, GODSMACK. In short, everything about her screamed at me, grabbed my attention. Somehow I managed to make out the words, "just a large coffee" and I nervously handed her my money and moved to the side to await my order. And that did it. That was that. My mind was now focused whole-heartdly on her. It wouldn't waver. And like some high-school mother-fucking moron, I couldn't talk to her, couldn't tell her how amazing I felt when she looked at me. So what did I do?

I did the natural thing: I told everyone else.

I'd make a comment here and there, or I'd come up to someone every few days and say something to them, ensuring before or after I said it that it would `stay between us' and they shouldn't tell her or spread it around. Fun fact: every ear is a microphone for the herd. But I knew that. Unconsciously -- maybe higher, maybe closer to consciousness; maybe semiconsciously -- I knew it was bound to get back to her, and that, deep down, is what I intended. It was what I counted on. Why? Simple: it's the shy guy's only means of communicating things he feels rather threatened by. I had learned from my previous mistakes, though. You see, some shy guys make the mistake of just telling one, singular person -- one member of the herd -- that he likes this girl, for instance. But that's just stupid. Why? Because by the time the message gets back to the girl you want it to get to, the message gets stained with the noise of every brain and mouth and ear it's traveled through. It's edited and translated. Horrendously abridged. At best the end product is an exaggerated truth; at worst, a garbled myth. It's a lot like the game of telephone, where you sit in a big circle of people and you whisper something into one person's ear and they whisper what they heard into the next person's ear and by the time it gets back to you, the original sender, it's something so far removed from what you originally said that you burst out laughing, stand confused, or simply shudder in disgust.

So if you tell just one person, the message will get garbled and stained with the noise by the time it gets to her -- it's the telephone game effect. But if you tell many different people independently, there's a greater chance of more genuine information making it to the intended target. It's not as genuine as it would be if the target would hear it straight from the horse's mouth, so-to-speak, but the general message can be distinguished by the target from the noise it acquired on the long road to her ears. The target can, in other words, decode the myth and get the general gist of it.

And of course the people I'd told said that they hadn't talked, that I could trust them, but I knew it was only a matter of time. In the herd, there are no secrets. In the meantime, I didn't get my hopes up as to what she'd think about it all once she knew. I just obsessed in solitude, kicking myself in the ass for being some sophomoric shy guy trying to reach out to a girl through some rather high-school technique.

After a rather long period of obsessing, Mitch approached me one night in the back kitchen. Mitch is one of those personalities you cannot help but develop an interest in after only a conversation or two. His head is crammed with endless nuggets of diverse information that would make him virtually untouchable in almost any game of trivia. He calls cigarettes `squares’ and atomic bombs `dirty bombs’, and sometimes after you say something that he’s apparently supposed to fill him with sympathy or a sense of obligation he’ll pull out the empty white insides of his pockets with his hands, take a look at them, shrug, look back up at you and say, “sorry, I’m all out of give-a-shits.” He is republican in his political views and certainly an alpha male, but I've caught that he is not as `might-makes-right' and as `bullet-is-the-answer-to-everything' as he often tries to make himself out to be. It's just that this man -- a year younger than I, a part-time cop and a full-time McDonalds manager -- is dedicated to projecting this tough, confident, endlessly competitive male image. He prides himself on his intelligence and on his particular in-born talent for applying strategy -- and, I must say, for good reason. But along with this stereotypical male persona one finds, soon enough, a coexisting antithesis in him as well: truly unique and independent qualities that differentiate him from the macho masses. He even has some undeniably feminine qualities, none of which he makes any effort to conceal. He is very confident and self-reliant, and to me that makes him an admirable individual (and an intriguing subject of study).

In place of our usual political and ethical discussions -- and the theological debates we would, and not too far in the future, unavoidably find ourselves entwined in -- he brought up a rather simple question that night, straight up and out of the blue.

"Are you into Goth chicks?"

Instantly I was reminded of the insatiable Terra, who had subjected me to torture only a day or two earlier, and I answered with a resounding: "Yes."

He then went on to quickly explain that he had spoken to Kate during the inspection. A mixture of anger and fear immediately swept over me, but, having expected such a reaction, he quickly added that I need not worry, for he had not revealed to her that she was a subject of my interest. He did, however, do a bit of reconnaissance work for me, he told me.

Apparently she revealed that she was often categorized by others as `gothic', that she had a tongue ring, that she was almost 20 years of age. Was she single? She had a live-in boyfriend but that they were having problems. She also had several tattoos, and she was -- and I nearly fell over when he said this -- a refuge from California. The fact that she was gothic-like reminded me of Terra, and the fact that she was from California reminded me of Claire. What was it with the striking similarities with all the women I find myself attracted to? I wondered if there were any more. I quickly asked Mitch an important question, but she was not, as far as he new, employed in any branch of the military.

He asked me if I was going to go for her, and I told him that she was probably out of my league. As much as I wanted to get to know her and do nasty things to her, I told him, I would most likely continue obsessing for some time, but it was a fixation that would pass. He offered help, he offered to set me up, to be a medium between her and I, but I flat out told him no. If anything was going to happen, her or I, or her and I, had to initiate it. I wanted to do this myself, if I did it at all. And I told him that knowing me, I probably wouldn't do anything about it at all, so nothing would happen.

He asked me what I was so worried about, and I told him that I was simply a nervous guy. I was also a very `me' person; I was quite the isolationist. I liked my free time, and there wasn't enough of it as it presently stood -- a relationship involved the investment of time, energy and attention, which I already had invested in solitary pursuits, as well as money, which I was also endlessly short on.

And that's when Mitch stepped with this his, "fuck `em and leave `em" philosophy -- treating women as sex objects, using them as instruments of pleasure until boredom presented itself and then dropping them like bags of sand and moving on towards the next one. Mitch seemed to share this philosophy with Ron -- another manager, a hyper-sexed, sexist black man who just about everyone in the place liked. He said he liked me, he respected me, because -- and I quote -- I "wasn't one-a them punk-ass white boys". I wondered, then, what kind of punk-ass white boy I really was. Though I didn't always agree with him, especially in his more sexist, black supremacist moods, I admired him as much as I admired Mitch, which was a great deal. And though Ron shared Mitch's "fuck `em and leave `em" philosophy, overall Ron seemed to me to be more of a romantic. He seemed to view sex as a spiritual experience, as did I, whereas Mitch seemed to often see it as just another area to apply strategy, to use a girl for her resources under the law of `might makes right'. And that may sound unfair, but that's how it often came across to me with him.

Overall, for a Christian, Mitch had beliefs pretty influenced by evolution and `survival of the fittest', and I could say the same about Ron. Not that I fit the stereotypical atheist profile or anything.

I told him I couldn't do that, though. The "fuck `em and leave `em" philosophy just didn't settle well with me at all; I wasn't like that. This attitude, apparently unheard of, just fueled a fire already blazing, giving both him and Ogre (who is a rather feminine, elitist manager) further justification for categorizing me as a "pacifist" and a "humanist" and to continue referring to me by the little nickname they'd given me: "Gandhi."

And the attitude of Ron and Mitch, their general perspective, made me want to classify them as primitives: treating women as bodies to fuck until a better body came along. And maybe my instinct to discriminate against them on that basis revealed a lot of fear in me -- specifically, that this whole drive for intimate partnership really was nothing more than a product of evolution, and that our concept of love was, as I had once so persistently attested, nothing more than a fictitious, romantic drape constructed by our higher cortex so that we can preserve and justify to our highly-evolved human brains the instincts that are necessary for our species survival and at the same time feel higher, more moral and more sufficiently-advanced then, for instance, two butt-sniffing dogs who want nothing more than to `get it on' and `do it like they do on the Discovery Channel'.

Yet I still told myself that Ron and Mitch's philosophy was faulty -- that we saw more in a girl than just the desire for sex. Perhaps love was not just about evolution and sex and animalistic impulses geared towards biological survival. Perhaps instinct was part of it, but not all of it. Perhaps love, relationship, companionship really was something more. Perhaps I could really try and have something with this girl; something meaningful. My feeble and continuing attempts with Terra had certainly failed.

Even if that were true, though -- even if I were to accept that my motives in desiring Kate were as spiritual as they were biological -- so much as walking up to her and saying `hi' seemed to be the most difficult thing in the world.

The long, hard road towards saying `hi' was undoubtedly aided by two friends and co-workers of mine, Rena and Mary. I had directly told Mary about my insatiable attraction towards Kate, but my means of communicating this to Rena was a bit different. One day, right after Kate had left, I grabbed Rena, pulled her aside, dry humped her leg and growled into her ear that I wanted to do wonderfully nasty things to that girl.

It turned out that everyone wanted to set us up. More than two people had come up to me, and in what seemed sincere honesty, said to me: "I can definitely see you two together." That felt good, but it sounded weird. Someone can see me with a girlfriend, let alone a girl so maddeningly beautiful? I wasn't sure I could even see me with a girlfriend. I again told everyone that there would be no setting up -- this, I said, I have to do on my own, if at all. Rena kept pushing me to say `hi' to her in the very least. It took me another week and a half, but I finally said `hi' to her. I just looked at her and said it as I was walking passed her, and I wasn't even sure if she heard me. I felt so immature. Why hadn't I talked to her directly from the beginning? This was so high school, and I was 25 years old. I was pathetic. This was never going to happen, I was dead certain. Until the day Kate came in after her shift, handed Rena a piece of paper and said to deliver it, so I was told, to `Bob'. Rena handed it to me, I opened it up, and there was her name and number.

Now I thought at first perhaps the number was not meant for me, for I am, of course, not named Bob. Only later on would I discover what this truly meant -- you see, it was not `Bob' she had called me, but BOB: an acronym for `Boy On Back-line.' This meant, of course, that she was kind of weird, too, which made me feel a whole lot better.

After Rena handed me the number, though, I was feeling even more nervous. What the hell was I supposed to do? Call her. Yeah. Call her, obviously.

Now, somewhere in the back of my mind a random little piece of advice, locked away in there from years ago, just happened to pop up. I once knew this very gothic fellow, (a transvestite, I later was told) who was a magnet for women. He told me quite specifically that a guy should never call a girl the day or day after he gets her phone number, for then you seem too eager, too obsessed, too concerned. Girls don't go for guys ready to jump and go. Take it easy, he told me, wait two days or so. Don't make her think your desperate. Maybe wait three days, even. That was just stupid, I thought. This was no big deal. The longer I wait the bigger the deal its going to feel. I should just call her. But I decided to hold off a day, just so I wouldn't seem too eager.

The next day she again came in on my shift, and Mitch said, "there's your woman." I shook my head. She wasn't my woman; hell, I had just coughed up the courage to say hi to her. Even if her and I were going out, which seemed light-years away from probable, it wasn't as if she was some material possession of `mine'. Later on, Ken, some kid who reminds me of the crazy looking images that used to be on those Garbage Patch cards kids used to trade each other when I was in elementary school, came up to me and said, as he nodded towards the lobby: "Hey, due, your chicks out there." She's not a chick, and I have not assumed ownership. She's a beautiful Goth girl from California and I'm a nervous child trapped in the body of a 25-year-old from the slums of Ohio, give me a fucking break, will you?

Mitch came back up to me and said I could go out, have a smoke, and talk with her. So I went out into the lobby, where she was talking with someone. Her hair was wet, her eyes intense, and she wore a red shirt that read `Leave Me Alone.' I walked by her and I forget what I said exactly, but implied that she should come outside with me as I had a smoke.

Outside, we both sat down. She said she'd heard that I liked her or something, and I nodded, and she asked why. I simply told her the truth, that I found her extremely attractive and it seemed like we were two people that might get along.

She asked if I was an insomniac. That's what she'd heard, she said. I told her yes, it was true, I don't sleep well at all. She asked me why and, in my desire to keep the deep end of my numerous insanities to myself for the moment, I said it was a long story. So she went on. She seemed to have an endless array of interesting questions for me. "What's your favorite flower?" She'd ask, or, "What's your favorite food?" And there were so many things I wanted to ask her. I wanted to know damned near everything about her, but when it came down to having her there beside me, or later on, in the passenger seat of my car, with her and I alone in the dark on the way to my house, my mind went blank. The brain freeze. The brain fart. Most of the time I just echoed the questions she asked me. Her favorite flower? The daffodil. Mine? The rose. Her favorite ice cream? Rocky road. Mine? Strawberry, I think. What was my birthday? November 12. Her birthday? August 31st.

August 31st?

And I slapped my head: she was a Virgo. From California. Claire was a Virgo. From California.

By the time my cigarette was out, and I smoked it slowly and let it burn to the filter, I had gotten to know her a little. I'd gotten far beyond a `hi'. In a short time we had evolved into sentences; into whole paragraphs, even. And we decided to hang out that night and talk some more.

So that evening, after close, we talked outside at the front tables. She told me how her boyfriend was away on vacation, how he'd be back in a few days. He was a problem, she told me. It seemed sex was the only thing on his mind, he was irresponsible, he didn't have a job, he played video games all day, he never wanted to take her out anywhere. He wouldn't even let her borrow the car. He was negligent to say the very least. The way she was talking, she was on the brink of breaking up with him. She told me she was trying to work it out, but if he didn't shape up, it would be over.

Prior to him, she went on to tell me, she was engaged to a guy. She had lived in California with him, and they decided to move to Ohio. Once they had began living here, though, he suddenly got very controlling and wouldn't let her see her friends. He wanted her to sleep when he slept, but she was an insomniac -- sometimes, sleeping was next to impossible for her. And she was sick of spending the nights alone. There were other things that got between them, too: he worked a shift opposing hers and they hardly ever saw each other, he kept putting off the marriage they had planned on three previous occasions but never did anything about, he started getting heavy into drugs, began drinking a lot. She was a pothead, she smoked the shit everyday -- but pot was one thing, she told me, excessive drug use was another.

So she left him. One day while he was at work she wrote him a letter and moved out. Then I think she moved in with her current boyfriend. So she had basically admitted to cheating on one boyfriend with a guy who would be her future boyfriend. I struck me that it was Terra and the Monkey Bars all over again.

As we were talking, Rena and a few others from work rolled up in a car. We ended up hanging out with them for the remainder of the night. In the back seat of that car, Kate and I began tickling each other. I'm not sure how it started, but it felt good. I felt something blossoming there in the air around us that night. Something that went beneath conversation and flirtatious behavior, something that enveloped both of us. Something I hadn't felt in a really long time: potential of a very special kind.

A day or two later she came over to my house, looking great as she always does, with that beautifully intense look in her eyes. We hung around a bit with Sandra and Nick and Terra downstairs, watching a very strange movie. Vern was there, too. Later on, he'd tell me that he thought she looked like Claire Danes. That bothered me a bit. Not that I thought she looked like her, but because I had thought Claire looked like her -- which eventually led to me substituting her real name for `Claire' when I wrote about her. Were eerie coincidences ranking pretty damned high here, or was it just me?

Eventually the crowd dispersed, and it cut down to Nick. The three of us went on to watching another movie, and eventually the tickling and pushing and flirting between Kate and I turned into kissing. It's hard to tell who starts what, but the desire was quite obviously mutual, so it's basically irrelevant. Which of course means she probably kissed me first. Anyway, Nick finally got the hint after awhile and left. It took long enough. The making out got so heated, though, so fucking heated. I can't ever remember feeling like that -- maybe close, with Anne. Either way, Kate was simply amazing. I felt so calm and natural and passionate kissing her, like it was exactly where I belonged. And every time I would kiss her afterwards -- the last time I kissed her -- it felt just as natural, just as passionate, just as liberating.

Soon she had broken up with her boyfriend, and her and I were officially a couple. Something that had not occurred in a long time, since high school, six years ago -- with Claire -- if that even counts. And then something else happened that hadn't happened in awhile.

Though twenty-five years of age, I'd only had sex twice, and it was with the same girl, the same late night and early morning in the Autumn of 1999. Well, admittedly, depending on one's choice of interpretation, that figure may not be entirely accurate. You see, there was also an incident in May of 2001, I think it was, with another girl, Lena, though I'm not entirely certain that counts as we didn't really get to finish. So as to not exclude this third occasion as an act of sex and at the same time not include it entirely, I've usually found myself stating that I'd had sex two-and-a-half times. Part of that might be the reaction that statement tended to elicit from people, though. I mean, when you tell someone you've had sex two and a half times, they always get that one eyebrow crawling up their forehead in this amusing arch, and they tilt their head like a confused dog, and, I don’t know, it makes me laugh. But, yeah, whatever.

Anyway, it was the second or third night of being with Kate in ever-more heated situations that she asked me if I wanted to have sex. It was then when I got what I've come to call the `threshold fear': you want something or someone so much and you finally get nanometers away from achieving it and suddenly this tremendous terror sets in. Fear of the unknown is behind it, perhaps; the fear of change, the fear of foreign territory. The fear of having a desire finally satisfied is also a possibility, as that is all-too-often, in my world, foreign territory. I told her we should take things as they come.

We began fooling around, and things got intense again. We were heated, sweating -- and it almost happened. "Is that a yes?" She said. I thought I'd done something bad; I felt guilty. She offered some added information and asked if I was sure. I was suddenly very hesitant again. I wasn't aware her monthly visitor was present, so-to-speak -- the idea of going forward with this wasn't sounding all that good of an idea all of a sudden, but I still intensely, incredibly, undeniably wanted this. I asked her if she wanted to. She said yes in undeniable certainty and nodded frantically in an extreme affirmative. I voiced by hesitation. It was finally her that said we should wait -- and that in the meantime, I should do some shopping. So as it had happened before, I was left hungry again -- the difference being that this time, with this wonderful girl, there was a certain promise of resolution.

There was, of course, an issue. You see, this was a type of shopping I had never done before. A kind of shopping that I'd never had reason to do. And I didn't know where exactly I might purchase, um, raincoats for junior. I assumed a drug store, perhaps even a grocery store in the drug section, but I looked all over the grocery store one evening and couldn't find any. I finally asked Nick, who informed me I could probably pick them up at any gas station. Mentioning it to Sandra, she said that she had a whole bunch that she wouldn't be using and would be happy to throw them my way. I decided just to wait on those.

So Kate came over again. Things got heated again one night. In the midst of it, I was informed by her that her monthly visitor had left. Suprise. I said that I hadn't done my shopping -- and she said, well, then you’d better go do it.

Um, okay.

So I put on my cloths, grabbed my keys, told her I'd be back, and left. I hadn't had that kind of motivation in years. I pulled into the gas station a hop, jump and skip away from home. I looked a while, and amongst the chap-stick and tooth-brushes and breath mints. A shaft of light shone down from the sky an onto a little package of Durex. `Hallelujah' played in the background. I grabbed the box and handed the very masculine lady behind the counter the money. I was nervous as hell. I felt I should've bought something else, so it didn't seem to the lady at the register that this was my sole reason for coming into the gas station, because for some reason that made me feel all guilty and stuff. I didn't understand why I felt that way, and I couldn't think of anything to buy, anyway. Would it make a difference if I threw in a burrito and Pepsi beside the little box of raincoats on the counter? Why should I care what anybody else thinks? I could hardly think. My head and blood and chest was pounding and racing so quickly I could hardly keep up with it. I was in a heightened state, every nanometric inch of me.

"Have a good night," she said after handing me my change.

"You, too."

I drove home, and stepping into my room I saw the most beautiful sight, and I fail to see how I could ever forget it: candles were all about the room, flickering, giving off that spiritual kind of atmosphere. The bed, an altar. The ritual, long anticipated. She sat at the center of my bed, playing with her hands, and looking up at me shyly and sweetly, her beautiful, deep eyes poking up at me just below her lowered forehead. Nothing else existed but me and her in this moment, right now. And nothing else mattered. All else was background. What was once the loud static of my life lowered in volume until it was a fading hum. This was a dream, it had to be. This was too ideal. She was too ideal. Too incredibly beautiful. She really made me feel as if everything was really going to be okay with me, as if everything, after all the bullshit in the past years, was going to be all right. That this, that her, that everything we would share from soul to skin was the payoff. That she would bring an end to the war within me.

I placed the package on the pillow. After foreplay had reached it's pique, I reached for it with a bit of fear. She asked if I was sure. I nodded enthusiastically. You? Yes, she said with certainty. And sex with her was absolutely amazing. That night, Anne's philosophy, which had for years echoed in my mind, became for the first time my practice: focus on the feeling, cease all thought, cease all speaking, be in the now, live in the moment here, be receptive to your senses, be vulnerable, be one with the sacred experience of the present moment.

I felt so free with Kate, so liberated within her. I couldn't share the whole of my mind, I couldn't spiritually merge with her, but with nothing but skin and sweat between us I was one step closer to feeling complete. With Kate, there was no ambivalence. No hesitance. No questions. No uncertainty. I wanted to be with this girl, to have a long-term relationship with her, to develop something meaningful out of all of this. I felt so comfortable with her so naturally, so trusting of her so quickly and easily, all of which was very unlike me. Kate and I seemed to be what I considered a perfect match, both emotionally, mentally, and sexually. She seemed to harbor the same kind of dark curiosity about sexual possibilities as I did, and her desire for ever-increasing intensity in that category suited my tastes to a tee. These things seemed to appeal to both of us. I didn't feel ashamed or guilty of these desires with her, and didn't have the kind of reservations I'd always imagined I'd have. But sex sort of became an obsession or fixation. My mind was teeming with ways to apply creativity: what else could be done to intensify the experience?

Granted, the curiosity most likely grew out of my limited experience in the area, but it became a playground of curioisities. One curiosity was how ambigious the lines between pleasure and pain seemed to be; how they distorted, blurred, and disappeared. Especially at their heights, where they seemed to mix and merge, were the opposites blended, where dualities were reconciled in the moment of climax. I’m not implying psuedomasochism, but the physical, sexual and emotional sensations we shared, the reactions we had, the facial expressions, the sounds -- all of them seemed to be pleasure and pain simultaneously; `good pain’.

Another curiosity: I had imagined that sex, perhaps even meaningless sex, might satisfy my hunger -- but here, in what was more, in what was very meaningful sex, I found sex just fed the hunger more hunger. Desire feeds desire, as the Buddhists claimed. I found that I wanted closer. I wanted more intensity. I wanted to dig deeper, as deep as I could go into this experience, be as receptive as I could be to the sensation, the emotion, the feeling. I wanted to experience this as completely as I could, to be as honest and open and free and naked with her as one could possibly get on all existing levels and get all the feedback to let me know that she felt the same exact way.

After awhile, I began to worry that she might think that's all I wanted out of it. It wasn't. In the beginning, I had told her I didn't know where this was going, that we should just stand back and watch as this unfolds, but a lot of that was said because I didn't know if I was just a rebound. I said that we shouldn't worry about the future and where this was going, but just enjoy this as it was in the here and now. We both seemed to agree to take this at it came. Later on, though, our feelings had both changed, and they seemed to be the same: this was something we wanted to keep going. And I could see it as something long-lasting. Even my roommate, Nick, noted that this girl seemed to be the perfect, ideal mixture of everything I wanted.

And she really seemed to be, from soul to skin. It was my recognition that it was so ideal -- perhaps too ideal -- that caused me to preserve some resistances, though; to disallow myself to give myself up to her completely. So far life has only shown that nightmares seemed to be the only permanence, a voice in my head reminded me, but all dreams always ended the same way: with a rude awakening. I was fully aware of my trust issue here; of my reluctance to stand before her in total, naked vulnerability. I was still such an infant, it seemed -- I was such a child in all this. The difference was that this time, unlike all the others, I was trying. I really did want her and I to be together. I could've never imagined such a beautiful thing as this bond I felt we shared. I wanted to explore this foreign territory in all possible directions. I wanted to spiral out of my circles and cycles as far as was possible, push the thresholds passed my known universe. It was an eye-opening experience -- she was an eye-opening experience. Finally, I thought, I have something true, something real. I wanted to grow, to crack through the ceiling and reach for the stars, bathe in the sun, let the hells of my reality roll off me like rain and laugh at life in spite of it all -- laugh to the universe for the fact that in all the shit it had thrown on me over the years, I had finally found my candle light in the darkness, I had found a vibrant, new California sun rising and breaking through the dark clouds of my sick Ohio sky.

One thing that bothered me, one thing that made me be wary of my trust, at least at first, was that she was still living with her ex-boyfriend and his family. Now there was a fucked-up situation. I never would come to step inside that house. Apparently she was friends with his family first; she used to work with the mother while she worked at the fast food place across the street. While she was with her previous boyfriend and looking for a place to live, the lady offered Kate a room in her house, and she eventually took it. Then she just ended up having a relationship with her son. After they broke up, both the father and mother told her she was welcome to stay. The reasons were quite obvious, too, and they told her it quite clearly: unlike their son, she was responsible, contributed money to the house, and even held down two jobs for awhile. Now she was working full time at the same place I worked. If anyone should be kicked out, it would be their son.

And yet with him being her ex-boyfriend and all, it couldn't have been easy for her to live there. Getting back to Terra and the Monkeybars, I was wondering if she was expecting to move in with me. She wasn't on the lease, obviously, so I couldn't really ask her to move in until October when it would renew, anyway. I mean, I could, but it'd be risky. So I accepted the situation, with her living there. I didn't say much about it, nor did she. Then in conversation, shortly before she left for her vacation, she briefly stated that they still shared the same room, but he was pretty good about letting her have the bed when she actually slept there and not at my place. Pretty good? I wondered what that was supposed to mean, but coughed it up to over-analysis. So they shared a room anyway. Fucked up situation.

More discomfort arose out of that whole situation with her ex-boyfriend's family, however. The feeling that struck me when she wanted to spend time with her ex-boyfriend's family, or when I'd feel uncomfortable about her living there, or when I thought about her leaving for those three weeks for her parent's house in California -- was how incredibly wrong it was for me to be so fucking jealous and untrusting of her. And to feel as if I owned her, as if she was some sort of possession. That's what I hated so much about human relationships, especially intimate ones -- this instinct to act as if you own another person like some piece of property. I acted as if she was mine, and I hated myself for the instinctual delusion that caused me to feel that I owned her. I rebelled against it. She had even spoken about how controlling her ex-fiancee had gotten after they had come together down to Ohio, which only served to increase my resistance towards this possessive instinct. I wasn't going to be another controlling boyfriend. An intimate relationship, I was sure, was not about possession or ownership of another, as if the other were an item -- it's about trust, mutual respect, understanding, and a sense of value in one another. It was about nurturing a bond, giving it the appropriate conditions in which to grow.

I'd damn near seen her every day; usually we took a few days off a week. That was good, because I needed my alone time. She worked mornings and I worked nights. She'd walk up from where she was living at her ex-boyfriend's house to work, maybe a ten minute walk, and wait for me until I got off around midnight. I'd smoke a cigarette, talk with her a bit, hold her, then sometimes we'd go somewhere, then we'd go home. And when I didn't have to take her home early in the morning so she could go to work -- on those nights when I got to `keep her' -- life seemed to take on a new light.

Seeing someone this often was strange for me. Usually, as a rule, I need a good amount of time alone to think to myself. Always in my life I had been the nucleus I always returned to -- I was my own home base. Now it was her I returned to, her I revolved around. It was her I looked forward to seeing, not the reflection of myself in my deluded mind. Prior to her, days around people were days of waiting to be alone -- now, my days of being alone and days of being with people other than her were days of waiting to be around her. Now when I went into my isolation for a day or so, or even on break at work when she wasn't waiting for me outside, all I could think about was her. I would have a horrible day in the back kitchen, I would get ready to go at the end of the day filled with my usual anger or depression, and I'd walk outside to find her there, by my place on the patio beside the garage can, her knees pulled up to her chin, her arms wrapped around her legs, looking up and into me with those beautiful eyes of hers. Her presence made all the negativity just dissipate; the world I carried on my shoulders was left to be held by the fabric of space, and with her at my side I could step into the world and feel connected with life again. Still, nothing was enough. No amount of her could satisfy -- but I soaked up every moment for all I could.

The inevitable finally came, and one night I gave her a brief overview of the weird stuff I'd experienced over the course of my life. I was quick to point out that I didn't know if `they' were really what they seemed to be, that I felt an attitude of uncertainty was the safest approach to these experiences. I explained that what I once so fervently believed were out-of-body experiences into some otherworld or `astral plane', as some have called it, could be nothing more than waking dreams during periods of sleep paralysis; what seemed to be aliens and hybrid children could very well be convincing hallucinations, autonomous archetypal manifestations of my unconscious. It could just be split-off parts of my mind, perhaps equally conscious as myself but not at the `wheel' of my brain with any regularity, that utilized personal memories and cultural metaphors as a means of achieving some form of communication or contact with me in the hopes that a psychological integration might occur that would make my personality 360 degrees again. I told her in many ways it seemed as if I fit the title of a schizophrenic, but that there were some things that caused me to hesitate to come to that conclusion; that the doc said my brain was likely to be abnormal in some sense, and that I simply experienced the world and myself differently than the majority.

We talked about it a bit, and we both explained ourselves as spiritual as opposed to religious. We both meditated regularly. She said that she had grown up Mormon, but had since drifted from it and began feeding her curiosity towards other religions. She mentioned Catholicism, at which point I had to hold my tongue so hard with my teeth that I feared I might draw blood. She also mentioned Wicca, which I had a more positive than negative reaction to. She seemed drawn to it for the same reasons that I had a more positive than negative reaction to it, too: Wicca is very nature-oriented, and she is as well.

She went into detailed explanation about something else, however, that I found incredibly interesting. She explained to me that she often practiced what she referred to as `candle magick', and she had done so since as far back as she could remember. She had never read any of the books I had over the years, but her solitary practice with candle magick echoed exactly as those books suggested. She utilized this practice to heal and help herself and others, to let go of anger and depression, to signify the end of chapters of her life and everything else that my half-assed research on ritual as rites of passage has helped me understand bit by bit over the years. Again, she does this as a natural instinct, having grown up in an environment with no obvious neo-`pagan' persuasion. Some time later, she explained the specifics of her practice: she first rubs the candle, cleansing it of `excess energy' and fueling it with intent. She then would carve something symbolic or referent to her intent onto the candle, such as a name of a person she was angry at, a person she wanted to help, or something of the like. She would then light the candle and focus on it, meditate on it, and watch it melt and burn down passed the name. She said she would never use that specific candle twice, she would never use it again for any other purpose. I don't recall if she said she threw it away or buried it or simply let it burn down to nothingness -- but it was disposed of. I found this interesting, not only because of my intense interest in the use of ritual a year or so back, but because this habit, this system, this way or path developed in her naturally and seemed to work so well for her.

There was so much about her I adored. She was so calm and controlled; still on the surface, but intense deep beneath. She had no reservations. She had no time for regrets, second guesses, grudges. She had a beautiful simplicity about her, the kind I associate with Claire now that I think of it. And she knew when to hold on and how to let go so she could do what she had to do without any excess baggage. She never fought, she never argued, but she had her opinions and observations -- she was certainly no pushover. She was for give-and-take, she was for cooperation, she was for time share. She was fair, peaceful and tranquil. She had a love of freedom, it seemed to me, a love of independence, and she had a sense of responsibility. She knew who she was: she wasn’t trying to be someone to impress anyone else, she didn’t change around the people she hung around with. Physically, mentally, emotionally, sexually, she was beautiful.

Then there was how she made me feel; who she inspired me be when I was around her. I had a purpose with her, a drive, a meaning. I felt so focused with her. With Kate, I didn’t have my attention going in five thousand different directions, secretly drooling over this girl or that girl -- I was passed all that. I had achieved my goal. I was totally satisfied. I didn’t have to feel guilty about my urge, I could itch my scratch with her in a meaningful way.

I wanted to take her places and do the boyfriend thing, and I did all I could think of with the little cash I had. It didn’t add up to much, admittedly. One of the things I like about living in a college town is that so many things are in walking distance -- restaurants, grocery stores, all-night gas stations. Since Kate liked to walk and I did as well, this worked out perfectly. We once walked down to the ice-cream place nearby and I got her some Rocky Road. Another time, I took her to a movie. Not much creativity in that choice, I know, but it was memorable.

We walked our way to the theater, which wasn't far from the house. After I bought the tickets, we had some time to kill, so we sat on the bench in the lobby and watched some kids playing video games as we talked. She told me a lot about her family and about the small town of Barstow, California, where she grew up. She told me how, to her ears, we talked funny here in Ohio -- how she had never before heard the terms "my bad" or "it's all good." She told me about her first kiss, when she first tried pot, and the boyfriends she'd had since high school. Like Claire, apparently, high school relationships didn't count with her.

It was strange being there on that bench with us talking so casually, with her in my arms. It was unspeakably odd, feeling the way I did right then and with it seeming so natural. I actually felt as if I was a boyfriend. That I was mature. That I was real. That I was humanized. I felt as if I was really part of something special. I never felt that way before.

It kind of worried me. And no matter how often I tried to ignore it, I couldn’t seem to muffle this part of me, this tiny voice, that kept warning me to be careful. I didn't want to be made a fool, as I'd seen happen to so many others in the past in regards to relationships. So as much as I wanted to trust, I tried to keep myself away from blind faith or premature certitude. You see, whenever others confide in me regarding their newly-acquired significant others, I always warn them against falling too deep, too fast. I tell them that there's a certain danger in rushing into things. That plunging in the deep end, especially so early, is dangerous; one must beware of those treacherous waters too soon, one must ease oneself into them. When someone stimulates emotions like Kate does, it's easy for one to get addicted, and if the drug then leaves you the withdrawal symptoms, they can destroy you. I was down in the dumps before she met me, but if she lifts me this high up off the ground and then just drops me... well, the higher you’re lifted, the harder you fall when your support is taken away, you know what I mean? Gravity is the enemy. The strong climb themselves, or they grow their own wings. I was weak and wingless, and for those like me, perhaps its safer at the bottom. I could gain strength eventually, I could transform alone. The thing was, I had wanted to do this all myself. I had wanted to cure myself, but I found her to be the antidote. An addictive healing agent. I kept telling myself: I can't use her as a crutch, I have to heal myself. I promised myself that with Kate I wouldn't forget that it’s dangerous to fall too deep, too fast. I wouldn't be one of those people who expect others to do what they say, not what they do. I would lead by example. Very consciously, I tried to take my own advice. I tried my damnedest not to be the biggest fucking hypocrite in the world.

But all of this felt so right. I remember thinking then, as we both sat on that bench: make this feeling last. Let this feeling grow.

So I fell too deep, too fast -- like a sumo wrestler in the deepest of gravity wells.

It seemed as if she fell deep, too, though one can never be certain about his perceptions. You never really know for sure what's going on inside people's heads, save for those rare instances where you end up inside them. Never mind that. The reason I wonder if she fell as deep for me as I did with her was due to something she said one day, a few weeks after we'd met. It was just after we'd had sex, and she had said something that I thought I'd heard wrong -- that I hoped, in a way, that I'd heard wrong. And I closed my eyes, and I took a deep breath, and I forced out the question just to make sure I was hearing things. Tell me, I said, tell me I'm hearing things.

"I love you," she said.

"No, no," I thought, remaining silent and looking away from her. "Not that word, Kate. We've talked about that word. That's a bad word. A bad, four-letter word. You hate the word fuck, I hate the word love. Fuck sounds cold to you, love sounds insane to me."

"It's just a word," she says.

"No, its not just a word," I thought to her. "Its a powerful word. It signifies something with unique, undeniable depth of emotion and spirit and meaning. Sex becomes a vehicle for meaning when it serves as a metaphor, a ritual signifying something deeper than the act itself. Love is not just a word to me. To other people, love is a word: they love ice cream, they love long walks in the park, they love this thing or that person for this long or in this way. Love, I'm sorry to say, has been thrown around so much by some people its meaning has become void. Use it all the time for everything or say it to everyone and it turns out loosing its depth. It becomes a word that means nothing. Love has become a whore of a word. Behind it, I place a lot of thought, a lot of caution, oceans of emotion, an inconceivable amount of spirit, because the next time I use it I want to make sure that I had to, because there is no other choice. That's how it was the first time I used it. The first time I said it to a girl."

"You don't have to say anything," she told me, and she meant it. "I'm not trying to make you feel uncomfortable. I'm sorry."

"Don't be," I said.

"I love you."

I didn't say anything.

She eventually asked me if I knew that she was going to visit her family in California for three weeks. I told her I'd heard about it some time ago in passing, but she herself had never mentioned it to me. In a half-joking fashion, I asked her if she was intending to stay. She said that she had been considering it awhile back, but that she had decided against it. Still, I shuddered. For her to be gone for three weeks was inconceivable. I refused to even think about it. I had embraced that delusion from childhood: “if you ignore it, maybe it didn't happen; if you don't acknowledge it's existence, maybe it'll go away and you won't have to deal with it. You don't have to see what you refuse to see, and what you don't see can't hurt you.” But on a higher level I knew all that to be bullshit. What you refuse to see are the things that can hurt you the most in the long run, when you’re inevitably forced to face them.

The night before she left for California to visit her parents, we walked around town, down back roads and the beneath street lights. The college town seemed like a ghost town, at least in memory, without a person in sight, with perhaps only the occasional, passing car. We walked and talked, she told me more about her parents and their house, about how she loved the snow in Ohio but missed the California sky and the beautiful, multicolored sunset and sunrise. Her words painted an almost mythic place in my mind: a desert of silence, a desert of beautiful, open skies where on long walks to the straight horizon you'd only happen upon a passing tumble weed, a scorpion crossing your path, or some other wanderlust soul. More than once as we walked, we would stop on the sidewalk and hold each other, kiss each other. The me I hated -- the dark, dreary, nihilistic, pessimistic, fatalistic me -- he seemed to be miles away in memory as I stood there embracing her.

A few times, I half-jokingly asked her not to go, but she brushed it off by saying it was only three weeks. I was half-inclined to ask her if I could go with her, but I knew that would be crazy.

When I dropped her off at her house the next night, we kissed in the car. We kissed goodbye. I gave her a look. She told me then, as she would many times on the phone after she'd left, that I had no need to worry: she was coming back. And for weeks, I kept telling myself that. For awhile there while she was gone, I'd call her or she'd call me -- not a day went by when we wouldn't speak to each other. She'd even called me two times at while work; they didn't care, they thought it was so sweet, so cute. It was on the first of those occasions that she had called me at work when, as was usual, she said at the end of the phone conversation those three words: “I love you.”. It always made me feel uncomfortable before, but it felt right when she said it then, and before I realized it I said, "I love you, too." So naturally. So honestly. And there was a long, charged silence before we said our usual good-byes.

No regrets. It’s all good.

The routine phone calls back and fourth continued for another week or so, and then I suddenly didn't hear from her for two days. I wondered: should I call, should I not call? I called once. She had gone on a walk. A day went by. I called again: she was at her friends house, her sister said. I called again: still not home. It wasn't just the lack of contact or the distance in space, I think, but something else was bothering me. I had this horrific feeling in my gut, in my chest, in my head. It was physical. I woke up one morning after a considerable amount of sleep (for me, anyway) and I was dizzy all morning, even after going in to work. I just felt fucked up, like I was on something. I'd drank a bit at the party the night before, but not nearly enough for a hangover, and alcohol never made me feel like this. Never. Something was gnawing at me. Was this psychosomatic, I wondered?

"Aw, you're love-struck," a girl at work said. I was confused. Does she mean I'm addicted to Kate and these are withdrawal symptoms or something?

I went over our conversations in my mind. Since she'd gone down there, one major thing had horrified me: her parents wanted her to move back to California to stay with them. Her father even said he could get her a position in this job at a plant where he worked. She looked into it, she had told me, but just to satisfy him -- she wasn't serious about it, not at all. Eventually she'd like to move down there, she said, maybe, just maybe, but not yet. Not yet. I saw through it like glass. I knew damned well it had been in her head as serious option, not for later, not as a future possibility, but as a present, immediate option. And something in me told me she was swaying towards staying in Cali. Call it paranoia; I did. But I wasn't really letting emotions get in the way. What I was doing was walking in her shoes, looking through her eyes, and thinking how I would think if I were her in the circumstance she was in. I mean, what did she have here in Ohio? Some amateur boyfriend with a lousy job and a lousy car who’s twenty-five and not really going anywhere in life, some uncomfortable household with an ex-boyfriend, some job at a fast food restaurant? What did she have down there? Family support, a good job just waiting for her, a beautiful California sun in the expansive desert sky of Barstow...

When she finally called me a few days later, something seemed wrong. Something unspoken, something buried there beneath the surface. A day lapsed again. I couldn’t help but notice that the calls were getting fewer and farther between. Then she called me late one evening, it was about three AM for me. I already knew it was coming, I could smell the stench of the truth in the air, taste it's bitter flavor in my mouth, and it had literally been twisting in my stomach. I saw it as she spoke, as she tried to beat around the bush. I asked the right questions in the attempts to make it as easy as possible for her to say it. I asked what had been going on, and she told me about her parents -- about her father's back hurting, the fact that her mother had been in the hospital a few times while she was down here in Ohio and not told her, how she still wasn't doing all that well. Then I asked what had been on her mind as of late; if there was anything new. I think I let out a bit of fear or even anger in my voice, if only because I said it so cold and casual, so acted. She revealed that there had been something, and that it dealt with what her parents had been talking about -- that’s how she said it. That wasn’t enough. I asked her what it was specifically, and she said it was in regards to her staying there in California to live. I asked her if she was coming back. She said she didn't think so.

And I heard a sob. Then another.

The first was hers; the second, mine.

She never verbally stated she was staying. We never officially said that we were breaking up. There was no real closure. It was simply discontinued. It was like that great television show that’s just suddenly canceled, or a great book you’re reading that you have to return to the library before you’ve finished reading it. It was clear that she wasn't coming back. The finality was too powerful to me to ignore. I was yet again forced to face my fear of extinction, and I think this was behind the thought that popped up one evening about a week later while I was on a walk alone and thinking of Kate.

The thought seemed to have just come out of nowhere, and it was this: there is no selfless reason to mourn the dead. The only cause of such mourning can be greed. So too is it with phases or moments in life that we look back on with this morose nostalgia. We want more. That everything in life has an expiration date, whether the exact date is known or not, should be a given. We fancy these illusions of immortality, however. Even if you live it up, however, as I feel I did with her, it doesn't matter. No matter how long you had, no matter how many chances you were given to really live it up or get to know the person at a greater depth, no matter how many of those chances you took, no matter how much you actually got to know the person, in their death we always feel we could've done more, gotten more, been more to or for the person. And its greed. It’s the inability to accept the changing seasons; the inability to let go and move on with life. The anger that comes over a significant death or change stems from the fact that we’re forced to confront the fact that we really have no control over the conditions of life. In the face of that inevitabilty, our only means of defense against these facts, which we cannot accept as a natural course of our existence, is to depress ourselves, to hate ourselves and others, to dwell on the past and fear the future as the present slips by us.

"I still want to call you," she said to me.

Instantly, it reminded me of the line every guy like me has heard from high school: `I still want to be friends.’ And as recognition of the situation as it would be from this point on began to sink in, of us `just being friends’ and still calling each other, all I could think about was how I had felt for Claire all those years. All I could think about was how it would absolutely kill me when we talked every three months and she'd tell me she'd be moving to a different state, how she'd met a different guy, got engaged again, got married again, got pregnant again, got divorced again. I caught brief, short echoes of all my jealousy in that situation with Claire; of all my hurt, my rage, my constant wondering just what she feels for me on the surface or deep down. I recalled not wanting to cut off my friendship with Claire simply because I had stronger feelings for her, and therefore maintaining it, and therefore allowing myself to be subjected to the emotional torture as I was drug through the mud of hell after hell, bearing shit-storm after shit-storm.

I wondered if I’d ever see her again, and it terrified me. I remembered what would happen every time I'd think I was over Claire; every single time I had decided that I was just happy with her and I being friends. I would suddenly be faced with seeing her again face to face, and in an instant all those emotions I’d thought were dead and gone would flood back. I would find myself caught in between the land of once-was and coulda-been and forced to ride the wave of the question: `could it ever be again?’ And I could still feel how it would kill every piece of my being, how it would evaporate every drop of hope I had for ever being over her. I saw how hope could kill a man -- perpetually murder a man. I saw how very easily my situation with Claire could happen all over again with Kate, and all I could think of was: no, I'm not ready for all that bullshit again. To hell with this.

But even if I never saw her again and we just talked, I wondered, how bad would that be? It would be just a different flavor of hell, I knew. In my personal opinion, talking on the phone absolutely kills; I hate the phone. It's just bearable when you'll see the person you're talking to in a few hours or the next day, or even in a week or two or three. But to be around her every day, then have to bear her being gone on a vacation for three weeks, it was torture enough talking to her over the phone and not being able to hold her. And then to have the vacation extend indefinitely? It was too fucking much.

The phone is a tease for real interaction, real communication. And now I had gone from the closest closeness to the farthest distance. The real life to mental masturbation. Living life actively to becoming, yet again, the passive witness to life as it trails by. Only now made worse by the memory, by the knowledge, that there is a way of living so far removed from this death-like, zombie existence I perpetually lead. The higher you climb, the higher you're lifted, the harder, the father, you fall, fall, fall. No one else to blame for this, though. It was my bad, my bad.

“I want to keep talking to you, too,” I said.

Shit, I was crying now. I was such a fucking child. I didn’t want to make her feel any worse about this than she already did, and there really seemed to be nothing left to say now. How the fuck can someone have any form of conversation right after an A-Bomb like that has been dropped? So after a short conversation with a lot of painful pauses, I said that I had to go, that I couldn't talk about it right then, that I’d talk to her tomorrow. And before we hung up, she used the four-letter word again in the usual three-word sentence. The difference was that she added a `still', and that indicated to me that the three previous words were obligatory. And I used the four-letter word again.

Again, it had become a four-letter word.

"Unfulfilled desires are dangerous forces."
-- Sarah Tarleton Colvin.

TRUTH & DARE.
by Patchwork
6/22/04

She chooses truth again,
and I ask her, and then she looks at me,
says she has no sexual fantasies:
that she does what she wants and imagines,
so there's no need.

She tells me I could never know
all she wants to do to me
and my head's just spinning
and she's grinning as she looks down on me.

I choose dare again,
knowing I'll be too chicken to live up to it
and then she asks me about my sexual fantasies:

I know for me they're a dime a dozen,
never thought to count my chickens
before they hatched: never thought they could.

Now the egg cracks and in reality's light I find
I'm chicken, I'm so fucking chicken...

"The hardest battle you are ever going to have to fight is the battle to be just you."
-- Leo Buscaglia.

OUT THERE.
by Mousie
1/24/02

there seem to be greener pastures
out there
one with your name on it
if you'd just set aside your fear
and trust
in something you've long ago left behind
something that seems to sanctify you
while confusing your mind

you take comfort in such brittle things
and you wait for the security it might bring
and when the satisfaction never comes
you sit there pretending to be numb

out here
there is a place just for you
a little miracle
that you never let come true
out here
is where you keep landing
everytime you fall down
beyond your understanding

out here is a blessing
still under disguise
a truth among the many
of the world's cruel lies
out here you left something
you never recognized
that you may yet gain
if you are willing to compromise ...

there are so many wonderful things
for you to embrace
if you'd just hang up your pride
and come out of your hiding place ...

“When, doomed to death I shall have expired, I will attend you as a nocturnal fury; and, a ghost, I will attack your faces with my hooked talons (for such is the power of those divinities, the Manes) and brooding upon your restless breasts, I will deprive you of repose by terror.”
-- Horace, 5th Epode.

“This is the hag, when maids lie on their back,
That presses them, and learns them first to bear,
Making them women of good carriage.”
-- William Shakespeare (Act 1, Scene 4 from Romeo and Juliet).

"I sleep -- for a while -- two or three hours -- then a dream -- no -- a nightmare seizes me in its grip, I know full well that I am lying down and that I am asleep... I sense it and I know it... and I am also aware that somebody is coming up to me, looking at me, running his fingers over me, climbing on to my bed, kneeling on my chest, taking me by the throat and squeezing... squeezing... with all its might, trying to strangle me. I struggle, but I am tied down by that dreadful feeling of helplessness which paralyzes us in our dreams. I want to cry out -- but I can't. I want to move -- I can't do it. I try, making terrible, strenuous efforts, gasping for breath, to turn on my side, to throw off this creature who is crushing me and choking me -- but I can't! Then, suddenly, I wake up, panic-stricken, covered in sweat. I light a candle. I am alone."
-- Guy de Maupassant, Le Horla, page 893.

HAGRIDDEN.
by Rewired

Things were pretty weird already when I was sixteen, and then I talked with a poltergeist through a Ouija board, got on antidepressants, and finally got dry-fucked by a female demon in my sleep. All brought on by the resistance to instincts and the fear of death.

Perhaps that’s jumping a bit ahead, however.

I guess the core of this story really starts in early February, 1995, when I had asked my mother if she’d ever had anything strange occur to her that could be classified as paranormal. I was looking for her maybe having seen a UFO, or evidence of having had abduction experiences. That’s not at all what my question brought to her mind. What she began telling me was her terrifying experience with a Ouija board when she was a teenager, and it was her story that had sort of piqued my interest in it to begin with.

She had used it a few times. She told me how she had once asked the board if she’d ever get married, and what her husband’s name would be. It told her that she would be married twice and gave her the initials of both of them. She laughed at the thought of being married twice, and especially at the initials of her first husband, because they were the same as hers. She also laughed about having three children, one miscarriage. But it all came true, she told me, every bit of it.

That sort of freaked her out, but nothing compared to what happened one night -- the last night she’d ever use the Ouija. She had been in her friend’s attic, and they had been going about the usual routine of asking it questions, recieving answers, and blaming each other for moving the planchette. After awhile, they grew bored with it and stood up to leave the attic. Then they heard a noise. When they looked back at the board, they found the planchette moving erratically on the board at high speed, all by itself. She never used the board again and, having had the subject brought up in her mind, she then stressed her insistence that neither me nor either of my younger sisters ever bring one of them into the house, ever.

So, of course, I purchased a Ouija board.

I bought it from a friend of mine at school, stuck it in my book bag, and had my sisters hold onto it for me. We were all pretty curious. Though the board hadn’t given me much reliable, valuable information the first time I’d used it almost a full year before, I was getting pretty desperate at this time for any source of information beyond my bruised brain and the books I had been reading that might help answer the most fundamental of my questions. The Ouija board sounded as good an idea as anything else.

I knew little about the board back then, but since I’ve done some research. Apparently, the whole thing began in 1848, in a cabin in Hydesville, New York. Kate and Maggie Fox began communicating with what they believed to be the spirit of a deceased peddler, who at first communicated with them through knocks that merely indicated yes and no answers. More detailed conversation was soon desired, however, and an elaborate code system was developed by which certain knocks stood for certain letters of the alphabet. Hearing of this, others tried the same thing, gathering people in there homes to engage in elaborate Morse code with the Other Side. And so the Spiritualist movement began.

The reason this whole thing caught on is pretty obvious, once you think about it. Most cultures select, through their unique means, those who anthropologists call `shamans’ -- people given the role of communicating and interacting with the otherworld. Here in the Western culture, however, we have no such official role in society for such potential individuals. We could say the space has been filled by priests or psychologists, or that our potential shamans have been metaphorically burned at the stake under the categories of mental disorders such as schizophrenia. Regardless, here in the West, inspired by the Fox sisters, many have chosen to take on the role themselves and have direct contact with beings from that otherworld.

Our constant need for things to be better and faster soon took hold, however. The long and elaborate methods of knocks and raps became tiring and frustrating to many, and they sought a more direct and swift -- and less noisy -- means of communication. Many methods then came into fashion. Some fell into a trance and communicated with the entities in that fashion, through their minds. Others allowed themselves to `channel’ the beings; to be possessed by them for a limited amount of time for the purposes of communicating with others in the surrounding area. And then came a small device created, according to stories which cannot be validated, in 1853 by a French Spiritualist by the name of M. Planchette (French for `little plank’). The device, which came to be known as the planchette, was small and heart-shaped with three pencils attached to its legs.

By itself, the planchette seemed pretty useless, so many ditched the planchette for the pen. `Automatic writing’ was born, and has since been revived in the New Age movement as a form of channeling. It works like this: a trance medium would fall into a receptive, altered state of consciousness and allow herself to write spontaneously, without conscious editing. This began with the pen, went to the type-writer, and later even the canvas and keyboard. Most often, these writings were attributed to the works of the spirits. Sometimes, automatic writing was explained as the medium receiving messages from the spirit in her mind, which she then produced on the page. On other occasions, the spirit was said to be working through the medium’s hands. Through this method, many have produced books, novels, poetry, music and artwork that they attribute to the deceased or unearthly -- Ben Franklin, Jesus Christ, and even aliens borrow their hands. Quite often the medium did not even know what was being written, and the handwriting was noticeably different than her own. People who had a hard time drawing a stick figure where suddenly creating artwork that many critics have persisted are inarguably the style of the deceased artist the medium attributed it to.

Eventually, though, many came to interpret the material as having come from a secondary personality (which many attested must have had access to extrasensory perception and psychokinetic abilities) of the medium, usually locked in the unconscious mind, but now awakened and given space to express itself. For this reason, it was adopted later on as a creative tool -- and a therapeutic one. This form of writing was eventually picked up by Beatnicks and came to be known as `stream of consciousness.' Not knowing that it was an official style, I began automatic writing at about age sixteen, when I began seeing `aliens' and having flashbacks from my youth. It continued after my Ouija experience. It really did feel, to me, as if something else was running my fingers. Whatever it was, and is, there is no doubt in my mind it is the same thing `running' all my perceptual anomalies.

The planchette was revived by a coffin and cabinet maker by the name of EC Reiche. He created a small wooden board with the alphabet arranged in two arcs across the top of the board, numbers from one to ten below them, and at each bottom corner a `yes’ and a `no’ a `goodbye’ and a `maybe’. With this board he used the planchette, but he replaced the pencils with wooden pegs so the device was free to roam the surface of the board as two mediums placed their fingers upon it. Allegedly, he named the board the `Ouija’ (`we-ja’) because he received the word from a spirit through the board and had believed -- falsely -- that it was the Egyptian word for luck.

He eventually sold the Ouija to a friend of his, Charles Kennard, who then founded the Kennard Novelty Co. and began producing the boards around 1886. Shortly thereafter, William Fuld, the shop manager, made the decision to go into business for himself, forced Kennard out of the loop and changed its name to Ouija Novelty Co. He became a successful businessman and myth-maker. He claimed to have invented the board himself, started the rumor that the name `Ouija’ was a hybrid of the words for `yes’ in French (oui) and German (ja), and attributed much of his success to the guidance of the board itself. He remained in control of the company for the next 35 years, until 1927, when he plummeted to his death from the top of his Baltimore building. Until 1966 his heirs maintained the company, who then sold out to Parker Brothers, who currently hold all the trademarks and patents to the board and continue to produce it in mass quantities. The boards they manufacture still follow the original style, but now they got nifty ones that glow in the dark, too.

The board is quite easy to use. You just rest the board on the laps between two people and have them put their fingertips on the planchette. They then either wait for it to move or both begin jointly, lightly, swirling the planchette in a circular or figure-eight fashion on the board’s surface. They may state their goals or send an invitation. Through the board, people believe they’ve come into contact with the deceased, angels, demons, aliens -- you name it.

My sisters had not only been hiding it from my mother for me, they had been using it, and they seemed to be enjoying it. They told me how they had been talking to some guardian spirit watching over us who called himself Ed Fred. I had tried the board a few times in solitude and it had kind of scared me, but I decided that I wouldn’t believe it had anything to do with anything beyond my own brain until I had no other choice but to come to that conclusion.

It was on February 9 that my sisters and I gathered in my room to use the board together. For me, it would be the very last time. My sisters worked the board as I asked the questions. At first, I was very serious about it all. I asked the board if what I had seen were really aliens, and the board answered yes; the board also said there would be no new abductions until March. Then, however, my attitude changed. I had asked it a lot of questions, and some of them were questions I’d previously asked, only I asked them in a different fashion, and I received totally different answers. It was disappointing, to find all this to be a crock, and I started getting bitter and sarcastic. In the spirit of fun, no pun, I began asking it really cheesy questions. Then my sisters started laughing, and began asking sarcastic questions of their own. We were all treating it as a joke.

With one last drop of seriousness, I asked if my sister, Eve, was an abductee and if the aliens would be coming for her. It said yes. Then on a whim I asked if Eve’s eye, which she had been complaining had been hurting her earlier, had anything to do with the aliens. Ed Fred said yes.

I was in the process of rolling my eyes when Eve looked to the right, and I caught something that didn’t register right away. Linda caught it at the same time, though, and it registered a lot faster for her. She jumped. I looked back at Eve as it struck me what Linda and I had seen almost simultaneously: the big, bold, straight red cut on the white of Eve’s eye.

Stories of devices implanted into the bodies of abductees rushed through my mind. Had the existence of some intelligence behind the Ouija and the existence of the aliens been validated here in own fowl swoop? Absolutely not, I thought. It could just be coincidence. Or the entity speaking to us could be a poltergeist, and it could have cut Eve's eye itself. All I knew for certain was that Linda and I were entirely amazed and more than a little spooked. We just looked at each other, unable to say anything. Eve, by this point, obviously knew something was wrong and started to freak out. We tried to keep her calm as we told her about the cut on her eye. She was yelling at us and crying, saying that this wasn’t funny anymore. She stood up and said she wouldn’t play with the board ever again. She promised to calm down before leaving the room and not to tell mom, and Linda and I agreed to quit using it without argument. I eventually gave it to my cousin, Maddy. I kept watch on Eve’s room at night for the next week or so, during which time I heard a host of strange noises about the house. I kept a close eye on her room again in March, just to be sure.

By March, I was feeling pretty burned out by everything that had occurred since the dawn of the Winter season. I had by this time collected, on my own, a wide range of what seemed to be previously forgotten memories that stretched from the tragically mundane to the unspeakably bizarre. At first, I had sought clarity through books, then through a Ouija board. That just fed old questions further elaboration and spawned a hoard of new ones. It was around this time that the possibility finally began to sink it that I just might be going entirely insane, so I decided I was ready to go see a mental health professional.

When I approached my mom with this, she was, of course, all for it, and set up an appointment immediately. Though I’d previously seen at least three other social workers in my youth, this was the first psychiatrist I’d ever encountered. She was a skinny, wrinkly woman with a heavy German accent who insisted what I needed to do was to go outside more often to get some fresh air. She also told me to eat more fruit, save for bananas, because they don’t count. Perhaps she considered it cannibalism. Anyway, she threw me on 10 milligrams of this drug called Nortriptyline, and I began taking it on March third.

Considering the increased strangeness that occurred during this period, I did a bit of research on this drug years later. I found that Nortriptyline hydrochloride in the generic name for this drug, but it is also known under the brand names Aventyl and Pamekir. It is a tricyclic antidepressant (TCA), which means that raises the levels of neurotransmitters in the brain tissue that may be at abnormal levels and causing the condition of depression. At the same time, its a sedative that eases anxiety, restlessness, insomnia and chronic pain. The increase in neurochemicals may cause sleep and appetite to improve quickly, but it can take a month or two until the affects of the medication set in completely.

Not just affects, either, but side affects. The more common ones include feeling drowsy, dizzy, having blurred vision, feeling light-headed, having dry mouth, as well as experiencing constipation and the inability to urinate. If a person is already anxious, this drug may increase anxiety. It can amplify a present psychosis or awaken latent symptoms. It can cause symptoms of the manic phase to emerge in bipolar patients. Epileptiform seizures may also occur -- seizures known as idiopathic (medspeak for `I don’t have a fucking clue what’s causing this’) seizures. And if all of that isn’t bad enough, it can also put you at a higher risk for cavities. No joke. Now, life-threatening reactions to this drug include the following: dramatic changes in clear and logical thinking, fainting or dizziness, fever, itching, wheezing, bad coughing, a blue skin color and the swelling of the tongue, throat or face and pressure in the chest. Nowhere, however, does it mention strange dreams, out-of-body experiences or vicious attacks by non-corporeal entities, which is disappointing.

Nortriptyline comes in capsules of 10mg, 25mg, 50mg, and 75mg, and the dosage is specific to the patient. As with me, it is often taken just before bedtime to help you sleep.

The weirdness returned on the evening of March fourteenth, only eleven days after I began taking my happy zombie pills. I had been lying on my back in bed at the time, drifting in and out of sleep. This was rare behavior, I should note, for I’d been afraid to sleep on my back since childhood. I’d always gotten bad dreams when I slept that way. Apparently it still worked that way, though at the beginning it just gave birth to an interesting and unusual sensation. As I was lying there, I kept feeling the sensation of being lifted up out of my body and out of my bedroom window, always ending back up in my body seconds later. I didn’t believe I was actually floating in physical or spirit form, it was just an odd sensation I was curious about. I tried to control the experience, and felt that I could control how I floated somewhat. After awhile I grew bored with that and began to drift off mentally.

Then my attention returned threefold. I suddenly became acutely aware of an odd presence in my room. I found I couldn’t move. Then it got incredibly worse: I felt someone crawling atop my body, putting her knees at the sides of my rib cage. It was straddling me, and soon enough I sensed movement. I still couldn’t move, I couldn’t even open my eyes, but I did my damnedest to struggle and fight the paralysis so I could throw this thing off me. Whatever it was, the entity was pushing something over my face that made it hard for me to breath. I got the sense that it was a tank of some kind. It was then that my consciousness seemed to dislocate, and I got this weird image in my head. I was looking out through a porthole at a swampy area or marsh full of trees and muck. At the same time, I could still feel this thing on top of me, and I struggled to pull out of these images in my head and regain control over my body. I seemed to have some limited success. I no longer had the sensation of the tank being on my face, but the creature was now pushing it’s hands on my chest, making it harder and harder for me to breath. It was suffocating me. Then it put it’s knees on my chest and pushed down harder and harder. I couldn’t move or breathe. I tried to open my eyes to see the thing, to fight it, to try and ask for mercy or something -- but I blacked out for what seemed to have been just a moment and woke up. As suddenly and inexplicably as the experience had begun, it had ended.

I wrote the experience down the best I could, regained my composure, and eventually went to sleep. I was fucking exhausted.

The next morning when I awoke, I looked at my notebook. I was most certainly confused. For one, the entry I’d made from the night before had a peculiar nature about it. After my documentation of the experience, which I remembered writing, I had wrote that this sensation had `also happened at around four in the morning’. So apparently it had happened not once, but twice. That was the first strange thing. The second was that I had written down the time just before beginning that sentence, and the time was 1:31 AM. This presents a problem, as it implies that I had written of the first and second experiences roughly two-and-a-half hours prior to the first experience. Then, another problem presented itself: I had logged out at the bottom of the entry at 1:18 AM. As a rule, you can’t log out of something before you’ve logged in, especially so when you’re documenting two experiences an hour and a half before the first experience occurred. Apparently I had no respect for linear progression.

There was one more strange element in all this, however. In the margin by my entry I found an odd drawing. I knew I must have drawn it during, prior, or after the odd experience, but I didn’t remember drawing it at all. It was a circle with two elongated crescents to the top and bottom. Some of my friends think it looks like an eye.

All that kind of freaked me out. I had thought that medication would make all this weird shit stop, maybe clear up my mind so I could answer some of my questions, but now my problems just had another layer. Now I didn’t know if these new experiences were drug-induced, amplifying the symptoms of a previously-diseased mind, or were simply having no effect whatsoever. Taking them just seemed to add questions, not subtract them, and that was the last thing I wanted. So I wasted no time informing my mother that I was having second thoughts about the medication. She said to just give it a try, and I insisted that I had. She gave me a condescending laugh and told me that it had only been a little over a week since I’d first began taking the meds and that I shouldn’t be getting any effects yet. I wanted to argue, but I knew I’d have to bring up what had happened that night, so I let it drop. I took matters into my own hands and started skipping days in-between taking my medication without her knowledge. I did it slowly so I could minimize any potential side-affects.

So, what exactly was behind all this -- behind the Ouija and this `thing' that had straddled me that evening?

Some claim it has to do with `evil spirits’. It is frequently recommended, even persisted, that you do not use the Ouija board alone as I had. According to some, using it at all put one to great risk, especially if the person in question is already receptive to the world of the strange. For instance, a strong warning came from Edgar Cayce in regards to the Ouija. He had received letters numbering in the thousands from people who had used the board and found it to be a catalyst for the full spectrum of paranormal phenomena, including poltergeist activity, out-of-body experiences, astral projection, psychic vampirism and possession. These people believed that by using the board to communicate with spirits on the `other side’ you establish a link and open a portal that allows them to affect you and perhaps even the world around you. Parents and religious groups claimed that through the medium of the Ouija malevolent spirits have been capable of manipulating the minds and possessing the bodies of teenagers, causing emotional damage and in many cases suicide. I knew none of this when I first used the board, and would have believed none of it, and still don’t buy into it completely. It seems silly to me that a piece of cardboard could be considered to make all that much of a difference, but who am I to say? I knew nothing of these allegations, and sure, strange things had been occurring far before I’d bought the board, but things from then on got incredibly weirder.

Others believe the Ouija is guided by the unconscious, autonomous parts of the mind; that the planchette moved by the combined unconscious force or `synergy’ between the people using the board. In 1952, William B. Carpenter invented the term `ideomotor effect’, which refers to the ability of the unconscious mind to influence or control our muscular movements in an involuntary, autonomous fashion. He believed parts of our minds operating outside our conscious awareness were able to guide our motor actions in order to fulfill our expectations and also to resonate with the movements of other people through subliminally picking up subtle cues in their body language. He used the ideomotor effect to explain the phenomena experienced by those who used dowsing rods, pendulums, and, among other things, Ouija boards. He claimed that these people may find it difficult to accept that the ideomotor responses are reflecting unconscious portions of their personality because what they come into contact with they may find frightening. They therefore find psychological security in attributing it all to evil spirits. Others agree that the unconscious is at the root of it all, but add that there may be a telepathic, precognitive and psychokinetic component to it as well, which would explain some of the stranger stories, including my mother's. Another possible theory is that the joint and focused concentration of those using the board activates an unconscious psychokinetic ability in the users which inspire paranormal phenomena which validate their belief structures or opens a portal to the other side.

One thing was for certain, and it was this: if having sudden flashbacks of encounters I had beginning a decade ago with creatures I felt certain were extraterrestrial didn’t alone prove that I was a head case, being attacked by an evil spirit in my sleep did the trick. Or was that thing really an alien getting it on with me? Or were the aliens I saw really evil spirits? Who the fuck knew? Perhaps it had to do with that fucking Ouija board. Perhaps when I had used it alone, it had gained possession of my body, and the medication had made me more susceptible to it’s influence. Maybe whatever entity was behind the board was the same entity that straddled me that night. Maybe by letting it use my hand to move the planchette, it was able to take control of my hand so it could draw that picture in the margins of my notebook.

I began getting more worried about what I’d been remembering and experiencing, so in order to sort through my fragmented memories, I had eventually typed up the summation of what had been happening to me under an apt title, `Confusion.’ I began passing it around to select people in hopes that someone might understand me, talk about it with me, or perhaps be able to shed some light on whatever the fuck was wrong with me.

I was almost convinced I was alone in this insanity until I walked in the art room on March 19, and saw an illustration hanging on the far wall that totally blew me away. I had frequently seen alien-like images depicted in the art room, and all of them weren’t my own, but what I saw hanging on the wall that day totally blew me away. The drawing was done in pencil and charcoal and depicted very skinny, humanoid beings huddled closely together in the corner of a hallway. All their eyes, large, round and glowing, stared straight ahead, poking out of their oversized craniums and right into you. It sent chills threw me. It was terrifyingly beautiful. The artist was Marty Eston, brother of the beautiful Myra Eston, a girl in my grade who I sat next to in botany class. She was a dark little girl, and had quite a bit of a temper. For that reason, I was glad to find that I had successfully remained on her good side since the dawn of high school. She had a particular interest in vampires -- though obsession is probably a better term -- and a bit of interest in the paranormal in general. One day after I’d seen what her brother had drawn, I mentioned it to her in the subtlest way I could and commented on how eerie it was. She agreed without hesitation, and when I asked her whether she knew his source of inspiration, she sort of let out a nervous laugh and shook her head. Apparently her brother had seen a vision of it while on an acid trip gone wrong one night at home and it had really freaked him out. He was scared as hell when he saw it, and decided to draw it because simply explaining it didn’t cut it.

I thought perhaps she could at least appreciate the paranormal occurrences I'd been experiencing due to her preexisting dark-natured mindset, so I tossed her a copy of my story. A while later, as I was in the library and she was reading it in the far back, she came up to me with a wild look in her eyes, holding my story tightly in her hands. “Tim, do you know what you just described here?”

I didn’t know what she was talking about. “Which part?”

She pointed to the experience I had with the entity on top of me, pushing down on my chest. “That’s the Old Hag.”

I asked her to repeat herself, as I was a bit confused. Then she began to explain. She had some information on it - I believe it was a photocopied passage out of a book - and I nearly shit my pants. What I read fit the details of my experience to a tee. Attacks from the old hag are experienced, according to some modern research, from fifteen percent of the adult population worldwide. The characteristics of the attacks each person experiences can vary, but the general pattern is rather consistent. While in bed, the person finds himself unable to move. He might hear strange noises or sense movement, but he always feels a distinct presence in the room. Oftentimes he sees a figure, such as a shadow or an old woman (hence the label, `old hag’) which one often interprets as `evil’, malevolent or threatening. He find this figure straddling him, pressing on his chest with building pressure and making it ever-more difficult for him to breath. He struggles and tries to scream and move, but all efforts prove to be futile. He fears he might be dying, or might pass out. Before that occurs, however, he usually finds himself awake; shaken but alive, the experience over as soon as it had begun. Sometimes, however, it can lead to an out-of-body experie