Hergest Ridge

How wonderful it is to hear a lover whisper a pet name into your ear. How divine it is to smell the scent of their neck and taste their lips while running your fingers across their skin. How perfect to look deep into their eyes and get hypnotized by lust.

As powerful as a drug I’d say.

So powerful that I pretended not to notice when your stories stopped making sense.

I chose to ignore the small bugs that crept into my bones when I knew you were lying.

I allowed my anger to lay dormant within me and take on a life of its own….

to slowly set traps for me….

to change who I was….

to fester….

Everyday.

I became my own worst enemy. I stopped battling you and waged war on myself.

Pushing it deeper and deeper into my blood, letting it flow through me. Damage me. A slow suicide.

And not unlike any addiction, recovery would be a cold bitch.

I listened to a broken record of tricks you played on me, tricks I played on myself.

It was finally time to go. And I did.

 
– Marie Laberge
SPECIAL THANKS TO MARIE FOR ALLOWING THE REPOST OF 1997 AT HERGEST RIDGE.

“Well then, what does it mean to you?”

“Does it matter?”

For a moment, only the ivory encased clock made conversation, its constant tick-tack banter a heartbeat of its own.

“It means I am done. It means that hope is a good swimmer, and I have to find a way to drown it.”

“Is that what you are doing now? Drowning hope?”

“Yes. I used to think that if I leave it out there long enough, it would soak up enough salt water and go down on its own.”

“How does one go about drowning hope?”

“With needles. That’s why I’m here, isn’t it? Because I stick needles into my arms.”

“Hadrian, please show me your arms.”

Hadrian removed his sweater, and was now sitting in his olive green tshirt. On it, an invitation to travel, Prague – Czech It Out.

“I told you, there is nothing to see.” His arms smooth, no bruising, no entry holes, he crossed them across his chest, closed his eyes, and put his head back.

“Hadrien, do you remember now why you are here?”

“I heal fast, but I don’t care if you believe me the part about the needles. Can I smoke now?”

“You know the answer to that.”

“You ask me questions all the time, to which you know the answers. Maybe we’re both hoping to hear something different for a change.”

—

Her high heels off, Oriel headed down the dimly lit hallway on her way to the bathroom. Her jacket and white blouse joined the uncomfortable shoes on the floor. Before she started the bathwater, she pulled off her skirt and let it lie where it fell.

Through the dark apartment, she walked to the kitchen, pulled out a bottle of wine from the fridge, and started toward the bathroom again.

“One broken machine, trying to fix another.” That’s all she could think, as she sank her bare body in the bath water coloured with therapeutic salts.

The lit candles warmed the walls and cast long, dancing shadows. Oriel reached for the syringe beside, and pierced her wet skin with the needle. Then, she uncorked the wine, drank from the bottle, put her head back, and slowly drifted into unconsciousness, hope drowning in salt water.

Love is a warm liquor, fluid and flowing, not to be tamed or confined. Poured into a broken heart, it weeps to the ground and is displaced drop by little drop on the soles of the feet of others – carried off, mixed with dirt, left to dry on the exhale of a spring day’s breeze.

Hate is a cancer, a solid mass caught behind the ribs choking the soul desperate to heal. Without holding on or being held, it rattles and grinds the ribcage – it can never leave the way love flows through a broken heart. Piece by piece it needs to be fragmented before it can cripple the body from within – broken bones, broken bodies, broken human beings.

It may look like the coming days are the beginning of a new life. I shudder to think that the case. As a grown human being I do not desire to be a tabula rasa.

Everyone around you has but one life. It starts when we pass through the often detested birth canal, and ends when our minds go to sleep for the last time, the heart no longer beating.

The closest we can come to starting a new life is to rip out the pages of chapters past. But what’s left once we start tearing out the pages? How can we ever feel fulfilled when our covers hold but a few pages decades into our lives? We can’t. Only when we accept the past as part of the present do we have a chance at making semblance of what is this very moment.

Should we find a way to tear out and discard parts of our selves, everything that follows begins to make less and less sense – like books with missing pages, even the simplest of plots falls apart when parts of the story are simply missing.

If I may suggest, let’s all put away the abacus – let’s stop calculating, thinking, and strategising. Only then can the real emotions grow roots in our fertile hearts and minds. All too often the answer is that there is no answer, and life loses no meaning for it. If you were to have one person describe and define life – its purpose, – would you ask a scientist or mathematician to do it, or instead talk to a poet?

In a life lived there is no added value for understanding. Cherish that fact, for only the least unique problems in life have answers on which all can agree and make sense of.

“Man seht die scheinende, wunderschöne Sterne und man wünscht immer dahin näher zu kommen. Ja näher, aber dann bemerkt man dass er eigentlich auf alles auf der Erde verzichtet hat. Jetzt ist er zwischen die Sterne und die Erde.”

“We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.”