Unto Cæsar

There is a circle, a cycle, and the purpose of our work is to stand, one foot in each world, to help balance and prime the Great Now. No pressure. But the work of doing and the work of existing, and not existing, continues along.

We do the best that we can, knowing this. We face our lives and ourselves the best we can in any given moment, even through the oscillations and anxieties. What we know is never the same, because it exists as a reflexive reflection, a mirror that marks the changes of time and our substance, indeed, allows us to be barely conscious of our time in this world.

I insist this is a largely erroneous complaint, if it is actually even a complaint, because it requires a particular perspective and is therefore a distortion of the truth. I can there disclaim and all further textual outbursts as being an organic dictation of my present gnosis, and leave it at that. Forever.

I am not responsible for the burdens of thought others might lay into my work. I am just the author, strapped to the mast as the ship goes steadily down.

The Visitor

Uncomfortable. Bright. But obscured. Enormous in sound. Will I ever get home? Was there ever a time I was home? The figures here ignore me as if they cannot tolerate the Visitor's presence. The way before closed behind me forever and a cool wind beckoned me onward, the dreams and hopes of another lifetime. When I made it to the roiling deep oasis, I was surrounded by a cobalt and iron wall of a million living echoes that danced across its surface and marched along the water's edge. A great tremor wracked the wall and it bent inside of itself, twisted around my perceptions of it, and I ran. But though I ran far into the desert, I never lost the way. I will have always been this way before. With no fear, I relented. I am home. The Visitor. No. Host.

Sling

I glanced at the clock, and it seemed to leer back to me in the still and quiet dark of my mother's kitchen. It was late, even for this sleepless house, and dawn would break in a few more pensive moments, break and seal away the smokey spell of cloves and cannabis, chicory coffee and expensive whiskey. My limbs were lead, my eyes and throat dry, my ears howled within the liminal silence.

It would not be the first of many mornings at that kitchen table, and I would not always be there alone - many times my mother would take my place in the paisley and peach room of quiet contemplations. Sometimes, rarely, we would share it, many wordless hours in this unspoken hall of ritual from long ago. The many bitter, weighty thoughts of my distant adolescence, and the worn echoes of her time with her first lost love, confined us to this place.

The arrival of the morning gazette, startling in its force upon the kitchen door, would rouse us to the comings and goings of our daylight hours, surprising but not unexpected. It would permit us to set aside our unforgiven griefs and our graspings, to set out upon the threshold of morning, only to end up at last at our lonely post; always straining to splinter the sinews of Why, always the passing of the moments marked only by the piercing glare of the stained clock as our wicked audience.

Yesterday, today, and tomorrow were bled together at the edges, buried hidden under the barely-there dust unending that gathered, a dust that over uncountable days began to pile on and on, gaining a palpable and undeniable menace. It would stretch and deform the presence of the hours, twisting and groaning against the steady mechanical rhythm of the kitchen timepiece. A feeble human device that scarcely kept such a yawning monster at bay.

It cried and wailed and slammed itself against the mortal edifice to the cadence of my pulse, and never to any success, but roared endlessly, the frightful sounds of impossible and immaterial struggle entombed within the soft and often monolithic drone of the compressor motor in the refrigerator. The imposed order of timekeeping and routines set by newspaper arrivals were only for those who were not paying attention - the force of the beast at the gates shook the walls of the kitchen, made my breath ragged.

First Post

The Spanish moss drifted faintly in the dying breath of the wind, draped in the final whispers of the twilight yearning. I sighed, you took my hand, the moon curdled above; you began to change your shape, all fur and fang and ancient longing, but I didn't see - I was blind, heedless to the flesh, and we were more than our bones. Not long after, we were gone.

Hello, my name is Blair (They/Them pronouns), and I try to remember to write sometimes. I'd like to have some of my work here to encourage myself to keep writing and give myself a place (and permission) to share what I'm currently working on. I am an occultist and Gothic enthusiast, and I have a great too many influences to list any one artist or creator.

Thanks for reading, and be well. Our time in this world is not forever. What will we do, with this time that we have together?