THE TOWER OF BRAHMA: Chapter 12 - Waking Hole Home (edit)

03/27/04

Home. Four simple letters and yet the true explanation of the word could fill every book in a library. I was never sure of what the word meant to me. I suppose it's a place I forget to feel self-conscious and instead wallow in self-pity.

I made it here on zombie autopilot, lost amid a sea of red tailights flowing downstream from the sun's orange halo. The last few weeks at rest stops pass through my mind and I see them with a sparkly new clarity. Awkward snippets of pathetic transfers of sentences. A stolen glance here and there as I watch a muscular arm, a furrowed brow, delicate hands. Eye contact is immediately broken off after half-a-second, and I remain outside the circle walking among, but never within.

Now I'm home and things should be different, and they are but, just as expected. The abrasive and rough edges of my old life are just as ill-fitting as it was before the escape. Ahh, what a beautiful word. Drugs, drinking, running, driving, escape. Fleeing from everything makes you forget you can never get away from the enemy inside.

He's still here, lurking, poisoning this life and those around him. Dwelling inside he thinks he should have been aborted, allowing his parents to shoot forth from their feeble frames and into something gloriously beautiful. But he knows that they would squander the chance and destroy the beauty somewhere/somewhen else. I guess none of us can escape our internally twisted twin.

Sleep comes easily as it feels like I've been awake for months. A complex series of biological changes takes place and I see myself sitting on a rock on a mountain. Maybe it's the mystery of the Native American tribe who once called this massive rock home that causes the spiritual merging of self. Looking out on the horizon, through the mass of dead skeletons of this ancient forest, I lose myself and succumb to a mental exorcism.

All of the delicate flipside persona comes crashing down the mountain, sliding and smashing to a billion pieces. The mountain itself seems to shake and laugh at my misery, almost mockingly asking, "Is that all you've got boy?"

And then I wake up. Home.