The Snake's Nook

do not remember writing any of this

 

We drive past the empty street, echoing like moist caves humming a haunting whisper when the wind rushes past the top; an empty bottle, the only instrument the wind can play. After 7 hours of lost roaming and doing our best to rely on my failing sense of direction from a cloudy memory, we’ve finally found where we’re going. We’re in a small town called Snake’s Cavern, where my brother Damian and I secretly came when I was 5 and he was 23. It’s a time I try to linger in, to pretend the world stopped turning for those few weeks that we were here, before speeding clocks expanded my body and shrunk my mind. Back when everything was real. Twelve short years have passed and I’m still that little girl I knew, even though my body repels that reality, or at least what everyone else sees. Reality is meant to be clear... to be exact and bona fide. But fantasy has proven to be much more real than it in my life. The small things are real, the grass between my toes or the wind panting on my face, but what matters; my brother’s death, his absence from a cluttered room weighing the floorboards with all his things, a hidden black dress; those are what belong in the story books I obsessively read. He’s still here. The twelve years of his so-called passing have passed, but he hasn’t. Sometimes when it’s late at night and I can’t sleep because the ghosts won’t stop thumping on my walls awaiting help I cannot give, I see him. He sleeps next to me and I stroke his hair with my nicotine yellow fingertips and finger paint eyeballs over his eyelids like I did when I was little. Even while sleeping he was awake, as to not leave me alone with parents more dead than he and his eyes stare at me with wet and slippery shifting, despite the fragmenting paint that would surely wear off by morning.

He drives next to me now, as I hug my knees with my brown high tops on the dash, and he sings my favourite song, a song written for him in particular, “Transatlanticism” by Death Cab for Cutie. He turns to me with his long and flowing black hair and red lipstick and says

“We have to stop at the mall sometime. I need some new heels.”

“Sure, anytime you want” I respond without looking at her. Molly, my best friend for twelve years whom I met at his funeral. When I first saw her I thought she was an overgrown fairy. Her pointy ears shaping like dull knives near the top and her huge lips and hair reaching all the way to her waist just screamed to me that she belonged in her woods where she would dangle from leaves and bathe in the morning dew. Like me, she was just trying to find her way back to it, to the place she can’t recall but rather only the tiny pinpricks in the sky. A seemingly giant ladybug or a fragment of flight, a grown over gravestone or a fake seizure.

This street seems familiar, I see a worn out picture hidden in the very back of my head, the part we stay clear of, and it swirls into view now. For a split second I forget why I forgot about it. A plaster snake across the lawn of a park stares me in the face, smiling hugely and cruelly, as if mocking my penitent twelve year absence. He’s the legend of the town, how it got its name. The lake here is small, and from the view of the arid has more algae than water; a thick cloud of dead plants and squirming bugs, whom I always thought were suffering from eternal epilepsy from the lack of life in their home. It’s said that beneath all the death that shadows the lake, there’s a serpent that feeds off of the darkness, who you can only see by swimming beneath the green from which you might never return and beneath the bugs and the dead fish. Few ever take it on however as no one likes to be in the company of death.

Damian always said that the snake was only real to those who believed it was, and that if when you dove beneath those horizontal curtains of seaweed expecting to see him, you would. “It’s all about hope” he would preach, and that he wasn’t really there...but he was real in our minds. I always believed in the serpent. But the sculpture was once glistening in new paint, and his plastered eyes were open and vibrant. I look at it now and especially in the dark of the night I see that the tedious paint missing scraps of skin throughout his body is completely artificial and the pupils of his eyes are faded and closing, not the same.

“F*****g creepy statue, I don’t like how it’s staring at me” Molly says, cringing at the sight and turning her face from it towards me. “Don’t you think?”

I nod meaninglessly. I never told her of the times I spent here with Damian, or that it was here that he supposedly died, because of the snake he never believed in. I never knew why he wanted to come here so badly to see something he didn’t even have faith in, but there was something mysterious and timeless about the lake to him. I saw his face when we stood by it, how he’d gaze far into it as if staring into a rare crystal ball, searching for visions but seeing only quartz. He’d write in his journal vigorously, like his words kept outrunning him and he had to catch up to them in order to enclose them in that unread book of his. I didn’t wonder where he’d gone, I already knew. I knew he wasn’t here with me, but nevertheless I saw him. Call me crazy, or as my parents would scream late at night when I made insomnia snacks for the two of us, delusional. If I have to be insane in order to have him here with me, sanity is no longer a necessity. But where he really went I’m certain is still down there beneath the lake that looks like abandoned ruins on top but filled with pitch black water beneath it.

The lake pans into view, and just as before it looks just as earthy as anything else, and that if one wasn’t aware of the town that it would swallow them up like quicksand and they would claw their way upwards, but the algae as thick as the soil itself might not let them; a hungry mouth feeding off of death like a voracious vulture. A mystifying house rests just beside it, sitting there alone and friendless, but the fading red shutters opening like buoyant bloodshot eyes motion me to return to them, for they’ve been waiting quite some time.  

“It’s this one” I tell him, and as he drives up through the driveway his face curls in confusion and his stare rolls over to a lonesome cross peeking out of the ground like a grave of a dead soldier to whoever is unkowing, but I know that it was only where the for sale sign once sat before we moved it.

“What is this place?” he whispers softly and glares at the home looking like it could tumble down any second.

“What do you mean? This is where we always stay.”

“I assumed when you said we were staying in a cute town you meant a hotel, not this falling down abandoned wreck. Is this even legal?” He walks back to the car, “We’re not staying here.”

My smile shrinks and as my lips reattach angrily I follow him and lock the door before he reaches it.

“We’re staying. This place has missed us and we have to stay here with it...like we used to.”

His eyebrows straighten and as he huffs a long sigh, his eyes wilt a little like sleepy flowers.

“Okay, we’ll stay here. Is there furniture inside?” he hesitantly walks back, and all the while his head drooping in worry and sadness I try not to acknowledge.

“No, we camp out on the ground,” I hiss at him for almost leaving but all the while rejoicing that he didn’t.

The grey dust that paints the room in a thin layer of time blows into my eyes and as we open the door it rains on us like chalk of missed classes and lessons, but I don’t want to clean it. I’m home, and the dust is valid proof that time exists, although it never did to me.

“Lovely” he spits from behind me and lays the sleeping bags across the forlorn ground. He crawls inside and snuggles into it warmly and he yawns “Good night.”

I snuggle into mine like a butterfly returning to its cocoon; coming back to where we're supposed to become beautiful, become complete, but it was the becoming we want to loiter in forever. I don’t want to sleep. Usually whenever I’m awake I’m living in a dream world, and when I sleep I’m fully alert and wakeful and the inexplicable nonsense of dream life makes perfect sense while plain, regular people things make none at all. Maybe my life is all a dream, maybe my dreams are where I’m supposed to live. But I always wake up. And with each awakening is another ending to another life, as reveries never pick up where they left off. Every night I’m someone else, and somewhere else. Nothing lasts, and just when I start to live a life, it ends and I have to begin all over again. It's just a neverending race track with no prizes and no winners. I don’t mind that it’s spread out, but if living a momentary life of happiness means waking up and having it end a footstep later from when it starts, I don’t want happiness. When I'm living nothing’s spread out, but I’m trapped in one life I don’t belong in. Time jams itself back together and this one life I’m in is just a vision, a dull boring and endless vision. The walls are blurry and the world is a fast forwarding movie that goes on for far too long.

I used to dream of a bridge, of a place between my constant life and my scattered one. It was collapsing over a pit much like the Grand Canyon, and with each cracking slab of wood I’d feel safer and safer. It was grey and covered in dust, and all I had with me was a single candle. It’s raining over that bridge, but the candle never goes out. As I lay here now next to my dear brother, reunited in the one place we were alone and clear, I see a tiny candle in the corner. A wall creaks loudly, and a small chip of wood falls from the ceiling to my face. But there’s no canyon.

I do fall asleep, and after I wake up from a very foreign feeling �" a dreamless sleep, it’s still dark out. I hear subtle creaks, but they slowly then suddenly build into thrashing knocks, vibrating the walls with powdery dirt floating in the air for a mid second before crashing to the ground in disturbed, bothered piles. This happens sometimes. I’ve never seen them, but I talked to them once. The one I talked to was named Debra, and she said only I could help them all to cross over as I was the door between the living and the dead. She said that responsibility was greater than the one to care for myself, and that until I helped them they would knock everywhere I went, but make sure that only I could hear -- a feeble attempt to drive me mad.

Too late.

I don’t know how to help them. I can’t see this door and I can’t see either of the sides but they won’t listen. I’ve grown to ignore it however and to use it as a lullaby, but I know I won’t sleep anymore tonight.  

All that keeps me here while I wander in awoken dreams and all that assures me that I am real is music, and I’m coming back to myself as my iPod stumbles upon song after song of who I am and where I’ve gone. These songs make the fog hide. They make it hide to where I usually go, a tiny nook inside myself�"a tunnel no doctor or surgeon can ever find. It feels like I’m skipping through a meadow of bouncing hills that are the music beneath me, and the trees and clouds and sun and moon and stars and sky sing above me. Time goes slowly and each song is a day, but I can’t move. I can’t breathe when I’m in there. This is when Damian wakes up and taps me on the shoulder and says “Where is the bathroom?” I can’t show him. It’s like this sleeping bag or ground or soil or town or world is the only thing keeping myself in my body, and as soon as I move I hide inside myself again, and it’s not me anymore but a marionette and I can’t see through myself. I notice each leaf and each flower... but it isn’t me. Nothing’s individual or special, everything’s meshed together and everything’s the same; I’m a part of everything but not a part of myself.

He just sits there and after a few minutes he softly whispers “Are we going?” I just make a small hum while I bury my face in my hands, slowly sliding them up my cheeks and gathering the skin in my palms as the weight of my head and weight of my hands become unbalanced.

Someone starts crying. I look over and jolt my head at the sight of Molly.

“Molly?!” I ask, “Where’d you come from?” She chokes on her words and silent sobs that she sucks back in, then releases now in an angry outburst.

“Do you have any idea what this all does to me?!” she manages to puff out in individual exhales, “You’ve been sick and depressed for years and it’s hurting me, you don’t realize any of it.”

I know what she’s talking about, but I want my Damian back.

“I’m sorry Molly,” I spit out the name like burnt food and trying to sound as genuine as I can I mumble “I just miss him that’s all. I’ll show you the bathroom.” I show her before she answers.

As she quietly shuts the door making an extra effort not to look at me I hear the faint knocking return. I walk back to where we slept and it bursts into explosions of crashes, leaving fireworks of dust throughout the room. I sit there trying to force ease onto myself as I hear the gentle rain of the shower Molly is now.

The knocking has stopped aswell as the water, and a tsunami of silence showers over me. It's tranquil and foreign, but silence though an in tune cave at times is an isolated room in others. It's in rare silence when my thoughts are let loose, and the truth of all that's happened comes roaring through the penns of my mind, and that's an ugly, ugly place to be. On a sudden impulse I leave the house and walk over to the lake, just as I’m out of her sight which truth be told, the truth she’s unlucky enough to see is that: it’s convenient for us both.

All I see is plains of water in front of me, stretching farther than I can see but where it ends is invisible. It’s like visiting an old friend you don’t remember anymore, one that you could remember if you wanted to but you don’t really, because the friendship’s gone mouldy, and it’s best to just throw it away. I didn’t want to see this place again, and I didn’t want to remember what happened here, but as dreams are beyond our control; it plays out before my eyes like a play I can’t stand but just have to see how it ends.

 

 

“Damian, stop throwing rocks in there, you’re going to wake up the snake!” a little girl pleas in all seriousness. It was me back then. I recognize myself, and am overtaken by a gust of reminiscence and mourning from when I knew who I was.

I knew then that the snake was real, but whether or not he was good was beyond my knowing. I hoped for good, but hoping couldn’t become certainty just yet as it could now oh so effortlessly.

“I don’t believe in the snake so he’s not there,” he taunted back as he tossed stone after stone, some resting just on top of the plants and some sinking deep below it. He knew how much I hated that he didn’t hope and that he didn’t believe, and he made sure to rub my face in it at least once a day while we were here.

“Why don’t you believe in anything?” I asked him curiously.

“Because seeing is believing. What you believe in doesn’t happen like in those bullshit stories you read, and chances are that what you think isn’t what you see. You’re just a child but you’ll see soon that belief is just fantasy. You’ll learn that later on”

I didn’t.

He knew I hated when he talked to me like a child instead of like a person, as if I could help my ripe age. I stood up seemingly huge and mighty although I was all of 4 feet tall and I fumed at him and screamed like the child with a temper that I was,

“You think you’re so great because you’re big and smart, but I like to believe in good stuff instead of seeing bad stuff. You’re just like mom and dad, and you’re just like my dolls. You’re an empty corpse!”

I’d heard him refer to them as that to his friends from time to time while I spied on him through the vent connecting our rooms, but as I didn’t know what an “empty corpse” was, I didn’t realize the gravity of weight I sent pouring down on him with those two seemingly meaningless words.  

“What the f**k do you know?! You don’t know how lucky you are to “see the good stuff.” You’re just a rotten child Maureen, and as soon as you grow up you’re going to be damaged and broken just like the rest of the world. You can think what you want about me but don’t you dare compare me to mom and dad. You haven’t seen the worst they can do by a long shot!” He smashed another rock into the lake so hard it ripped a hole through the plant and for the first time ever I saw the water I’d only heard was beneath it. He stared at the hole just as I did, and I could clearly see a small tear roll down his cheek.

I’d never seen him cry. I cried, but I was a child as people never let me forget, and the fact that he was crying while all he ever did was lecture me for being what I couldn’t help being made me far more angry than I was sympathetic, although I still wanted him to believe.

“He’s real Damian, I’m going to go get him and then you’ll have to see the good stuff.”

I headed for the hole, in which I planned to stick my hand down and reach around, but the dividing line between grass and lake was unclear and before I knew it I was drenched head to toe and falling inside a cold blackness where I couldn’t breathe. I heard what sounded like a muffled explosion, and I searched the depths but couldn’t see anything for the life of me, although my eyes stung and even within all this wetness felt drier than ever before. My lungs were making music then, banging like drums and setting the beat to the meadows of music that all started here. My chest heaved in and out while I tried to find the air, where I could mend my struggling lungs but there was just nothing. There was a sound amidst all the muffles I could hear: a slight hissing. It grew louder and louder and it didn’t scare me. Hope was speaking to me, he was real. Now I could make Damian happy and he would finally see the good stuff like I did. I felt two strong forces lift me under my arms then and I rolled onto the grass, refilling my lungs with the air, dehydrating them from the water I was drowning in. I knew the snake was what saved me, and I searched all around me for Damian so I could give him the hope he couldn’t give himself, but he was gone.

 

 

I never told anyone. When my parents discovered that he was missing, they never asked me if I’d seen him, as no one knew we came to Snake’s Cavern, as his “disappearance” occurred after I got home. I didn’t know what to tell them, I didn’t know where he went. He didn’t dive in after me, I was sure of that. It was the snake that saved me; it was hope that saved me. He was still here with me, but no one else. He was my hope now, but lately he’s been slipping away trace by trace. I catch glimpses of others in him, or I hear angry knocking that I know is from him rather than others I sense, as I have to help him but once again...can’t. I can, but I died there instead of him that day, and I’m never coming back.

 

 

                I see those same plains before me now, and I wonder where he is. I wonder if he misses me, who he’s with and if he’s trying to reach me again. He’s dead, but so am I. The only difference between us is that I’m visible to everyone but myself. He’s visible to no one but me. Still... I’d love to be with him always, not just in flashes. I want to join him to wherever he went. I never lost hope. That day taught me that, and when people ask if I miss him I always respond with a hard and sure “No.” He’s still here, I miss me. I know the only way to get me back is to sleep in the wakeful dreams I live in at night, as to sleep always. Maybe I’ll be able to see his eyelids then, when it’s just the two of us like it always should have been. I belong in the water that I lost myself in. It’s where I come back to myself and where the sums of all my lives commune... I want to drown in water and to hydrate my lungs to ease all this air that I’m drowning in.

                I open my hoodie and within the pocket closest to my heart I take out his diary. I never read it, but as I ended where he stopped writing, I want my being to end in the same spot. I open it to the first blank page and write the sequence of letters that I know may never be read or even found, but the odes I send out are more of an attempt to bring the good out of myself and to see a last glimpse of beauty of this world before I'm overwhelmed with the beauty of another than a goodbye for them. I write...

To Molly:

I love you Molly. You don’t understand but I’m sorry I’ve made you cry. You’re my reins that kept me running. You hurt me but I’m still running. I know we had hardly anything at all that was between us and not who I wanted you to be, but when no one was good enough to bring on the form of what I needed you glowed. It didn’t work; in the end you weren’t right, but you were a firefly in the darkness. And that’s something.

Maureen.

 

 

To Damian:

You’re my other half, the half I never lost though everyone else did, and you’re my sky. You’re what I search for while I’m drowning and you’re what I want to see, REALLY see before I go. If heaven or nirvana or whatever is after all this is a clear, Candlelit Ocean with just you and me and myself, it’s where I hope to go. See you soon.

Maureen

 

 

Mom and Dad:

I love you both very much and I forgive you for what you never gave, for all the feelings you never felt and never passed on to me. Try to love each other again. Even if not now, try to love who you used to be. Without that you’re not you. I’m glad you were a part of me.

 

Maureen

 

 

I hear Molly calling for me from the back yard, and I wonder where she would look for me, or even if she would. She doesn’t know there’s a lake beneath all this vegetation so she would never find me. Would she see me like I see Damian? Guess we'll find out.

I walk to the dividing line, the last place I ever saw Damian and I dive in, surrendering myself to the carnivorous lake with a being no so carnivorous inside. I’m sinking again, and it seems this lake has no bottom. Just as before, I hear a deathful hissing, and nothing has changed.

Being underwater is the exact feeling that my brain has had for twelve years; it feels like I’ve been keeping my mind as a pet in a fishbowl all this time�"a souvenir for something I always wanted to mislay. The sounds are muffled, everything would be fuzzy if not for this black all around me, and everything moves slower down here, but everything sinks faster. Despite my immense wish for a change, being in an environment suitable for how I’ve felt is far more comforting than changing up there. I see a ray of light. I look up and it’s the hole I dove in from. Just below me I see the ground of the lake, and what looks like a long green tube, with sinister eyes staring up at me. The hiss grows louder and ranges from gentle serenades to starving shrieks and all I can see are those evil eyes tied to mine through invisible orbs of vibrating life amongst the lake of everything lifeless. The lake never wanted death, it wanted life. That’s why Damian is still here, and why I feel the sharp fullness of myself deep down in this belly, for it was here that I forgot myself. It took Damian’s body to give me his life, and took my life to make room in my body. If we would all stay united in this lake I don’t know, but this snake I’ve believed in and loved so deeply for so long is swimming towards me, and with each inch he draws closer, his eyes narrow more and he never blinks. Sleep. He never does, and being awake in this hole with this thing no matter how clear or how together is far worse than any amount of waking up there. I need to get out.

I search frantically for the hole I came through, but it’s quickly closing like a crumbling parachute that can’t rise up again. I swim up to it, but the ground disappears. All I see is a tiny crack opening to the world of the living that I can reach again, to the place I dreaded for so long but beg for it now. Time is running out, and the world spins faster. I don’t know what way’s up, and I don’t know what way’s down. On one end I hear never-ending knocking, but on the other I see the eyelid-less snake staring me down and I don’t know which way is which or which hell to choose. I’m holding a candle and I’m on the collapsing bridge. Spinning faster, I speed towards the curtains closing and blocking out the daylight towards the knocking, unaware of if this ravenous lake will devour me or spit me out; if hope is an illusion, or if guilt is hidden. I reach it and there’s a thin line of light on my face, I reach upwards trying to break through the womb to be re-born as living or as dead, anything but this middle I was under the impression was so heavenly and envious. The bridge decides now. I’ve always known it would, but now it’s beyond my control. I keep swimming towards the light, hoping to everything I am and everything I’ve lost and everything I’ve possibly found that this lake will let me cross.

Author's Note

I know I use the word "dream" a lot. There's not really any avoiding that as there's not many synonyms to it.

July '09

Reviews

[The Ugly Rose]

It's mysterious, a little confusing at first, interesting, and many other aspects. The only deal I have with it is that a few of the sentences have too much detail to be easily understood. I love it though. Reminds me of some of the books I've read before :3