Intensity

Adventures in the eighth house.

I'm a Satyr and I'm fighting against a man. The land would give you an easy death, but the sea will kill you slowly, says the voice over. It seems I am a sea-Satyr and I'm pulling the man into the ocean again and again with my pipes--letting the man escape and pulling him in again.

The man has his method of escape down by now. He swims horizontally, and gets out and the fight moves to land again. We're both in the old bathhouse at my childhood home. He's pulled out a knife.

The image of a big silver jewel encrusted knife floats between us. It has to be here. This is where we lost the knife, I think. I have my little black pocketknife out in my hand. I wrap my left arm in cloth for cloak and dagger fighting. He does the same. He's haggard and shirtless. We lunge forward. This is the end. I lose track of his knife but I hope my arm has caught it. Mine is at his chest. I need to kill him. I press my knife in and draw blood, and wake up in shock.

---

It’s the beginning of the end. School is over. In three more days we all have to be out of the dorms. There’s a layer of nostalgia in the air. Everything here will be remembered and kept safe. A layer also of regret for things left undone, and promises begun but never ended. I keep to my old patterns letting them carry me to the end, others break theirs " regret winning over fear.

We’re at sword practice, Yellow, Manta and I. I’ve set them on their tasks. Yellow is practicing leaps, Manta circles against my blade. Silver arrives, a little antsy. I watch her closely. She needs something hard. I give her my sand filled, iron plated sword, the one she can barely lift, and have her practice pulling momentum to stop a blow. It’s important to learn but hard to do. She’s getting more and more frustrated.

She wants to go confess her love. She doesn’t want to do it. She needs to go confess her love. She fears his answer " but finally we edge her on. “Anything can be better than this” she says, dropping her sword with a thunk and ambling off in the direction of his apartment. We keep practicing, letting the ritual that’s built through the year hold us in the end.

Silver returns. Bad sign. She comes towards us and then collapses on the concrete. We all rush to her. She’s sobbing, deep, full body sobbing. Yellow wraps her in a hug. I wrap one arm around her and put the other on her back. Just there. Just holding. She cries and we hold her till the end of sword practice. The sobs decrease. He simply sees her as a friend.

We keep her safe for the rest of the night, staying with her and letting her sleep over in Manta’s room. Commiserating. We all lie together in a big snuggling pile. Two more have joined our party " Priam, also a sword student of mine, but out due to a sprained ankle, and Oglaf, big red bearded child. We teach Oglaf how to snuggle close, which he says he’s never done before, but takes to easily. We lie side by side and one atop the other, and laugh. Soon we will not be together.

We leave late. Priam’s been asking if we could talk. He asks again. How about now? He looks like he needs it. “Five minutes.” He says. “I just need to rant for five minutes.” I send Yellow ahead, and take Priam inside the big building with the lobby. We sit, backs to the window. He sits on the far side of the ledge; I beckon him closer. An arm reached out, contact created. He begins.

”There’s this girl . . . “

He’s watched her for a long time and he’s pretty sure she feels nothing save friendship in return " but the not knowing for sure is destroying him. We talk about rot and how it grows in things hidden in the dark. Clean cuts vs. festering rashes, it’s so easy to tell someone else the right course of action. So hard to follow it. At some point Priam starts to cry, single drops that roll down his cheeks and hang from his nose. I listen and give what I can.

”I’m afraid of more than just rejection, I could handle that, but I’m afraid my entire support structure I’ve built here might collapse if I say something.” I think to myself that our friend group will always be there. Wondering at this other support system. It must be the Newspaper people. We never meet them. Priam talks of his tendency to run from awkwardness. He couldn’t stay with that between them. I watch tears continue their slow procession towards his lips where they inevitably get licked away. Finally he asks. “If something like this happened would you still be my friend?”

”Of course!” A pause, a click felt inside my head. “Is this someone in our friend group? He nods. A few quick mental calculations “Manta?” He nods again. I’m surprised I didn’t see it. He does hide it well.

Suddenly I find myself oddly his rival. I’ve been thinking of Manta that way as well of late. It passes and the clarity comes again. Rival or no " “You should tell her. Manta has a right to know. She won’t ostracize you. None of us will.” He nods again and begins to reply only to be interrupted by Yellow screaming to give her the bloody key to my apartment we’ve been talking for fifteen minutes out of the allotted five. We say goodnight and go our separate ways.

The next morning when we arrive at breakfast it’s just Manta and Priam at a table. This is Manta’s day to leave and she does shortly thereafter. So in a moment when Yellow is up getting food I ask " “Did you tell her?”

”Yes " it wasn’t as scary as I’d thought. She let me down gently.”

”I’m glad you got it out.”

I’m glad I got to see two people get it out. To see the emotional tenderness, openness, and hurt that is love in its most primal form. To see tears which I envy so greatly flow so freely. I almost felt I could cry again. I saw the path to crying again. That loss of control that is love.

---

In my dream, there’s an Asian woman - a friend, someone I trust. I think she’s someone’s partner.

“What is it you most desire? If you could have anything?” she asks.

“I would like to know myself. I have all these conceptions but they’re not real. I don’t actually know who I am. Love is the state of knowing someone deeply. I want to be able to love myself.”

---

Scarlet. Do you remember the day when I stood in my lover’s house, and she came out of the bathroom in a scarlet dress? Do you remember the confusion? I had told her what the color does to my heart, making everything seem more important. Men seem more dangerous. Women seem more alluring.

She knew all that, and she knew that I’d said ‘no more.’ She knew this wasn’t good for the both of us, but she wore the scarlet dress anyway.

And so I kissed her.

I could have not kissed her. I could have used that impressive self-control I can pull out at odd moments. I could have done anything else - but instead I kissed her because that’s what I thought she wanted. Maybe it was. After that the day was awkward and neither of us sure what game we were playing or why. My self-proclaimed limits back up, and maybe her expecting me to kiss her more, I watched her in that scarlet dress and felt confused.

That’s how I feel now.

Years later, a girl I’ve had my eye on for a few weeks now messages me late at night. She tells me she’s drunk. She tells me she’s been ‘making out with a guy on the beach.’ She tells me if I’d been at the party it would have been me instead.

This is unfortunate. I find my whole body shivering. I’ve always wondered in the past whether I was shivering from the tension or from the cold. In my warm room, now I know.

The problem is, I’m not sure what she wants. Me, evidently - but what am I to do? I have limits, predetermined. I’m not jumping into a relationship blind this time around. I’ve been playing a slow game; testing, feeling, learning, flirting.

Suddenly that game is broken. I know she would be mine if I wanted it. She’s forced my hand. There’s a sense of urgency now, a sense of need. Do I jump in before she chooses someone else? Do I pretend I don’t realize the implications? No - never that.

And so I find myself bending for a kiss I know cannot be right.

I manage the Facebook page for my magic club. Whenever someone wants to join I look at their profile. Decide if they seem like an evergreen student, and add them.

Near the beginning of the quarter a girl asks to join. I go to her profile, and immediately see she’s friends with someone already in the club. “Of course you can join!” I say and click to add her to the club.

Except, I’m still on her profile page. The add button isn’t to add her to the group; it’s to add her as a friend. Oops. I consider sending her a message explaining, but decide against it. “The worse that can happen is she thinks I’m weird.”

At best, she might be important to the story.

A little while later she adds me back. A little while after that she makes me respond to scarlet.

What does important to the story mean? How am I supposed react? Does it mean she’s automatically a good fit and I can move fast? I don’t want to move fast.

I tell all this to my best friend Kays. “If she’s important to the story then she’ll wait.” she says as if it’s perfectly obvious. Now that she’s said it, it is.

Everything calms and straightens and clears.

I know how to respond to scarlet.

---

I see the Asclepius symbol - two snakes intertwining around a staff - floating before me and follow it. A hawk launches itself into a gorge and I launch after it flying high above a mountain valley, and following the hawk through a waterfall to alight on the ground.

There is Asclepius - genderless crone, tender face looking into mine. Asclepius gives me seven vials that I put inside my chest for safekeeping, hammering my heart closed again with nails. The god touches my hand and takes the ache from it, and tells me that each vial will stop one death.

---

Today I killed a mouse with a pan.

This morning Papa mentioned that a mousetrap was missing. Normally this means there's a mouse wandering about with a mousetrap on its tail, but he's looked everywhere and can't find it.

The day passed. Darkness came.

I began to hear noises down in the kitchen - periodic rattling and scratching. Finally, duty drives me downstairs, and I grab a flashlight and leave it off until I hear the noise again.

It's definitely behind Dish-land - where we put our dirty dishes - I pull it out and shine my light, to look into the terrified eyes of a mouse.

I reach in and grab it by the mousetrap, indeed, pinned around it's tail.

What to do? This is the first time I've been called on to kill something I'm not eating, since I swore my oath I wouldn't. On the other hand the little thing is in pain.

I don't actually care if I share my house with other creatures. Mama's hatred of ants, Papa’s war against the mice, neither of these got passed down.

I could let it go.

But that rather defeats the purpose of having caught a mouse. Do I want its pain to be for nothing?

I could call papa down and ask him to kill it, but that strikes me as the coward’s path. I can kill more easily than he can. Papa has no fear of death but some distaste for killing.

All this is in the half complete flurry of unfinished sentences that is how I think, as the little mouse tries to pull itself away from me along the carpet.

I come to a decision. Death.

I pull a steel pan out of Dish-land. Pull the little mouse off the carpet and onto the hardwood floor, and pause a moment.

“Okay little one. I'm going to end this now. I don't know if I'm going to be able to eat you, but I will make sure that someone does. You will be alive again.”

“I respect you, I will honor you, I love you.”

“Go in peace.”

The mouse looks up at me with its little shiny eyes. Who knows if it accepts my judgment? I bring the pan down and miss the neck where I was aiming, hitting the lower back instead with a clang. The mouse doesn’t make a sound, but arches in pain and curls around the mousetrap.

“Oh gods, I'm sorry" I swear.

The mousetrap is sticking up and blocking my angle to the neck in an unusual reversal of roles. My second blow gets higher on the back and tolls on the floor again like a bell. The mouse is still twitching. My third blow takes it in the head, and leaves me breathing hard in the silence of the third chime of death.

“I meant that to be a little quicker,” I tell the mouse. I scoop the body onto a plate and cover it in a napkin to deal with tomorrow. I pause as my whole body shudders, then get undressed and climb up to my bed.

With time to think I begin to consider other options. I could have trapped the mouse to take into the woods tomorrow. The live chipmunk trap would probably have worked. Otherwise it would have been okay in a bowl. Why didn't I consider that?

And am I really going to just break my oath like that? I'll have to eat a symbolic part. Maybe cut out the heart and cook it in my eggs tomorrow. I can't just bury it.

And what was that speech? “I love you" before killing it? Isn't that a little sick?

Or is it perfect?

---

I'm going into QFC leaving Papa in the car. When I get inside I see him standing there waiting for me.

That's not right, I think. I must be dreaming.

I look around. If I'm dreaming everyone raise your hands. Everyone raises their hands.

What I'm supposed to do if I wake up in a dream is sit down, bring someone to sit across from me, and ask them questions about my unconscious mind. I do this but realize there is nothing I want to know that I don't already.

So what else is there to do given the gift of lucid dreaming? I open a portal into the red room where I keep my harem.

I go to one of the women, a black or Latino girl and climb on top. As I begin to move I notice she's missing a leg and an arm and part of her head. I feel her head with my hand. It's like part of her skull is missing, but there's still skin grown over. It's gushy and feels so strange.

“She's dead” says the person at the ice cream shop in my harem as I pause to get some ice cream.

This shock makes everything begin to fall apart, and I scramble around trying to retain control. Making people raise their hands until at last I wake up.

On waking I lay there for a long time in the dark, thinking about what just happened. I didn't have questions, but my psyche had answers. Violence, love, sex, and death - they're all linked somehow. Held In the intensity of emotion that cannot be denied and must simply be trusted.

That image making love to a dead girl, I brought it out for its shock value, to destroy the control that I sought to exert on the dream and throw me into surrender instead. Yet I am fascinated by powerful images and disturbing ideas.

Can you kill without loving? Live without killing? Love without hurting? Live without loving?

Intensity courts me at every path.