6 Hours

Autobiographical story of a person taking a walk at night.

Nicole Saenz

“6 Hours”

I walked down the winding road at dusk, listening to the chirps of crickets float up from the ground and over the sea of rooftops.

“I love the unfolding of mysteries,” I thought, which guided me to the realization that I am a person existing within the confines of this present moment but yet, somehow, I feel that my existence straddles multiple realities.

I continue down the path elevating upward until I reach the yellow lit Dairy Barn.  I witness the cars casually intersect, some entering the market’s drive-thru for quick groceries as hands quickly exchange green paper like shifty little apparatuses.   Meaning is created through an ongoing evaluation of associations whose appearances are visceral.  I am every impression I have ever felt.

A heavy man hangs out of his car, gut cut by the window which is almost fully rolled down.  He passes the two form-filled plastic bags to his obliging wife and continues straight with a look of purpose.  It reminds me of something out of a book and I realize that in my whirlwinds of psychic anxiety and rage, love is the only thing that has ever called me back.

I continue standing in the same spot, nudging my feet deeper into the thick rubber soles of my sneakers and grazing the cool cement sidewalk with the tip of my foot.  The love I feel, now in this moment, is hard to describe.  It is unannounced, a soft presence, the default, the background, the horizon, and the landscape.  It is the warm breeze of dusk while the sky is bluing.  It is the synapse between a smile shared amongst two people meeting for the first time on a New York City street.  There is no narrative.

From the electric heart beating outward but always in relation to something else, I take a left and now this street is lit up by a parade of businesses dressed in neon.  The scene looks like an airplane strip, a vector of aircraft marshals are signaling the way but I can see the end from here and it looks like oblivion.

As I stroll on I wonder to myself, “What is Love?”

There is movement across the street and I watch as groups of three and four scatter and come together, scatter and come together, during a preamble to what appears to be an elaborate celebratory dinner.  Women dressed in skirts and dresses postured with their hands close to their breasts hug and laugh.  They enter a Victorian home with a long, immediate stair case.  A car drives by with a soiled, semi-mounted sticker that reads “Just Do it.”

Then I feel like a deer caught in barbed wire as I trip on a block of protruding sidewalk. A calm soothing presence exhibits patience as I gnash my teeth in a desperate fear.  The wind blows hard against my face.  The entropy is heightened and progressing while the war in my mind rages onward. 

Love seems forgotten.  Sometimes I look for her on the train or at the mall.   I can’t see her and so I close my eyes and try to catch her breeze.  I try to feel her in an exchange with a new person.  My sensitivity is mirrored back to me and this makes me feel damaged.  The wind of this is hard and blows away any mental armor I had for the night ahead.  So I rather not share these parts of myself to only to feel the fate of a butterfly handled with callous hands.  I move onward because I survive through movement.

What is this all for if not love?  Love is what strings days together or makes them worthwhile.  It is the pressure that compresses me into a feeling person again.  When I was giving leftovers to a homeless man who said he was hungry it felt like love.  When I was sitting on my horse, Geronimo, in Costa Rica and the guide for our group asked if we wanted to go to the mountains or the beach first and Geronimo whinnied when I said “mountains,” that felt like love.

Love is Walt Whitman.

Love is Lana Del Rey.

Love is Rembrandt.

Love is Alex Grey.

Love is sunset.

Love is sunrise.

Love is nature.

Love is closure.

I love feeling like there are good people out there who are willing to make a difference.  It gives me hope.  Love looks shared or some kind of resonance.

A creature of night undulating down this abysmal highway, the darkness recognizes me as its own and the flux of world once known now calls me by the name of Phantom.

I love when I realize that I am being not judged but respected.  Everyone should have this feeling.  Love is a language.  Vocabulary is creativity and the possibilities of expression are infinite.  It can be sharing a coffee on a brisk morning before a day of work and enjoying a silence with another person. I feel that love always stems from truth and presence.  Sometimes things need to destruct and dissolve in order to reach a center where true love can grow from.

During a mental breakdown lasting a couple of years, the only things that kept me going were feeling respected and loved despite the unfortunate series of events that led to my demise.  I will never forget a few good people.  I want to say I owe it to them to keep moving forward but the truth is I owe it to myself because it is a travesty to not at least try to experience the beauty that life has to offer.

The whirlwind that was my life in 2012 cannot be forgotten.  The masses were speaking excitedly about the chance of impending doom due to a certain calendar made by the Mayans many years ago  Hurricane Sandy was hitting and the world felt like it was shifting chaotically.  That was the time when my soul nearly completely left my body.

It was this contorted existence which lasted many months and reminded me of a Philip K. Dick novel.  Everything held a certain magnificence and symbolic meaning but the information overloaded into a grotesque Orwellian message of purgatorial doom.  It is like the origin of limbic movements your body makes when you feel anxiety shooting out a series of unknown forbidden reflexes.  Your limbs shift while your back contorts into a hunch to hide your viscerals, which only makes you look weaker, might I add, and the voices of love sound like weapons of hate tailored for you in a way that would take years of studying your behaviors , mannerism, opinions and personality.

Then, as if to save you like a cavalry of archangels sloping down from the skies, you catch a wind of hope that you will survive from the madness but that moment turns out to be a scratch on a cd etched with your destiny, and you are but in this between realm where your survival skills passed through time are your only chance to acclimate back to a ground state thence fixated once more in your earthly narrative, well-acclimated and safe.

People scoff, and insult you consciously or subconsciously.  Unconsciously making it so difficult for you to swim up to the surface of these dark, polluted waters.  I can’t really remember how this became normal for me again.  It was gradual, there were many challenges.  There is residue and I will never be the same kid I was.

Love is that hope for an inherent meaning, a soulful relationship with existence itself.  It is the dream we forget to dream.  I now get my love through reading books that interest me.  They allow me to feel excited about the world.  Like there is so much to learn and discover.  I get my love through watching shows that allow me to feel or to laugh, like Gossip Girl or Family Guy.  I vicariously experience the spectrum of emotions through such media but want to experience those things for myself in real time.  So this is why I walk down lonely roads at night, to find a rift.

It is hard to love myself when I am made to feel broken by memories of myself.  My house always has a chill to it, like there was a murder here.  There is always a small pretense of a lurking threat through anger, words or even a look that suggests insults to the clarity of my purpose and the integrity of my humanness.

I delve into different philosophies or practices.  Magical rituals, having an altar, praying.  I like to construct my reality using various forms.  I also create art but it feels distant from my heart.  Writing feels good at times but it is sickening on a physical level, as well.  It can help give perspective.

I spend time thinking about the flux of people who entered and left my life and witnessing the heavenly illumination in their eyes when their heart glowed with a familiarity like we are of the same flesh.

I could write a Ginsberg beat poem 1,000 pages long with every moment I fully experienced the beauty and the hatred.

My hands are callous and I get a shooting pain in my heart center when I witness my crude violence to the sweet truth of another.  Save your information, I would rather live mundanely in a place of love then be struck by lightning and become a form insulted by the very laws of matter that makes this place.

I’d rather die whole and good than live out a long life of desperate attempts.

I cannot put love into a distant object, infusing spirit into a memory of the mind.  Love hides and shows itself to me constantly, in every living moment. 

This paper is only a prism for which I hope the reader will receive my words lightly.  I hope so because I can no longer see the beauty in my work as an artist.

My nerves quiver and I flinch at nothing.  Air and light are of the same.  Lana caresses me through the speakers.  If she has ever prayed for the anonymous, I hope she prayed for me.

Love. Love. Love.  Now it feels like I am painting.  Repeating a stroke across canvas to create a unit of meaning , a harmonic balance that my voice can hover over expressing each facet of my being.  This will be done by 12 PM.  If I cannot say it with 6 hours time then I do not know it.  Or it is not known to me. 

Love is the thing you are forgetting to do when you do not call him while you’re dragging yourself through the streets at night, crying outward in pain, singing in broken symphony a song to guide you home.

Lack of love is what makes a person use all sense of self as they shed their clothes and bathe in water for a spectacle. 

Love is missing when you threaten to stab your father and he returns with the knife.

Love is present when a poor man stretches a smile wide for you as he recites his excitement about the beautiful sunny day.

Love is gone when you stand on a train platform coaxing into existence that final impulse.

Love is gone when you are gone and nature of men has its way with you.

There isk contest or award.  Love doesn’t live here anymore.  It is colder.  I lose myself and cannot sustain love.  The vessel is shattered and I am sick.  I hate the trail of my life.  I am fucked.  I don’t know how to translate language of pain.

Why does immersion into the mystical  thoughts cause such vulnerability.  It’s stoo contorted love is curled up dead and dried into a ball.  Love is anarchy.  Anarchy of the soul!  Love is where I want to be.

Love is every relationship, image, meaning that I conjure.  I don’t know what is real, I tailor my experiences on a whim.

My mom is love.  She is the warmest person I know.  She loves me unconditionally.  She is there for me and very supportive.  She lives simply and looks at the good things in life.  She is very gentle.

I learned how to pretend to be happy in order to get the things I want in life.  Things are easier when they are met with a smile.  Sometimes I even feel genuine contentment with something as small as a nice sunny weather outside and how it feels on my skin.  There in that moment I feel that I’m in a place of love. .

When a person witnesses me as I witness their weakness, I feel it’s the start of love.

As I let go of the desire and expectations and just allow for this mellow beat of life to play on, I feel a sweet contentment.  Some tea, a few good movies and some meaningful experiences with others is all I need.  That and to be heard.  All good things, all bad, black and white, dichotic memory making the shamanic experiences reassembling sacred moments and making better or worse truths.

Every psychic I talk to tells me to live from the heart more.  Every ascended master tells me to allow change.  Do I default to chance?

Love is an action not a thing.  That is why it is so difficult to write about.

There are texts that speak about the perennial philosophy; the binding idea that guides all religions is universal love.  Like, it is a great governing law and each religion is just saying it differently.  It is what twists fates and shapes destiny.  It is the fabric of which life is made out of.  I translate it as a basic functional gift of our neurochemistry which granted to civilizations globally the means to exist for so long.  Love saturates all.

When I was six years old, I had this dream that there was this warm yellow light saturating everything and that you could just look into it and receive everything you could ever want.

Love is what I hope to find again, to remember.   Without it I am just another lone wolf on the open road listening to the blank messages under the blanket of night.  I am then just a desperate individual forging superficial relations with the external characters of my psyche and as good as dust.  All I want to receive is love.  That’s all.

 

 

 

Author's Note

Raw/Draft. The flow or lack of is symbolic.