Excerpt: Eden's Flower

I am a scar composition. I am built of vines of raised flesh that creep along my right shoulder, down the once soft skin of my left arm, on the spherical edge of my left check. Scars typically come with stories attached to them, but I have no memory of how I acquired these marks, no knowledge of either the event or the tool used to write them on my skin.

Then again, no one here ever does recollect anything about their previous existence. It may be a boon, but tell me, what good is a tabula rasa without any hope of building something greater? We were prisoners confined by our borders and the eternal dusk swathing everything around us.

Our world is small and it seems to grow smaller by the day.

Everyone combats the stale despair in some way. I have yet to find the means of staving it off entirely, though I have tried. Believe me, I have. You have to at least make the attempt. If you don't, you drown, an Ophelia in the kingdom of uninterrupted twilight.

My most recent experimentation in defending myself against the loss of involves joining a tribe who seem all at once lost and at home here. They have no gods, only goddesses. Their prayers rise off fingertips gently caressing the tarnished ivory keys of a piano, their hymns are odes to those almost lovers they like to pretend they once had. They put their faith in beauty and innocence, in tulle skirts and nail polish the color of silver rain.

So it's not exactly surprising to me that they all wound up in Purgatory, Limbo, whatever the Under World we occupy can be classified as. It is an in-between place, one whose primary color composition is gray, as though it too cannot decide which cosmic sphere it wishes to reflect.

We are not dead, but none of us are alive.

My idols were never women who clung to an innocence state they may never truly have ever entertained but those who garbed themselves in the riches of experiences while maintaining a sense of wonderment. Never-Never Land was not a static, jovial place for all its whimsy. The fairy tales birthed by the Germanic forests so rarely had happily ever afters that came without loss and struggle.

In truth, I only attached myself to the gypsies because of how trapped I felt, still feel. The walls are closing in on me and I am constantly seeking beauty, clawing for it in song and image. If I try to see the world as a painting by Klimt, as a song by shoe gaze artists bent over guitars produce twinkling melodies whose sound is like the star systems I have only seen in photographs, holding on becomes a possibility.

It was the cynicism that made me desperate, the pessimism that swelled around me. It made me ache and each person who stated that love is not enough to salvage a soul or a life bruised me on a level deeper than marrow. I loathed their blind belief in what they conceived to be common sense.

Don't feel, think. Don't dream, be pragmatic. Lower your standards, because your ideals cannot take shape. All your Champaign bubble moments, those instants in which the snarled veins of the heart with delight, are temporary highs ignited by little more than brain chemicals. You are bound to come down sooner rather than later, you will fall, your wings will evaporate under the raw, amber kisses of a July sun. Passion is no longer in vogue and those who cling to dare to experience it are doomed to a life of extremes.

I know this, I acknowledge it, but I can't abandon the search for it. Even here in the dark, things Eternal stretching out around me, I cannot progress beyond this seemingly juvenile desire for more.