Waste Land

On the other hand, swarms of excitement brew in my belly, where the city has made me soft, and alone, aching to see the places in which we have not stamped our ridiculous seal onto things. The old adage is true about goth teenagers slinking into graveyards, making wet, mushy and barely audible crunches with their over sized boots and praying to the moon that their little enclave stays safe, the one in advanced art class, that they were purposefully attending a second time, so that they may find a space away from the vacuous, the big haired losers, the jocks who were about to springboard themselves into the sorry little lives they led today, the overtly petite cheerleaders whose cunts must have over expanded and dried up years ago, the average ones who occupied space and nothing more, waiting for their average parents to show them just how incredibly and wonderfully average they could be in their lives – there, in that class, those kids listened to what was then called “alternative” music and dressed however they liked, and made art that gave them some kind of inward voice, to revel and rage up at all the others, surrounding the little art school room, on the lower levels of the school, like ants marching towards winter. Surrounded – always. Those kids, yes, they enjoyed roaming the woods and the cemeteries which were supplanted (from “colonial times”) everywhere in that town, and its outskirts. There were tiny smatterings of cemeteries (really, just 5 -10 or so headstones, surrounded usually but not always by an old, rickety and crooked, short wooden fence, to keep God knows what out – dogs, raccoons, us- the child of a dwarf could climb these “fences” without barely lifting his leg off of the ground. There was one at the end of your long and winding dirt road, one at the end of many, one outside the town hall, and one smack in the middle of the back end of the high school, up the hill where the buses lined up, towards the top of that hill was the smaller stone structure where the slow ones learned – the pothead, heavy metal shirt clad ones, murky like a cloud of exhaust in dirty snow, making their way up and down the perimeters of the halls of the high school. Well, those mini-cemeteries being spread and dotted around the towns and rural outlying areas, like anything seen and gotten used to every day, made the sight of death (granted death far removed from our place and time) and the resting place of such death common somehow. You didn’t need to dye your hair black and listen to Cure to know that fact. There was always a kind of comfort from those places – like those first citizens of our village were protecting our corners, watching them at night and in the days when we were away from home, they were there, just as much a part of our community as we were.


So back to the trails that led us here. One of those kids from that classroom, utterly alienated and unhappy per the usual teenage memo most receive by about fifteen years of age, used to climb the big hill in the back of the house which led up to an unused chicken coop. It wasn’t used when they lived there either, but it was always there. It was like a microcosm, ground packed tight in snow, or grass or moss, under the world, wherein you could see whole dynasties and civilizations rise, conquer and fall just as softly back into the ground, from whence they thought they could blast off from. In that tiny, cold wooden chicken coop you can sit, in the absolute quiet and tender winter air, while the world churns, and makes, and wastes, and buys and throws away, and feels badly about it, and then does it again and again, exploiting every patch of “new” they could get their grubby, ineffectual hands on. Away from that, this hill remains. The sun shines perfectly onto it, into the latticework that the thin, northern branches allow to pass safely through. The stealthy grey cat, otherwise known as the abortionist, used to knock baby bird eggs one by one out of the nearby branches and onto the hard ground. There is nothing like taking a fat, lazy indoor cat and letting him loose outside. Even if it’s been years since he’s been out there, he’ll remain scared for a moment, and then – something will cross his eyes and he will be aligned with his surroundings in a shot. One good sniff, and the eyes perk – it’s up the trees, onto the hunt, and wayward zig zags across the gardens and the lands. This same cat could be seen marching down that same hill, from the chicken coop, dead mouse in its mouth and dropping it in front of its fat, orange mother, like a sacrificial prize. The fat one begins to eat the mouse – head, ears, brain, tongue, everything. She leaves nothing but the tail and then non chalantly meanders off. Good family relations. Another cat, in a more southern hemisphere did the same to a baby rabbit, leaving a perfectly halved carcass in a patch of sand. One you might have non chalantly picked up by its untouched (and only) back feet and flung further off into the pine trees. Dogs are no better – bounding unfettered from the woods behind the first house with bloody deer legs in their mouths – proud as children, pleased as punch. Upsetting when you see the garden snake perched on the shore of the pond, innocent frog in his mouth, slowly being digested down his ever fattening snake throat. Yeah, you might have run inside, afraid of that turning of the wheel, afraid that you had no control over it. But rest assured, that set of creatures do as they know to. Nothing more, nothing less.


And what of us? We are not so logical, so instant and forgiving with our outdoor adventures. They told you to keep any cats indoors on Halloween, especially black ones – because some “satanic” (i.e. those that went to the tiny version of the high school behind the gravestones) kids were sacrificing (i.e. killing as a remedy to familial resentment, general disgust and mistrust of themselves and the world) cats for Halloween. And other times too. Remember when they found that decapitated man in the park, the one which wasn’t a park at all – but a collection of medium sized fields, an enormous pond for ice hockey and ice skating (where that kid Tommy threw a snowball at you, giving you a bloody nose, because he liked you and wanted you to be his girlfriend), along with various swing sets, tee pees, and those apparatuses which just twirled you around. There, in that haven of childhood, this guy got his head chopped off. It was a serial killer, they thought. Not sure if they found any more, but always in your mind you think of Chicatilow in Russia – he killed something like hundreds of men, women, hookers, boys – buried them in the woods outside of Moscow and farther than that. It’s not the same thing, obviously as the cycle of life repeating itself. But it’s necessary, else it wouldn’t happen. Sadly, some people just create that little spot for themselves in the woods by their very processes, or lack thereof. There are girls hiding in the guise of women who have admitted that they are on a destructive track, one which might get them killed one day. You know those – the ones who, when you find the body, ravaged and cut up and dumped in the same woods you played as a child, emanate such Relief across their faces. For some, assisted suicide, for others the bad luck star shone heavily onto them, for still others – it was just the way they headed. Deserving something or not doesn’t change the fact that the world allowed it to happen. That’s where all the arguments of the right vs. wrong types lose weight.


Those goth kids will still be depressed even now, and years from now, stumbling over the bodies of the dead, through the moss of the microcosm, the chicken coop holding in its walls another lonely teen. Whoever’s running down that hill now is running over the bones of two very loved german shepherds – wrapped, and buried at least 6 feet under, in homemade wooden coffins by a man whose greatest advice to you was “If you have any problems in your life – just sit in nature for awhile. Watch it, really watch it. The animals, the sky, the ground, the trees, all of it. Whatever your problem, you can find an answer to it if you just look at nature”.  The same man cut the tail off of their childhood dog who they lovingly referred to as “Bitch” in another language. Fear not, the world is no safer or more beautiful behind the parallel of the trees at the sides of the highway. They are not a cloak, but a marker, into that restless primitive inside our soft and medicated selves, running from snakes, delighting in the gruesome view of mice being devoured whole by their killers, looking into the eyes of our own killers and deciding what steps to take, curling up in the corner of the whistling wind beating the sides of the abandoned little coop, and letting go of our destinies, only to see what actually lay before us, and we, free to actually greet its darkness and shadow, its wet earth which may open up and swallow us whole into its dreaded afterlife. No matter how deep in the forest you are, there can and always will be that moment when you take one more step, left right or center, and a vista bursts into view of sky, open light and egress which you didn’t know was there just one single step previous.


Reams and reams of years in between – and still, quashed and released by cities, held in and bullied by countryside, I still can remember it. Each and every time wherein arrives this feeling, the one wherein my stomach gives way, my head shakes loose itself from its foundations, and my eyes just Go – taking along that thing I may refer to as my heart, but really it can’t have a name – else if it did, it’d be on display in each and every strip mall from here to Moscow; purging from my pores, between my legs, out my ears and whistling into the space outside of myself, when my feet aren’t on the ground anymore no matter their location, I think of it.  I am ten years old, and at my friend’s house, set in the middle of the woods, with those skunk cabbages and weeds, and slim, snaky gorges forming a little fence around the land on either side, and I am on her tire swing, tied tightly (hopefully) to the widest tree trunk which is set at the edge of a cliff. Even now, it couldn’t be seen as being small to my adult eyes….it is a huge drop, onto fields of corn and wheat below. The pale sky and the warmth of its sunset shining at me in the distance.  I swing more and more, the feeling of swinging off of that great hill enthralls me like nothing else.  I could drop at any moment-  there are no parents, no adults, no rules keeping me behind.  I know I shouldn’t. I could fall, the knot on the tire swing could come loose (if it so chose), my feet could slip, but no – I wrap my legs around the vehicle and I rock more and more, backing up further and further into the shadows and letting myself release out into the warm late afternoon breeze. The colours of the sun are lessening, and there is nothing but Light at which I'm becoming, and transcending from each time. My heart is pumping, and then calmed. My stomach churning, and then at peace. You are in control of nothing, and safe in the knowledge that nothing is in control of you. The light catches me every time, and, to this very day and place no matter what moment I have found myself aroused to my core because of, I am back there, soaring, and scared, and unsure, and never-ending.


~ M. Lucia