Coincidence or happenstance, expect you know I'm too nuts-o by much to ever call it mere coincidence. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but sometimes you prick your ears too hard, and stuff starts happening around you.
I opened a door into the past a couple days ago, because I felt it needed airing perhaps, or simply because I needed to draw on something for my book. It worked, but it fucked me up a bit, after. See, I know how the devil don't let you out of hell twice, but sometimes, I guess I just need reminding. That ubiquitous voice that kept me on the straight and narrow when I needed it most, the warning not to fuck around, went unheeded. Fucked around and found out, eh.
Just how far the limits of my new and improved self stretch. You're good, but don't get too cocky, else the world comes around to knock you down a peg. Knock some sense into you. Guess it comes to the deserving.
It was harder to close, the door, once I'd opened it. I shimmied my way into the murk, and what I'd thought long dead, I found had tendrils still vying for my bare wrists and ankles.
Still. With help. I managed to kick it in the mouth, but maybe not close the door completely. Strange stuff started happening around me. And it sure is freaky, the way the world starts acting up. The world responds to you, always, unnervingly sometimes.
I looked up to the show that had been rolling in the background, was struck by the song. Slow and melodic, remembered running across the room as a young girl when I heard it. Played at a different pace, with the wrong inflections, but there it was, nonetheless. This melody I hadn't even let myself think about in years. Well, I thought, fuck me.
A random drunken phrase, like a culture shock, sending waves across my lifeline.
Opening a book at random, being confronted by a word that's a name, that's a memory, that's another thing not to think about. That's a lie. I think about things painfully, obsessively, until I've sucked all the meat off of their bones. And I've thought of this one enough, yet still surprise myself. Her name. A past future. Che mi portano altrove.
But not anymore.
I don't know how these things happen sometimes, but I held the door open, and several little things seemed to happen at once. Memories of the past, lights blinking, words, secret triggers, whispers.
Or is it just that, as Carl Jung suggested, the more you pay attention to these strange little occurrences, the more they happen? Somebody brings up something you haven't talked about in years. A name is called. A secret song. The universe responding. The devil propping open a hatch. Coincidences with consequences.
The more we paid attention to it, the stranger life got.
I thought I knew the way it would come at me.
I thought I could just dash in, grab something I'd forgot, except that's maybe not the way time works, really. I thought I'd get myself snagged in the same old ways, so fortified my armor beforehand.
I didn't. The past didn't hold out a familar hand. The spell, I found, remained broken. But inside me, the same proclivities for getting lost. And I realized I'd carry them with me always, this ease of wandering, of losing my step and alienating myself from my path.
I thought less about what the song once meant, and more of the drive to stay up that night, and let myself get waylaid when I should've gone home. Gone back. I stopped asking, for the first time, what was it external that caught me, and finally,
What part of myself so badly wanted to get caught?
And is getting caught the same as being caught, really?
I realize this might not make much sense to you. But it does to me. :)
