Page 151 - NyghtVision Magazine Volume 4 #3

As much as time can steal our grief, it cannot steal the sadness or the pain.

But why pain? Sadness and grief, that I could understand. But why pain? I wasn't look-
ing for a logical or "reasonable" answer. I had abandoned any expectation that human experi-
ence be logical or reasonable, and yet, I would have settled for anything that would have ended
My pain. Anything.
I thought about James Sands. My father. I remembered our last conversation. He looked
at me and said, "My one regret is that we aren't closer." I looked at him, and knowingly lied. "I
have no idea what you are talking about," I said. And yet I did. I did.

I watched the boy fall from the tree and impale himself upon the iron rake. I remem-
bered all the people I have known and who have died. I could still touch the sadness and the
grief that lived in their deaths. I could, if I called to mind enough about them and their lives,
bring Myself to suffer the sadness and grief again. My godfather. My grandmother. I remem-
bered her looking up at me in her madness, socks over her hands to keep her from tearing out
of her veins the needles that fed her and kept her alive. "Falcon, your Nonni is dying!" I could
feel my arms bring themselves tightly around her - drawing her madness and her pain into me.
Unable to cry with her, I held her as she sobbed in my arms.
But like a still and silent summer rayn, as soon as I let go of the memories, the sadness
and grief passed.

And yet, this sadness, this pain that would surely kill Me, it knew nothing of all those
who had long ago died. It knew only this moment. Only this nyght. Only this now. “...if at the
bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions
produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay
hid beneath everything, what would life be but despair?” Another time, another place, I would
have smiled remembering this quote. But not this nyght. And perhaps if I did not this nyght
survive, never would I smile again.
An accident of place, perhaps, but I knew that just over My head and to the right, on My
bookshelves, Kierkegaard. Irony upon irony. Futility upon futility, Thoth bounded up, landing
upon My chest and then settled on the back of the couch looking down at Me. Somehow, he dis-
lodged a book that seemed of its own accord to fall and strike Me upon the chest. Kierkegaard.
A single bookmark. I forced my eyes to focus and for a moment to forsake the blackness.

"And when the hourglass has run out, the hourglass of temporality, when the noise of
secular life has grown silent and its restless or ineffectual activism has come to an end,
when everything around you is still, as it is in eternity, then eternity asks you and every
individual in these millions and millions about only one thing: whether you have lived
in despair or not."

There was no mistaking Thoth's concern. He reached down and touched the side of My face.
But there was nothing he or anyone could do............. An impossible possibility. Living without
despair. I began to wonder if My pain, My grief, were not despair consuming Me. Thoth was on
My chest now, rubbing his face against Mine. Puring loudly enough to unsettle the nyght. Yet
his concern brought Me no comfort.
And then I remembered. The orchard. Missing isis. The pain of the trees facing another
wynter consuming Mine until I could not separate one from the other. A thousand tears and

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