The Worm God Returns

And there was war in Heaven.

I have wandered, aimlessly, for time unknown. I've wandered the empty space between worlds, that vast and colorless nothingness. I have wandered Other Places, where things lurk that no Man can see. That no being could see without going mad. Maybe it is madness, then, that caused the ache to rise in me. I began to hurt, though whether the pain was physical or something else, I could never say. I hurt, that was that. I wandered anyway, heedless and blind, in all the ways that matter in those places. I crossed gray fields and black mountains, all beneath a sky that seemed transparent. A sky with nothing behind it. There was a shifting sense of self in those places, as if direction and geography and all the senses that tell us where we are, what dimensions make up our bodies, all of these things accounted for nothing.

I came upon a cave, once, at the end of it. The ache was worse, all-encompassing. My feet were bare, my shoes were long since worn away, if I'd ever worn shoes to begin with. They left trails of streaked blood in my wake, though the ground here is too insubstantial to be called rugged. My limbs felt like lead. No, not lead. Heavier. Like mountains. Every muscle in my body cried out, begged me to sit and rest. I suppose I was hungry. I was thirsty. My lips were chapped, cracked, bloodied. My throat was swollen nearly shut with thirst. My flesh, dehydrated and starved, was stretched over bones so brittle they seemed to rattle with every lurching step. My eyes, half-lidded, saw little. I felt less. I was only partially aware of my own suffering. Not lost in thought. Just lost, in truth. Wandering. Careless.

I found a cave and sat, for a time. I needed no fire. I doubt it would have done me any good to try building one. Nothing lived in this place. Nothing, truly, existed. Save for me. Maybe not even me. I was just passing through. Another empty place. I sat and, for the first time in countless years, centuries, eons, Ages, I thought.

I thought and began to feel. I felt angry. Betrayed. Alone. I felt...stupid.

The ache became something wholly different. This was pain. This was the apotheosis of pain. A shudder wracked my body, bent me at the waist, forced me to the floor, to my knees, from where I sat. I doubled, teeth gritted, blood flowing from a tongue I'd bitten through. My teeth clenched, strained, there was a crack in my jaw. My flesh, already pulled taut, began to split. My spine burst through, the skin there simply tearing open along the length of my back and falling away like layers off an onion. My bones snapped. Fingers, toes, arms, legs. One at a time, the pace steadily increasing. They snapped and splintered, tearing ragged holes in skin that was already peeling away from me, severing muscle and sinew, falling with loud, nauseating plops to the floor. The bones broke, my joints bent, unbidden, in directions they were never intended to bend.

I screamed. I screamed like a man being pulled apart, piece by piece. No scream, no sound emitted by anything living, sounds quite the same. I screamed until I saw blood in my own eyes, until my throat, already swollen, burst. Blood filled it, spilled into my mouth, poured over my lips as the peeled themselves off my face and fell away. My lungs, the air all expelled, shriveled and blackened. I tried to keep shrieking. I wondered how I was still alive.

Then I burst into flames.

My rage manifested physically in fire. My withering, broken form was engulfed, consumed. I clawed at my chest with broken fingers, tore off flame blackened ribs, smashed my useless hands against my breastbone until it shattered, and seized my heart in a skeletal fist. I roared, or tried to, and crushed it.

The fire died away, gave way to light. A blaze ever hotter, brighter. I closed my eyes against it. The light rose and filled the cave, burst through the intangible stone, blew outward in every direction as I unfurled, aching, from hibernation. My bones grew, changed, and melded together. My broken, worthless fist grew strong. My flesh leaped up from the floor, stretched, and clung to me again. My shoulders grew outward, upward, until I was winged with bone. Great, powerful wings that grew membranous and dark.

I roared again, a sound that shook the endless nothing, shook the very emptiness between one world and another. And shattered it. Shattered all of those lonely places.

I rose to my feet, towering over the blasted landscape. I looked out over the vast devastation and rolled my shoulders into their sockets. My muscles flexed of their own accord, testing themselves, rippling with power. I was power. Unparalleled power. Unimaginable power.

I turned my eyes skyward and saw my home. What had once been my home. And I knew rage like never before. I saw usurpers to my throne. I saw betrayal. I saw, and I seethed. I seethed and I roared. I leveled mountains, dried up seas, blackened all the skies in all the worlds. I covered all things in darkness. And those who would challenge me trembled, On High, everywhere. They cowered and hid, clenched hands that would not cease shaking.

Blood pounded in my head. Power coursed through my body. Rage boiled in my veins. Vengeance would slake my thirst. I was alive. I was reborn.

I have returned.

Death to all who stood against me. Death for all who will not bow. Pray I do not find you. Pray for my forgiveness now.

Come, Insects, come and be a feast for Worm. Come and see if you survive.

Murderously,
-God

I Like You, Get Naked.

I'm pale, like bloodless flesh left too long in the dark. I'm all made of desires and longing, composed of bits of dust and refracted light. The sum of all my parts amounts to imaginary numbers, and I've always hated algebra. I like it this way. I keep my weaknesses as private as my faith, and my flaws as public as my erections.

I've missed you of late, all of you. A strange thought came to me the other day. The first girl I ever kissed remains, to this day, one of my closest friends. One of those people nearest to my heart and fondest in my thoughts. The first girl I ever had sex with, on the other hand, has been gone since that night. Vanished with the full moon. An orgasm phantasm. I never learned her name, and I don't suspect I ever will.

Odd, for all my sexcapades, that it should suddenly occur to me that sex isn't my real goal in life. Oh, sure there is great fun to be had in flings. Great pleasure in the pursuit and capture of something you desire. There is something tantalizing about unattached physical delights. But then its gone, evaporated like so much water left in the August heat. Not that I haven't found lasting friendships arising from those heady moments, once the sweat has been washed away, the tangled sheets swapped out for new ones, and the concealing darkness traded for piercing daylight, the same woman whose throat was red in the shape of my clenching fingers just hours ago can trade witty banter and dirty jokes as if nothing happened. I've experienced that a handful of times and those friends are wonderful, bright people despite making the woeful, terrible mistake of being my friends.

No, I'm not even saying that I can't be close to someone and then have sex with them.

I'm saying the sex doesn't matter. Fuck me and leave me and I'll whistle my way through work tomorrow. Fuck me and stay and I'll bring you flowers when we meet for coffee. Either way, I'll be satisfied. You won't hurt me, I won't hurt you. We won't share any more of ourselves than we want to.

It isn't the sex that matters, its the affection. More specifically, physical affection.

The reason I remained close to those friends with whom I shared a bed, or became close afterward, was a matter of affection, rather than being hooked on what their bodies could do to mine. I enjoyed my time with them because they let me make them laugh more than cum, make them feel safe more than desired. It was the wholly natural arm slipped into the crook of my elbow, the lingering hug, the eyes met and held, the often less-than-subtle kiss.

Take me with a kiss, and I'm yours forever.

I live for the physical. Things that make me feel good. I drink because I am so entirely in love with the atmosphere that comes with it. I write because I love to explore these worlds and touch the people who live there. I share the little things I write about you because I love the way they make you smile. I talk and tell jokes and spin tall tales because making the people I feel closest to laugh is my greatest gift, and my greatest joy.

When it comes right down to it, I'm an addict, and a fond kiss is my cocaine.

That's the thought that brings me out of myself each time I sink down. Each time those black moods settle over me like a pall. Each time I find myself sequestered away from the world because I've spent too many hours working and too few hours doing what I enjoy. Writing, drinking, being with good people. Kissing. Fucking like Caligula at an all-you-can-bang buffet of...vaginas, I guess. Horses or something. Fucking, is the important part of that.

I know, I just spent paragraphs talking about why the sex doesn't matter, but let's face it: the sex may not be necessary, but holy shit do we love sex.

On a less ridiculous note, while there are things I would keep private from the world I'm not opposed to being read like one of my stories. There are those among you that I would, and have, and do, share those deepest parts of me with. And while you may not have spent the waning hours of one or a hundred nights wrapped up with me, or danced slow circles in a dark, cramped, silent room, or kissed me just for the hell of it, there is something all of you have in common. It's affection, and I want to thank you for letting me show it. Because time and again it brings me back to the world, when I would much rather flee toward darkness.

Yours, Thank the Gods,
-S.R.

P.S.- I promise next time will be all naked legs and marching off to war. I'm not sure what's gotten into me with all this heartfelt stuff. I think I might actually be having those things women have. "Feelings?" Yeah, feelings. Usually this indicates I need to drink more. Or less. Either way, next entry will be all rape and pillage.

One Drunk Night Recalls Another

I'm drunk tonight and, as is so often the case, reminscing fondly of other nights I've spent in the same (or, at least, a similar) condition. I've been to bed already and found that every time I closed my eyes long enough to drift away, I'd smile. Half-conscious smiles, lips cocked slightly to the side against my pillow, accompanied by a low moan of contentment that bubbled out of my throat, muffled by my lips, and made me feel almost foolish. Almost. I'm drunk, after all.

I was thinking of you, naturally, and while all my memories of you are fond, drunk or otherwise, two in particular have stood out all night. They may be my favorites. Something I find odd, even now, as they're so wholly different from one another.

I recall the first acutely, though the details have become stretched through re-tellings and re-livings in the small number of years since the night it happened. I don't remember it so fondly for the experience of driving drunk (and needlessly, I might add) to the hospital or the sudden, chilly onsent of autumn in North Carolina that made me wish, as the hours went by and the booze began to wear off, that I'd brought along a jacket for you. I don't remember it so vividly because it was the first time I'd ever seen you cry and, amusingly enough, the first and, to my recollection, only time I've ever seen you naked.

No, the fondness of the memory only started with wandering in to find you fully dressed, and showering, when you were allegedly brushing your teeth. Finding myself in the shower with a beautiful woman in the middle of the night, still more than a little intoxicated, peeling off clothes to get at the monitors left adhered to your skin and thinking, vaguely, that in any other situation I'd be surely much more "clumsy" with my hands. The simplicity of crawling into a bed more suited fora toddler than two grown adults, the way you nestled between my body and the badly painted stone wall, curled up on my chest and fell asleep. That is the beauty of the night. That handful of minutes that crept into hours as I fell away from consciousness and woke to find you still there. Intimacy, whether romantic or platonic, has always been physical for me, despite my glibness of tongue and savvy wordsmithing. A touch, a look, is always more profound than the most heartfelt string of words. Hard to admit, but true.

Those hours of comfort, of trust, and closeness, are perhaps the most at peace I have ever felt.

The second night, I recall, ended with a scattered pile of my belongings tossed from a second-story window. I remember it not because I looked up at you, and at my clothes and assorted possessions tumbling haphazardly away from you, like a dumbfounded, jilted lover. I remember it for the look of pure mischievous amusement that remained on your face through it all. Clothes I don't ever remember giving to you and things I don't even recall fell away from your face until you disappeared from the window without a word.

I remember feeling a tumultuous mixture of laughter and fury, of confusion and sadness but, above all, a powerful desire to know what in the Nine Hells you were doing. I wanted to laugh and cry and slam my fists against the brick until I'd battered the walls down, or scale the building until I could crawl into your room and shake you until you answered my questions. Instead, I gathered my things and marched them back to my room. Until two days later when you arose and, laughing, took them back where they belonged.

I laid in bed tonight and thought of these things. Of dozens of talks, of six-hours walks that carried on into the encroaching dawn. Of four hour drives to a beach an hour and a half away and writing your name in the sand. Of horrendous downpours that struck the second we turned toward home. Of innuendo that slipped so easily between us, and long looks that convinced at least 800 people that we were bound to be crazy about each other.

I thought of them and felt a pain unlike anything I've ever felt before. A longing so powerful it hurled me out of bed and into my chair to write until it receeded like floodwaters in the weeks after a hurricane. Except it hasn't disappeared. I'm still here, 18 hours and hundreds of miles away, thinking and wondering.

And it suddenly occurs to me that it doesn't matter. The miles and the hours and the years between the nights I remember and tonight. It doesn't matter because the way I love you is so incomparable, so indestructible, that I never fear for a second that it might vanish alongside that longing. I may be wracked with the agony of being so far removed from all your waking moments, and I may tremble at the sheer depth of love I have for a friend, for a relationship that started with a pretty girl stealing my beer and, despite having no money and no beer left, not saying no because she seemed so earnest about wanting to try it for the first time.

I may feel those things, and all I'll do is smile. Because you are all the Order and the Chaos, the intimacy and the occasional fit of mischief, the bright things and the dimly remembered revelries, that make up what I love most in life. So another one for you, in this vast and multi-colored Rubix Cube.

Let's give them something to talk about.

Yours Always,
-S.R.

What You Do To Me

Jubilant does not begin to describe me. Ebullience does not scratch the surface of this. I am joy uncontained, passion unbridled, desire immeasurable. I am vast beyond comprehension and strength beyond comparison. I am powerful and raw, a seething mass of potential that grows only stronger, larger. I am unimaginable destruction and insurmountable benevolence. I am one, I am all, I'm Above and Beyond.

You can't see me, feel me, touch me. You can't hope to encompass, envelope something so tremendous with simple sense and sensation. A shiver running along the length of me would race forever in every direction. My pleasure is supreme, my pain is ultimate. You would look on me in awe, and tremble at the thought.

You would bow and beg, all of you who could stop the shaking long enough to move, to utter a single word. If you could see the way I feel tonight, you would flee in terror. You would burst into flames. You would fall in love so deep it would drown you. I am the center of all things, the creator and destroyer of all things.

Come live with me and be my love.

I have found, in these far-off, dreaming days, that I am insanity made flesh. I am love, given birth. I am wrath brought to life. I am a series of concepts, vague and powerful emotions. I am a creature of pure desires, consciousness of thought, awareness of action.

I could tear you to pieces, shred your flesh and crack your bones, peel the very fibers of your body apart with my bare hands. I relish that knowledge, that power. I am alive with it. Aroused by it.

I could bring you to a climax so severe, the aftershocks would topple cities. The flood would drown nations. Your voice would lift and crack, lilting into octaves beyond hearing, and deafen entire civilizations. Your body would spasm, so close to eruption, that Pompeii would cower and know it was on the cusp of death.

I could fill your heart with such reverence, such adoration, that it would hammer against your breast like a madman, like an army of madmen, raging to be let free. I could paint such innocent, pure affection on your face that all who looked upon you would gasp at how completely you love me.

I could burn all the worlds in the cosmos to ashes.

I am ineffable, intangible. Blinding brilliance, haunting darkness. Triumphant and defeated. Derelict, monolithic. I am multitudes and contradictions. Fragile and indestructible. I am a paradox of simple complications.

Come live with me and be my love.

I will poison you with poetry to leech the venom from your veins. I will siphon all the vileness and swallow it, let the infections fester in my guts and rot the flesh away. I will turn the light on all your darkness and devour your despair. I'll wrap these monstrous hands in you and strangle all your demons. You came into this world without them, and without them you will leave it.

I am not Salvation, she has danced out of my reach. I am not Redemption, she has flitted out of sight. I am not here to save you from the fear, or greif, or pain. I am here to hold you when the weight becomes too great. I am here to kill those things, should ever they arise, and show their twisted heads so that my blade may truly strike. I will protect you, when I can, whether with violence or with love. I will destroy you, if I have to, and I will pick the pieces up.

You are more than I can ask for, and more than I can be, though I am vast and infinite, omnipotent. Insignificant. I can burn the worlds to dust, but only you can show me life. I was made to do this thing, to belong to you.

Come live with me and be my love.

Unflinchingly Yours,
-S.R.