A Bright House

“Our will, quite the opposite of being free, is steady and stable, like an inner gyroscope, and it is the stability and constancy of our non-free will that makes me me and you you, and that also keeps me me and you you” ~ Douglas Hofstadter

Lacrimal apparatus. That which sheds tears. There are many ways to cry, many kinds of crying, some of which are unemotional responses to a given irritant or stimuli. There are gentle tears that arrive with a reduced body ache, localized and of a medium heat, perhaps rising to spill from a piece of exquisite music or a passage in a book that we wish we had written or read when we most needed to. This may be called healthy crying. Some of us have shed cool tears that fell because someone or something so frustrated our spirit, so wronged us, so let us down, we couldn’t help but relieve the pent up dam. Even if the heart was angry.

There is the gentle weary weep; when our thresholds are breached, attrition becomes too heavy a burden. Tears that seem almost too soul fatigued to leave the lower catch basins, fingers too heavy to lift in order to wipe them away. Tears of indignant rage may rise up directly from our ancient wiring, as with those born of fear. Of all these variable human characteristics as applied to the act of crying, there is nothing more wrenching than the whole heart sob. Loss, a prime mover. These are the hottest tears; they boil over in their wracking delivery. The lungs feel deprived, ribs threaten to crack, nasal passages close down, mucous, gasping mouth intake as though swimming in pain or release or a kind of relief inexpressible through spoken words. Leaning back against Ray Townes with his large warm hands both gently and firmly anchoring her, Jenny found herself allowing the floodgates to swing wide.

“Okay, Jenny” he whispered into her hair above the left ear. “Let it happen.” She cried the good cry with the bad cry. The pent up with the set free. These were the hottest, fattest, hardest falling tears of her life since losing Scott. She hadn’t shed these tears even when the void that took his place demanded it of her. These dropping splashes represented rings of pain and stunted growth, lost opportunities for healing and hope, and as they hit her legs and Ray’s forearms, Jenny shed some of those time calloused layers. He was everything her intuition told her he would be; a safe place in a storm. He was that person that instantly does what any of us should do, and is later called a hero.

Perhaps this would be the one glimpse of a solution for Jenny, the finally seen evidence that all is never lost. She had been transformed from a confident happy soul, despite a childhood that would try to murder that inner place, into a shell; her intellect, will, day and night dreaming essence, had been vanquished so easily by a random event without a tidy explanation or a happy ending. The hard falling river of her eyes felt very much, then, safe in the arms of a caring stranger, like a call at last, heard. It seemed that she cried an eternity in minutes. A sense that she was crying for Scott’s eyes, from his inability to say goodbye or shed his own tears... this was a final realization as she began to calm down. Her lap was soaked. Ray ran his fingers up and down the length of her forearms and for a few wonderfully comforting seconds, cupped each elbow in his palms. “Look at the moon” he said. “We are all connected to it. We are all one with what we experience, no matter our personalities or subjectivity.”

Though he knew that Jenny had attached herself to him emotionally, unconsciously into lucidly following her intuition, Ray suddenly leaned forward to kiss her left temple and then the dampened upper cheek. It was an act of tenderness that lived its moment free of doubt or potential repercussion, because it was unerringly the right thing to do. She felt it happen and was surprised by the muted reaction; her body felt as though a plug had been removed and toxins had begun to drain away. Confusion about everything she had been experiencing since this unusual man appeared at the Logan Street Grill, drained out and away. She had been lost to the sudden outpouring and couldn’t know what else he had been picking up through his clairvoyance. For Ray, the timing of Jenny’s watershed couldn’t have been more useful, for he had begun to see colliding images that were horrific. One opaque fluttering visual seemed to reveal a young Jenny of approximately twelve, definitely treading the doorstep into young womanhood, concealing a long bladed knife beneath a mattress. This bled immediately into, or was interfered by, a vast hoary expanse of frozen lake with a barely visible shoreline to the right... it was this second scene that carried emotional horror, but before Ray could focus into the depths of it, Jenny had lost her composure and pulled him back.

Sunday held its own challenges for Townes. He wouldn’t have the physical time to spare in order to reach his new friend in the deeper knowledge that he had been shown. A showing that bore the hallmark of grave emotional scarring for he and her alike. Her sudden wrenching full body outburst gave Ray both a form of exit and a keen pinch of the unfinished. Lost within his private protected thoughts, unsettled as they were, Ray removed his hands from her arms as she reached for the small bag she had brought along. She removed tissue to dab her eyes, leaned forward to gently blow her nose, noted that her tear geyser had soaked completely through the corduroy pants, and Ray asked “are you okay?” She nodded, then moved forward to pivot around on her knees, facing him. “Thank you so much" her soft words barely lifted into the rapidly cooling night air. Ray looked at her outline, lunar backlighting with shimmering lake accents, and fought a bottomless pit of concern that opened up within the lingering residue of his final impressions. Several widely separated orbs of diffused light created an elongated halo to the east and west of the nearby boardwalk. It gave the appearance of bathing Jenny as she knelt during those precious seconds of clarity, and Ray tuned in to a new energy from her that was split open, wonderfully vulnerable. He had never loved a woman other than his mother.

More unusual, at fifty two years of mortal age, Ray Townes had never lost his virginity. Being born as who he was, knowing all that was different within himself when contrasted to his peers in their socially restrained rural environment, had created a young man whose focus at an early stage of adolescence had been outside of bodily curiosity or need. This made him a freak, an outcast, an object of ruthless teasing and revulsion. Before he had attained driving age, when other young men of his years were fully involved in the activities so prevalent and obsessively vital to that male mindset and body-want, Ray was the recipient of wordless “knowings”, “messages”, frightening glimpses of information that waylaid the physical demands of his mortal housing. There were years of private anguished grappling, with the why him? People his age seemed temporarily empty of spiritual worth during those times of anger and fear over the burden he had been given. Ray didn’t want to touch anyone on an intimate level, nor to open himself up to being “seen”, and then his mother disappeared before his young loving eyes... gradually, insidiously, she became a reduction of her soul. By the time young Ray knew, clairvoyantly, that something was horribly wrong for her, was missing, it was too late.

So it came to be that Jenny and Ray connected on a pristine level of raw humanity, co-reaching through the many filters, and yet their private thoughts remained under guard out of concern for the other. He watched her, looking every bit the ghostly portrait long forgotten in an attic or padlocked shed, bathed in moon and lamplight haloing, and knew that she would love him so easily, too easily. The first of the Saturdays of change arrived as though guided, not by God in the traditional sense, or by gods with perverse senses of play, but through the channel that Ray had always perceived. One that existed free of dimensional definition, and moved in pure energy manifestation through every possible reality’s simultaneous pathway, constantly available to all living receivers.

With its crucial timing, its undeniable weight of importance, his impulsive direct following of the nudge to eat where Jenny was employed was instantly underscored by what he felt when he first looked at her. She was a tether and didn’t know it. This particular doorway, peculiar in its uniqueness only to them, was and had been swung wide; not stepping through, together, was unthinkable. They hadn’t reached a level of vocalization for what Ray had already come to believe; that both souls were going to peel back veils in reciprocal ways. He moved his hands to the cool grass at the base of the maple tree, continued to drift through his eyes and thoughts whilst staring at her, and could find no horizon of mind for what was imminent.

They both spoke at once, then. His words and hers seemed identical in count. She uttered hers during the act of regaining her feet. Respectively, what was co-said meshed into an overlap of “I saw a frozen lake” - “I dreamed of you yesterday”. It caused Ray to press hard against the tree trunk, seconds before he would have also arisen. They had spoken and heard each other’s words, but Jenny was more taken. She whispered “oh my god”. Ray looked at her lunar halo for a split second before the entire disc behind her was snuffed out by a moving shadow that arrived from nowhere in complete silence. It moved left to right across the full of the moon, swiftly before his eyes could attach detail, then rose straight up to the upper canopy of the tree against his back.

They are the unseen map. They are the crossing connecting regions of anomalous event. Folklore abounds. The Charles Forts of the world paid heed, noted the higher than average occurrences within reach of these controversial alleged globe straddling alignments; the ley lines. The mysterious builders of ancient monuments and far flung megaliths are too easy for the scorn of the doubters. Targets for smug hangers on who clutch at their comfort levels through such illusions as scientific method, kicking and screaming throughout the span of human history as each new discovery, acceptance, benchmark of “reality”, is “proven”. The comfort dweller who so easily mouths words such as “pseudoscience” has not set foot into the particular acreage of western Ontario forest that was the final visible evidence that one constable Will Pritchard ever existed.

On the frontier, the explorers of quantum mechanics find themselves spooked by such previously unthinkable ideas as bi-location. Instant reactions between witnesses who interact with bizarre floating-flying light orbs, oft times near locales decorated by dawn’s newest crop circle, elicit guffaws from the eminently sane. Little do they know, these firmly grounded individuals, that their planet is at one with their universe, and this is a permanent question, possibly an entity, always a mystery. Those who would rape and plunder, deplete and kill the one provable home for all life, and then laugh heartily at such notions as electro magnetic aberrations scattered the world over, will be the most frightened should they stray into the realm of dubious hypothesis become all too real.