I breathe, deeply, letting the air rush from my lungs in an almost gasp, and I stay silent. My jaw clenches in an effort to hold back the tirade that surges against my teeth like a tidal wave, sharp and salty, it stings. Sometimes, when I’m almost sure I’ll burst because I can’t stand it anymore, a fine tremor shivers through the inside of me and my eyes close in slow motion. It’s exaggerated, that slowness. Like counting to ten while wishing away the monsters under your bed, maybe when I finally open them again you’ll have disappeared. Vanished into thin air like a bad dream, leaving behind only a racing heart and a fading feeling of unease. I should be so lucky.

Fate placed us side by side, surely no choice of mine. When you set up your nest next to mine I knew it was ill fortuned, but what could I do? Mine is not the choice to make, such things are decided by more powerful people than I. Your proximity is dangerous, and it eats at me daily. You burn, every day, simmering with the poison of your lifetime’s choices and their deadly by-blows that multiply as demented rabbits. How can it be that you don’t hear yourself, how you sound, venom dripping from your lips, anger and frustration shimmering off you like a haze, every – single – day. Is that why you walk so quickly, talk so quickly? Are you, like a shark, in constant motion by sheer necessity? For surely such high metabolism is the only thing that keeps that poison from eating you alive, you have to eat it first. Stillness might very well mean death, but you’re dying anyway, wasting away to taut skin over brittle bones.

My skin crawls with the nearness of it, your poison leaking over the meager barrier between us and hissing as it trickles in through my ears. Slowly that venom has seeped its way inside of me, settling into my brain and heart like a secret well of dark and bitterly scented hate. It gathers there, quietly, drop by drop it grows deeper and more fathomless in every way. Dark things have taken up residence there. Moving silently beneath the surface they are blind eyed and sharp toothed. I am exquisitely aware of what your poison is doing to me. I am overcome by a feeling of helplessness when I feel those dark things stir in me, rising up towards the surface, drawn to your endless ichor and clamoring to reach daylight.

A better person would ignore you, set up some sort of metaphysical barrier, a shield that would protect me from your contagion. I would be able to virtually stopper my ears, but for that we needs work together, you and I. I could look on you with pity and move on. Move on, or make peace. A stronger person would be untouched. A kinder person would feel compassion. A wiser person would rationalize. I am not that person. I am the person who came to realize one bright summer morning that if I found out you were dead by some grace of god or happenstance, I would breathe a sigh of relief. I can already imagine the weight lifting from my heart in grateful freedom. The truth hit me, unblinking and naked in its honesty, and who am I to call it ugly or unkind? I didn’t ask for any of this.

I pray for grace to wash me clean of you and call it kindness that I might not become you instead.

Do you believe in magic? Do you believe that it is possible to transport oneself out of the ordinary and into realms untold? That one can visit a past now moldering and decayed, and see it gleaming as if not a moment had elapsed? Do you believe that the future isn’t something that happens to someone else far from now, but is instead something to be explored here, and now? What about angels, and demons? How then monsters and heroes, queens and rogues? Deadly secrets, sacred texts, and pirates. What about pirates?

I believe that all these things are imminently possible, and in fact I dare you to deny it. I dare you to prove that I don’t experience every single one of these things, and more, within the course of a month. Magic, mystery, and wonder are afoot. Right here, right now, I’ll tell you a story.

Tell us a story, that ageless request, as old as humanity itself. Gathered together after a long day of the required survival tasks, early humans faced each other across a fire pit and together they contemplated the dark and all the forces within it. The women held their babies close and eyes shifted towards the night, blinded by fire, that impenetrable darkness must have surely seemed limitless in it’s vastness. The men would have struggled not to grip their weapons a little tighter at the call of something wild and hungry. It is left to the storyteller, the repository of all known myth and legend to lift them out of themselves. His job, both sacred and practical, to take the unknown and unknowable and make them real would be safeguarded for thousands of years. He was holy, the living history of an oral people.

So moving is the urge to record and share the stories of our lives and the legends of our peoples that eventually ideas became symbols, and symbols became words. A secret language known only to the elite few, written first on stone, then tablets, papyrus, and parchment. The power in the written word and its ability to transcend the every day long after the writer is gone is epic. Books written before the birth of Christ are still read to this day, held up as magnificent examples of ancient literature. Even then, the hero got the girl, even if it took him a really long time. It is said that the burning of the Library at Alexandria set back the intellectual evolution of man centuries, if not more. Enter the Dark Ages and behold the power of the written word and collected knowledge.

The course of human history changed forever when words were made cheap. No longer was book learning the pursuit of only the rich. Now the common man, if not the peasant, could afford the textual pleasure of the turned page. The press brought the word of the Lord and every other Tom, Dick, and Harry to the world. Politics, literature, current events and how they were reported, all trembled with the promise of seemingly instantaneous content. Such power, words in the form of books. Power both dangerous and heady, that would both inflame dark hearts and uplift the purity of the human soul.

Tell us a story, and so they did. They told tales rife with flowery prose, delicate and genteel. Tales fit for kings and tales for paupers. Stories written for the every man, full of hard knocks and hope that things could be different. Stories to delight and mystify, with heroes to whom no mystery was too obscure. The people were entertained as never before, but it didn’t stop there. Words were powerful beyond the ability to awe, the written word could also change the world. Tracts on religion, politics, and morality all flooded the civilized world, food good or evil, and couched as truth. At least some of them found a home, like intellectual darts, inside the hearts and minds of people who’s paradigm might now suddenly… shift. Books are banned for a reason, spiteful and fearful though that reason may be. Books can be dangerous, and a single story can shape nations.

And so, we return to the ability of the written word help us transcend our singular selves into something more, to places we’ve never been but might like to someday. We give of ourselves to people, places, and times we’ve never seen but are so real that for those moments we are lost, and happily so. Books, stories, give us worlds to explore and other people’s lifetimes to do it in. For the span of a few minutes, hours, or a day, we are expanded beyond ourselves. Our histories are now not only our own, but everyone’s, anyone’s, and they reach past the dawn of man as far back as science will take us. Our futures are limitless, terrible and wonderful. From cover to cover we uncover fantastical tapestries woven for the pure delight of young and old.

My challenge to you is this: turn off your talking heads and glowing screens. Unplug your fingers from plastic keys and remotes, and step away. Do something radical, something dangerous. Turn the page and see what lies around the bend and beyond the horizon.

When I am old I know that I will still remember the sound of how we began again. Though my eyes may dim, my heart may slow, I will never forget the sound of the ocean, hundreds of miles away and yet right outside my window. In my tiny third floor bedroom, gabled and tin roofed, we began again. One night became two, one day became several, and an idea became real. We lay there, you and I, every night and that summer we were blessed with rain, and the sound of the sea.

My bedroom had little more than a bed and a dresser, and a lamp. Almost claustrophobic, the walls slanted in to the shape of the almost Victorian roof. If it weren’t for the two windows it would have been little more than a walk in closet. Bringing you in there, opening my room, my heart, and my bed, became even more intimate because the space was so confined. Like unwrapping the smallest present under the tree to find that good things really do come in small packages. Finding you in this way, again, was tremulous… as I waited to see if this time something true could grow from the seed of passion’s past.

I remember when the rains started. I was gradually wakened that night to the sound of it falling hard on our metal roof. The sound was constant and strong, a steady thrumming that blurred together into a wall of sound, alive in it’s intensity and auditory pulse. I love the rain, I always have. I remember changing into my bathing suit, quick like a bunny, so I could run around the lawn, standing under the pounding crash of the gutter spout, assaulted, shrieking, and loving every minute of it. This rain brought back those memories in a rush, what it felt like to be young and in love with being silly and free. The storm pounded the windows and walls and I reveled in its fury, safe in the dark haven of your arms.

That morning I woke before you, as I always do, and to my dismay the rain had stopped. In its stead I was graced by what can only be described as the sound of ocean waves. For a moment I was confused, though I don’t normally awake dulled or disoriented. When last I checked, the ocean was two and a half hours away. I couldn’t make sense of the ebb and flow that flooded the room. I shook you awake, “Listen, it sounds like the ocean!” I said, and you agreed. I gathered the sheet around me and knelt against the headboard, flush against the window frame, staring out at the early morning in wonder. You know I can’t let things rest, I just have to know. And suddenly, I did know.

Outside my window a maple tree leaned in close for a kiss, it’s leaves (on any other day) whispering against the screen, marking the seasons the way they always do. Each leaf glistened, soaked, the rain must have stopped only minutes before. The wind whipped up, roaring through the trees in a low moan. The leaves slid against each other, a mad wet friction, and that was it. That was the sound. It rose and fell, long and slow, like lovers with all the time in the world. I lay back down beside you and we entwined ourselves, like the leaves, surrounded on all sides by a wall of illusory sound and a very real joy in each other.

And so, when I am old I know that I will remember the sound of how we began again. How that summer we were blessed with rain, and how we lay together, surrounded by the sound of the sea.

Sometimes I think of snow as the ice-cold kisses of Winter. When the Earth is being covered in a blanket of adoration, the Ice Maiden kissing the seemingly lifeless body of her sometimes lover. She touches chilled and delicate lips to her beloved, to no avail. It is in the nature of her very love to drain the vitality from the object of her affections. Retreating inward, her lover slumbers and waits for warmer wiles. Softer than feathers, her kisses melt against my own upturned face and lips, tiny drops of melted longing. My tongue darts across burgundy lips and laps up the love it finds, rare and pure like ice wine.

It is one of those moments in time when you feel as if all the world is empty, and you are the last person on earth, or maybe the first. It’s rather like being present at the birth of Time. While an honor, yes, also very, very lonely. Moments such as these, when the power sings across your skin and you’re afraid to move for fear of shattering the crystalline perfection, are meant to be shared later with a lover – in the dark – spoken of in hushed whispers and reverent breaths. The air has a weight and it presses in on me with a firm strength. Perhaps I’m being tested, my ripeness being ascertained. Ready, yes… for what?

The field I stand in is wide and the silence is almost as loud as the ringing in my ears. But if I close my eyes I can imagine you, just beyond sight, waiting for me to wish you into existence. As if… as if I could only gather all the warmth that is seeping from my body, roll it into a ball, and butterfly kiss it… winging it’s way to you. Once there it would fashion itself a form, a blank canvas of a man, that your spirit might take it for a home. Your essence giving life where before there was none, bringing light where before there was only darkness and the surety of possibility.

When I open my eyes I see nothing but the crystal woods and fields, and no trace of you at all. A flicker of movement catches my eye and my heart races in my chest, thinking it might be you. Against the leaden sky a crow takes wing, and I pray it carry my love to you. For on wings as swift as those, perhaps you might one day hear word of it. Until that time I am held still, in stasis, or at least until this moment passes. It will pass, as such things inevitably do, but until that time I am bound by rapture, by the cold clarity of a need that knows no boundaries.