Stuck in the present.

Or trapped. Hanged, as in the Tarot card? No way to move. I feel like I’m an alien inside an egg, waiting for the right time to liberate myself and hatch out, some kind of a birth or a re-birthing. Quite appropriate for a blog that is supposed to deal with reincarnation…

The other day I got the first critics for one of my novels. I had commented earlier that every character had a bit of me. And this person said she could see that was true. She especially liked one of them, a character who was not there from the beginning. He was a late invention, however he started to grow and he also became my favourite. This character used to wear a ragged grey cloak with a hood, to protect him from the rain, and I often would write the raindrops would linger on the border of the hood, like tears. The same tears the rain helped conceal. Be it for the power of my imagination, or because that image is a real past life memory, I feel like that right now. That’s part of the reason why the scene where Arwen is walking through the woods mourning the death of Aragorn means so much to me. She also wears a hood which conceals her tears. I’ve always wanted to wear one like that.

In my meditations I always reach a river which I call “The river of life”. If you follow the river up, you reach the spring, that is, where it all began, your past. If you follow the river down, you reach the mouth, that is, what is to come, your future. I’m usually not interested in the future, but in the past. Today, it was dark and the waters run dry. I knelt down beside the river bed like I always do, only this time I was not wearing my normal clothes. I had this grey hood over my head and I felt so, so tired, as if a hundred knights on horses were following me and there were no place to hide. I can’t look up, I can’t look down, I just stay there frozen, wondering where to go now, where to do, knowing all is lost. I wait for my mind to go inside my soul, in search for answers, in search for images in the past which could help me find the way. But I can’t move backwards… and I can’t move forward either. I guess something has to be worked out, but what?

Death takes its own time. Better quick than slow, if I could choose… I’ve known both and this feels like a neverending agony. I’m about to ask someone to finish me off thrusting a blade into my heart. But I guess you can’t kill easily something that’s been strong and alive for quite a while. It will take some time to go away, as a chronic disease we’re finally getting rid of. 

  

Sometimes I think I haven’t cried enough. I'm still mourning for a life that is gone, hurting at the sight of what I called home for five years, now empty and rented in less than a day, witnessing how a dream can vanish in the blink of an eye, especially if it's based on vain illusions. And we get too used to build these high walls around us so that no one knows something’s wrong. I don’t need to do that anymore, or so I think. But maybe, unconsciously I keep doing it all the same. Pretending life goes on, with the same hopes, with the same strength.

Anyway, nothing lasts forever. Soon enough all this will be over. And even when we’ve been hanged in the past, we’ve always ended up freed. And this I mean… literally.