Nights in Purgatory ...Part 2 ...Otherworldy Guide

Somewhere inside me there is a dark limbo where all the truly important memories are heaped and slowly turning into mud...the thought fills me with an almost unbearable sorrow.
Haruki Murakami

Faith

Is this purgatory or limbo? I need to know what state I'm in.

Can't form a relationship with my female partner, even though we’re attracted to each other—and still mourning my dead wife who visits me nights. Not a good place to be.

So, here I am, in front of the fire again on a rainy night. I have a few case files spread out before me on the coffee table—the usual unusual—bloody canvases painted by demented minds.

I'm growing weary. My job is distasteful as working in a slaughterhouse, except the animals I deal with are the bipedal type who lurk in the fringes and prey on the unsuspecting. It’s given me a unique perspective of the human zoo—and the realization that the price of being sentient is a certain unavoidable pathology.

My monsters carve up people—but my pathology is cutting myself. Isn’t that what I’m doing now—torturing myself for being absent, oblivious to Faith’s mood swings, unable even to be present when she ended her life at twenty-nine?

The room darkens as if in a brownout, and I feel myself sliding down the same slippery slope again.

“You’re punishing yourself, Martin—what happened was not your fault.”

She’s in the half-light of the doorway, leaning up against the doorframe, as if wearied by these interminable conversations.

“I need you, Faith—I can’t go on.”

“You must—you’re tormenting yourself—and people need you. You can make a difference in others’ lives.”

“Whose lives,” I sneer, “these pathetic, twisted torsos, splayed out in my head—or my life, my half-life without you here?”

“Do you know why you try to black out drunk every night? Well, I’ll tell you—it’s the same reason lights dim when I come near.”

I chuckle bitterly, “Yeah, and what reason is that?”

She gives me such a sad, forlorn look that it draws the soul right out of me. “I can’t do your thinking for you.”

“Funny, Breton said almost the same thing this afternoon.”

“Did he?” she smiles, “That’s because he knows it’s got to do with need.”

A jagged arm of lightning draws my eyes to the window. I catch a glimpse of a lightning flare illumining some obscure geography of cloud.

I turn back, and she’s gone.

I sit alone in my front room, tear trails staining my cheek, rain shadows patterning the wall, and within, the desolate land of real need.

Torn and conflicted—unable to move forward or back. I should have insisted with Breton—I do need deliverance.

© 2019, John J Geddes. All rights reserved

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