Join My Cult - Original Falcon Press

her, made it impossible for me to function properly within that identity. It
was no longer home. I was no longer home. Even things, once so familiar,
were all strangers to me now.
I went back to the van to be alone, although I couldn’t be, constantly
haunted by flashes of memory, the sound of voices—some her voice,
some Ken’s, some that I could not place. Of course I wanted her to come
back and find me, I wanted her to apologize for how she had made me
feel and to talk to me about how we could work things out. But I knew
she wouldn’t. The audience had departed.
Yet, I was being watched by everything and everyone. Where they
gone? Where they everywhere? I hid under blankets to try to avoid being
watched, but even that was just a part of the play and somewhere, deep
down in my impassive recesses, I knew it. It was for my own amusement
but the game wasn’t amusing any longer, I just didn’t know how to stop.
It was time to practice what I had been preaching and transcend
myself. I had been right, that night in the carriage house—transcendence
meant death, to make room for new life—and that’s also where I had
gone wrong, by concretizing the realization. It was strictly metaphorical,
like the death and rebirth of the Christ. This was suicide, but there would
be new life to takes its place. I had to live through this, my greatest fear,
and come out the other side – finally alive, but also alone.
Calmly, I walked to the beach, listened to the waves beat slowly and
calmly away at the tightly packed sand, and let the life I had lived wash
away, devoured hungrily by that eternal tide. When it had taken it all, I
turned and walked away. I didn’t know where I was going or why. I just
walked.
The next thing I knew, I was wading through deep, sharp grass in
marshlands, surrounded by a chain link fence five or six feet tall. Without
even a second thought, I leapt over it, and looking back now, I have
absolutely no idea how.
My memory beyond this point is very hazy, but I will remember what I
can. The sky was a deep shade of orange, I remember that. And birds,
huge water birds, flew by—calling out. Out in the marsh, I spotted a
kingfisher, its head ducking under the tide for food. The birds, they were
calling my name. But it was no longer my name. I was to die.
I took my shoes off, ceremonially like I was entering a house in
ancient Japan, and continued barefoot through the warm muck, reveling
in the feeling of soft, wet mud under my bare feet. There was no litter or
glass, which meant that it was probably a wild life reserve. I briefly
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