Join My Cult - Original Falcon Press

wondered what it would be like to not breathe. Not the suffocating. I
realized that though I knew intellectually I would die, and that dead
people don’t breathe, it never struck me immediately in my body that
there would ever come a time when I stopped breathing. I couldn’t
remember not breathing, but it was possible to feel that empty space,
before my coming into being, and imagine it stretching out infinitely into
the future in front of me, into the past behind me, and suddenly this
growing horizon was not a before or an after. I saw my life as a selfcontained
bubble, a secret never to be known, all of our lives and trials:
secret, silent.
The sun was beginning to set, and the crickets were singing. So I sat
down and listened to them. Tears were streaming down my face, but I
couldn’t remember why. It was like sitting in a theatre after a movie you
particularly enjoyed has ended. Everyone else long ago filed out the
back, but you still sit expectantly waiting for all the actors to come back
and do it all again.
Unexpected thoughts entered my mind at this point. Amidst this confusion
I found myself thinking back to the woods that I had explored with
Ken and my other friends, and I thought about something Dawn had
mentioned to me in passing: that they were selling those lands, those
sacred lands, to help send Samantha to college. I imagined it torn apart,
leveled, sterilized. They would become a housing community, yet another
identical outcropping of the alienating suburbs that were blighting the
country. …The night in the carriage house, staring in the mirror, They
came to me. Now it was clear, if only for a moment, what exactly I had
agreed to. The woods somehow knew what was coming…though it
seemed crazy, for a moment I understood that there was a struggle on,
here, now, this very moment, for the future of the planet. But it was
waged here in the present between the future, and the past. Sides are
being drawn. Those who hear this, and feel the call, will make themselves
known. Then the lucidity was gone. Briny taste of tears in my
mouth.
In a while, I couldn’t remember who I was at all.
When my self-awareness returned, I wasn’t myself any longer. It was
like returning to your home after a war, a burnt out shell of what had
been. Love had passed through hate and become absolute, ineffable
indifference. This was my second real initiation, the first of course being
birth, though whether it was to be a success or failure remained to be
seen. What returned to take my place was something hardened, more
235