Epilogue II: Pathos

 

Purportedly, all of history can be rendered discernable only because of numerous conflicts, each precipitating and bringing together every distinctive arc in its hulking continuity. If this should be the case, then at the root of all beginnings must be some cataclysm, no matter how minute; some agitation that threatens the greater balance, demanding resolution. My personal struggle, I feel, has largely corroborated this pattern.  From the cavernous delirium of my infancy, disturbances of no mild scale unsettled enormous forms deep beneath the watery surface that was my waking cognition. Lost though they might be from my remembrance, these events initiated the metaphorical iceberg’s sundering. A wretched nemesis to sanity would draw its first screeching breathes in that era.

            Juxtaposed alongside the typical comic-hero joys from early youth is also the fear that saturates my oldest memories, no doubt causally related to those worrisome tremors. Even in the dawning days after I learned speech, I found myself in a world stalked by myriad phantasms where reason presented itself only as mere wishful thinking, scarcely any greater comfort than clear weather just before a nuclear detonation.  Whatever monstrosity or horrible demise I could fathom did not appear to be without at least scant plausibility, and nocturnal unrest imposed a loneliness that further bolstered the verisimilitude of each twisted thought. Through frightened eyes, then, I looked out upon a menacing reality, everything in it a horror to be reviled.

Still, I tentatively restricted my hysteria to fears of the paranormal that ambushed when entering dank basements untouched by the sun or houses kept in shade by nightfall. That was, until the instabilities from that bygone infancy erupted upward with tectonic violence during the ides of one particularly fateful year. I remember the sudden jolt that came on an otherwise unspectacular evening while my family and I raced down the freeway, as if the universe had, like a macrocosmic computing apparatus, frozen while processing its countless equations. Not more than a week later, I sat reading in the library that epitomized life’s normality until that very day, when without warning an immense dysphoria bore down through every strand of my being. It was a maelstrom - kinetic turbulence pulling muscles and tendons in every direction; psychogenic squalls dismembering a young mind, and weathering a soul beyond recognition.

    Ever since that solitary instant, I have endured a malediction that I still fail to sufficiently explicate with the verbal accounts I can contrive. An abyssal gate crashed open on that day and the grotesqueries that wailed and thrashed behind it surged beyond into the heartland before them. For the first time, I felt space, in all three of its dimensions, weighing down on me with its immensity, and somewhere behind my eyes, I knew something had been irremediably altered. Nine years have passed since that momentous disintegration. Ghost towns sit fallow in moody sandstorms. I now wait in my sanctum, an unattended king without a living subject to entreat for consolation or an unbroken domicile to seek for shelter. I stand on the flat plains of ash that used to be Eden and gaze into the horizon, bearing the cold wind and the caustic rain upon my brazen face.