Beginning of my Rapture

In the end; it all happened. Every scenario played out as if following a script written by all of my deepest, darkest, soul-sucking fears. The goblins that haunted the dark when I was young; the insecurities I developed from being continuously transplanted and having my roots ripped up with no soil or container to even move my battered nerves in...

This was never the picture I intended to paint. And now I truly understand the meaning of the phrase: "The road to Hell is paved with good intentions." The lesson will never stop resounding.

Good intentions simply aren't enough.

Kinda like the old barn that stands in the epicenter of my cataclysm.

It was supposed to be the lawn ornament of my first true home; the nucleus from which my dreams and hard work, bloody hands, heart, and soul... would develop into the life I always felt was just beyond my reach.

Rough, hand hewn beams born from blood and sweat and tough, scarred, meaty (and I'm sure eventually gnarled) human ambition and old, strong trees. Square pegs in round holes of beams who have seen more than I. Sometimes bark remained on the rounded edges of the floor beams.

At first I thought it beautiful and rustic.

Since My Fall, I now acknowledge the reciprocal aspect: the presence of the tree bark slowly metamorphosing to dust and accelerating the deterioration of a structure that obviously embodied the hardest work....yet one bit of carelessness...

They must have been in a hurry. Another lesson regrettably learned too late which had been preached my entire existence: yet I failed to understand.... so mired in my own rush were my dreams.

"Slow and steady wins the race.", "Haste makes waste.", "Patience is a virtue."... "e=mc2."

I loved that dirt, the boards and brook, from within the marrow of my bones. I wish I didn't have to remember, and take responsibility for locking myself away into that prison term I paraded as paradise.

But I do.

I will pay the cost of my selfishness every day; for every moment I allowed my children in that hellhole with a monster I will pay a lifetime of misery because I was too weak for too long to face homelessness again. I cannot convey how slowly the snake wrapped round my soul until I found myself unable to move, breathe, or even speak. It took nearly a decade. I have become a Phoenix... flames are still singing the edges of my soul and my hair has always imitated the mesmerizing color of conflagration; but with each rebirth the feathers of my soul multiply faster than my freckles ever did on this physical skin of mine.

I will humbly, even happily, pay hard to hope to find my place in the stars when my journey here is done.

For now, I drive past that barn I once loved and dreamed and worked in so many heartbeats; it is now falling over, in spite of all the sweat and blood and tears and heartache.

I don't believe it was made with love; but for necessity. Would that I could have saved my family from becoming like that fallen yet still falling, scattered, neglected, eternally tortured barn.

We will not continue on that desiccating journey any longer; we are not so much like that old decaying skeleton; floors falling into already rotted floors... beams of sunlight illuminating abandoned heaps of ancient bootleg moonshine jars.

We have broken away. We are feeling the sunlight unfiltered on our skins left sallow and searingly saddened far too long; it is miraculous and heartrendingly beautiful in equal measure to the pain of our splintered lives. We will grow and our hilt will shine across humanity in opposition of the dust-riddled shafts we once settled for. We will not continue to ripple ancient pain across our younger generations because the burns of our Phoenix season are far too fiercely and forever etched into our hearts.

When I write; my mind's eye will be eternally locked in the dark, close, quiet, hopeful, tormenting revelations that were brought to me while I would lay on the deck I once built overhanging the brook; and write into journals that surely by now have found the ashes of a woodstove...