Confessionals, Un Altro

When I think of the situation in the Balkans what I feel most now is stupidity. I’m an outsider, a foreigner and will remain so. Even stating something, anything about this “situation in the Balkans,” remains a prime example of just how foreign I will remain. This is true also in the States however there are ways through it region by region, to be American or the other. People test each other continually and even a glimpse at a slight of hand here or there reveals too much, maybe reveals all. What it takes is a bit of time or a battering ram of failure to sort it out. To determine if you are who you claim to be and/or why you’ve come. I’m continually finding it more difficult to understand the difference between hero and villain. Even the echo of this mindset is disturbing. Us and them. At the Bughouse life was clear, fight hard or perish inside of it. Friends were often enemies and enemies could be known and unknown. Most, well mostly those who became opposed to my way, morphed somehow consciously into the second of the latter, the unknown enemy. But what could force my mind into such a paranoid state? Pain, likely. Or defeat. Or worse, success, success at finding an answer even though I don’t like its result or consequence either to my body or soul which, in recent years, I’ve fancied merging into one. That mind/body conglomerate that coughs and pukes and twists its ugliness forward through the deep swampy bogs of desire and release. For weeks now I’ve awoken to fear of death. That’s saying something, from here in the world of vampires. But it’s not my own death I think of but the death of Buttercup. Her death specifically because somewhere in my code of the new mind/body I feel I’ve done something wrong in giving death open season in a time of great strain. However stupid, I feel responsible for letting the anxiety hold me down or change my path in any way and let go of being strong or open or a casualty in any way. And now because I lost a battle with demons, death will come to take her away and open bare a sustained pit of horror from which one has no hope of release. That and because, even after these years, I remember her softness and our soft, drunken conversations, in a time where I needed something soft and she needed some kind of cowboy to fulfill each others myths. And we did this well, even through the first phase and the diagnosis and the subsequent realization that this will not get better, that she would not be my girl even in the best of times, for very long. When I called, first we spoke for hours and it was good to hear her voice and to believe in something sustained and good. She is now on a constant drip for pain as the tumor on her brain stem blocks out the remaining life – first taking her ability to move, and then slowly growing deeper into the brain until it blocks her lungs and heart. My impulse is to lie close to her and put my fingers in her cunt. To deny the beast with soft touches and orgasms and warm hands over soft breasts. But being half a world away I just listened and spoke of our superficial experience and sent a package the next week from Kosovo. Buttercup responded with a polite letter, the kind of American politeness that Ana, when she senses it in me, wants to eat up and spit out as dribbles of waste. But from here, for my part, her gracious response was the kind act of a strong soul in a dying body. And I listen and wait in exile from the closed land of vampires hoping for some possible change of fate which has been assured will not arrive. Be strong little boy, find God's song.