East of Darkness

Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.

Mary Oliver

Today, I sit down to grieve. I am writing a farewell letter. I will never print it, or send it. I will just leave it here, in the obituary section of the newspaper for complete strangers to read. He will never read my letter here because, frankly, he doesn’t think I’m cool. I never commanded his attention with my art and my writing. I don’t think he ever listened to five minutes of my podcast. That alone made me question many times the nature of my affection for him, but I loved him regardless. I would have gone to some very dark places just to be with him.

It runs as a red thread among the men who left my life that they loved something else more than me, and it was never other women, even though in many cases that is what it appears to be.

In the case of C., it was vengeance.

My lover’s life story, I came to realize, was a history of vengeance, one where one chapter feeds directly into another.

His religious mother abused him, perhaps as a form of vengeance against his father who was never there. Once he left her and the little boy, she never remarried.

She was a prison guard in a tiny town on the westernmost cape of Northern California.

Chris grew up there isolated by the woods surrounded by a high-security prison and its personnel. Like a lot of Black Magicians, Chris was born with a prison sentence.

He almost crippled himself when he tried to escape that situation out of vengeance, as the first thing as an adult. At eighteen, he took a bus up north to Oregon, and on that first ride of freedom, he was robbed of all of his possessions. Somebody stole his identity.

Hell was beginning to laugh.

From the bus station in Portland, he went straight into his first love affair, one that ended up in her suicide, out of vengeance when he tried to leave. He found his girlfriend hanging from the ceiling at her art studio. Chris untied her and brought her back to life using the power of Black Magic.

She hated him for it and pulled a gun at him more than once, out of vengeance.

She was replaced by another girl, and that young girl, she got pregnant with him too soon.

The family’s shame was turned into a vendetta against him.

They tried to kill him. Twice.

He joined a black magic cult, out of vengeance.

There, he met the love of his life. His Twin Flame. She was his beloved disciple, and they plotted a new life, far away, in the Land of the Sun, in Florida. It was a short affair, but I know Chris never truly recovered from it.

What happened is the cult leader lured her away. And so, Chris spent years fighting the cult, out of vengeance. And, of course, they retaliated.

The girl who got pregnant meanwhile, she grew up and she sought vengeance against the family mafia who once turned her against her young lover and made her press false charges against him.

They almost got Chris into prison. He only spent three nights in jail, but somehow, I always sensed that this was the worst decisive moment of his life, a moment where he made some kind of decision to fully commit himself to vengeance.

Their child was adopted, but the charges remained. He had a permanent stain on his record, for domestic violence he did not commit, even though from the bird’s eye view, violence was everywhere.

He then spent years fighting to overturn the false conviction, out of vengeance.

When she turned up and around in town years later, he took the chance and somewhat maliciously lured her into a relationship, out of vengeance. It was held together by mutual fear, both of them knowing that he needed her testimony to overturn the court case.

This was the time when I came into the picture.

I thought for a long time that I would be the next better chapter of his life and that he would be mine.

A mutual friend introduced us because he thought I needed to get over somebody. I didn’t. I never did, but I got distracted.

I fell for Chris.

I fell for his darkness because it distracted me from mine, away from my own story. It gave me something else to latch onto. A hope. A fantasy. Don’t shit on fantasy.

Sometimes, it’s the one thing that keeps you alive.

I was in a dark place after my husband kicked me out on the streets of frozen Oregon two years ago. I was chock full of vengeance, so Hell matched us together, as he told me all his stories. I was at war too, and I saw myself in him.

I remember the first time there appeared to be an attraction between us.

It was lust of the wickedest sort.

‘Speak to me of the dark joy,’ I told him, and he described to me the pleasures of seeing his enemies die.

I saw it myself, even though I came late to the story, but people were still dying from his Works of Darkness.

Deep down inside, I had my reservations. I knew that the fact somebody had sent six people to kill you doesn’t give you the right to take six people out, when you escaped them, and they were no longer a threat.

But such is vengeance. It’s an addiction.

The family feud ended with the whole clan being either dead or crippled by his Black Magic. Meanwhile, his feud with the Black Magicians carried on. They made it their law to do away with the traitors, and he made it his law to never back down. They have been at it for as long as his daughter has been alive; a daughter that he never saw. A daughter he will never see because the people who raise her won’t forget. She is the real mystery point of this story, the payout of the plot somewhere in the future. What is left after a man who chose vengeance?

She has been alive for as long as two camps of Black Magicians have been trying to kill each other, scoring only partial successes, as they survive each assassination attempt, and the cycle goes on.

They sacrifice him every year on Halloween.

It’s his birthday, too.

A re-birth. A choice repeated.

His daughter was born the year it started, and I don’t think the irony dawns on him.

The faceless presence of Fate itself is staring at this child who is growing up somewhere else, far away; she is living a parallel life, an alternative story, perhaps, to the one that could have been.

A story that could have been of our love. The story of us where we lived in different places. California, Florida, Seattle. In reality, he never left his tiny town where all of this shit happened.

Geography plays a role here.

My ancestors saw the world divided between equal domains of Belobog, the Light God, and Chernobog, the Dark God. The sun rises in the East, in the direction of the Good God, who banishes the powers of darkness and brings the light. In the direction the sun sets, demons and night terrors rule the West.

I went all the way west, to Oregon, for my lover. Twice.

Each time I turned up empty-handed. Every time we were supposed to get closer, the Powers of Darkness intervened with events that bore their unmistakable signature.

Death. Disaster. Random violence and misfortune.

A broken rib gets broken again in the same place months later after it has healed. His car was sabotaged into lethal accidents, and when somebody was paid to fix it, he disappeared with all the money.

Then, Chris was assaulted in his own house and despite living there with other people, nobody had come to his aid.

On our last phone call, I learned that the woman he left splattered her blood all over his place. Out of vengeance. She was rushed to the hospital. There, she lied to get hold of the phone, to be able to harass him.

It happened three weeks after Halloween.

But he believes his enemies’ curses to be ineffective.

A literal blood sacrifice, that fed the Demons of Vengeance, the one fuel that keeps his story going.

Their relationship unraveled once the court case blackmail lost its power, then she became more violent. He is probably with her right now. I am not stupid.

I am in pain and I feel ashamed, but I have to withstand it this time. I just keep my butt in the chair and do the writing. The magical power of truth-telling has never failed me. And the truth is, something shifted in me upon hearing of this last incident.

It took me days to figure out why.

I’ve heard it all from him, after all. There was nothing new or surprising about the story, and the direction it took after his failed ritual that didn’t prevent his ex from sneaking into his house through the back door.

When she found her bags packed, she grabbed a knife and stabbed herself right in front of him.

I was expecting this ever since she broke his rib last year.

I knew whatever magic he was putting stock into was bound to fail, but what I came to see for the first time was how much I failed, too.

It was my own pride this whole time that was preventing me from seeing that I lost. I had lost this fight a long time ago. He will always choose violence over me. This choice, symbolically, is what will keep him trapped in the small town on the westernmost peninsula on the West Coast – the direction of the terrible god of slaughter, violence, and oppression.

I must move a little east of darkness.

Just a little bit.

My own life took a dangerous detour when I was chasing the chimera of my lover this summer on the West Coast. I poisoned myself three times while there, and I ran out of all my money. I went as far as I could into the realm of Chernobog, but I couldn’t stay to become the bride of the Dark God.

I must now move a little east of darkness, that’s all I need.

The city of Las Vegas belongs to the Dark Prince, but it is not all dark – it sports colored lights at every corner. It shines so brightly from the sky that some will say it’s the most lit-up city in the world.

It is ruled by the sunset, as life here begins after dark.

Everybody who lives here knows that this is just a part of truth. It is the sunset itself, known as the Golden Hour, that unpacks the miracle. It conjures up a spectacle of transcendental beauty. Every photographer flocks to it. Many views appear to have been built just for it.

Tourists usually miss out, because they are here for the darkness. Those of us who came to live here, however, we all seek redemption of some sort.

So we decide to settle in here, a little east of darkness, in the golden hour in Sunset City. The key is to move just a little out of darkness. Just a little bit. Then all new things might be possible.

I see a new dawn breaking.

Goodbye, Chris.