tdWss – The Story_Chapter 4 / Part III

Chapter 4 – ‘The Powers Within’ – Part III: Growing Within

G.J. took a moment to carefully observe the faces of children and the youngsters among the crowd that had gathered around the Clock Tower. Their eyes were like transfixed on space, as if they were watching an enrapturing show, right in front of them, suspended in the invisibility of the air. But even if this was rather peculiar, what it was truly amazing was the way they seemed to be all synchronized with each other, curling their lips and lifting the tips of their fingers in what it looked as if in touching a delicate surface. However, the strangest thing of all had to be the fact that nobody seemed to notice. Nobody, as in not one of the adults in sight. Only Luke, and now her after he’d pointed it out, seemed to be able to notice that there was something odd with the young ones.

She stifled a small cry, grabbing Luke’s shirt with her one hand as she observed how a kid standing on the pavement in front of Luke, next to a now barking dog, was starting to tremble and even vibrate, lost in Luke’s gaze.

‘It’s always been like that,’ Luke thought. The moment he would allow himself to relax completely and just…be, without trying to hold onto the perception of separation…if there was anybody nearby that happened to be talking to him or just looking at him right then…their own degree of vibration was affected, freaking the hell out of them. It’d probably been the excitement of the event, and perhaps the natural perfume of G.J.’s skin entering his nostrils when he’d been whispering to her ear, that for a moment he’d forgotten to be alert, present, bodied, fleshed up…and now the kid couldn’t take his eyes away off his, and his own perception had begun to alter, something for which he certainly was not prepared. Luke started to mumble the word he’d found to be of most help in those type of situations, a pretty obvious one to which he’d arrived, when cornered by a bunch of other children in the patio of his school, many years ago.

“Solid, solid, solid…” —he repeated almost furiously through his teeth.

“It’s all right, Luke, focus on my voice and my touch, can you hear me?” —G.J. looked around her and fixed her eyes on Xora, who was standing next to the kid.

As if pulled by an invisible force Xora turned his sight from Harriet and her brother to G.J., who was now gesturing with both her eyes and head to a point next to him. He just then became aware of the dog’s barks and realised that there was something odd with the owner.

“Hey, kid, your dog is getting a little excited, is everything all right there?” —Xora placed his hand on the boy’s trembling shoulder. Roger, startled by the man’s contact, turned his head to face him, thus freeing himself from the trap of Luke’s eyes and the fierce energy that they expelled.

“What…I…I…don’t know…err…yes…Willow, stop…stop! Shut up, silly dog!” —he shouted, stroking Willow’s neck and back, knowing that would help him to calm down. ‘What the hell was that’, he thought to himself, ‘that dude’s weird…’

Luke pulled G.J. close to his chest—“Thank you, beautiful. It’s only been a split second but wow…”—he started to apologise—“I hadn’t let go this easy in…how long it has been… eight-nine months? These people are in for a surprise today, G.J., this energy is strong, real strong…”

“I know, I’m feeling pretty strange myself and yes, as you said earlier, the children are acting quite bizarre, although now that kid and his dog have pulled them out of what looked like a trance…” —G.J. replied, happy to rest her cheek against Luke’s warmth and observe everything and everyone from there, her little heaven.

It was almost the time and the crowd there gathered was starting to lower their tone, until most were talking in whispers, even if animatedly.  Some children were clinging to their parent’s clothes, trying to grab their attention whilst others, the older ones were talking amongst them, pulling faces and making gestures with their hands and fingers, as in drawing spirals and cobwebs in the air. Growing within everybody’s chest…an alien sensation to which Luke was pretty accustomed…

Keep tuned for: Chapter 4 – ‘The Powers Within’ – Part IV: Light – Online Soon!

tdWss – The Story_Chapter 4 / Part II

Chapter 4 – ‘The Powers Within’ – Part II: Birth

Whilst in the womb, he’d had time to form a unique bond with Vancy Mileva, his biological mother.

But something he’d been really careful with was not to soak up the traumas through which she’d lived and the memories that had marked her with pain, during their bonding process. Apparently it was quite common to acquire many of the experiences of ‘the flesh giver’, especially their ingrained fears.

“Fear is Illness” —Luke remembered Lua, his light mother, saying in one of her highest vibrations—“Don’t let it enter your essence, that you must have very present, or this your sacrifice will have been in vain”.

“I’ll be aware, I’ll remember, I love you…”—His own essence scintillating in that pure music.

Luke shuddered with pleasure at the memory and startled himself once again with the response of his material body. 35 human-years, as he liked to call them, hadn’t accustomed him to how things worked in matter…even if that very same matter was just a construct, a necessary construct so he could adhere to the same dimensional laws that his fellow men…Probably it was the fact that he could not totally immerse himself in that perception why he’d still felt surprised by it so many times. Losing oneself in that dimensional perception was risky business, for Fear was lurking in every delusional corner.

Meeting G. J. O’Brien, his water link to this universe was what any light-made-earth-made-flesh could ask for. She was his ‘focusing energy’ and even though she took it as a sweet joke he was pretty serious the day he told her that she wasn’t missing a hand at all, on the contrary, she had that hand ‘into the All’. Luke knew about the fascination he held over his fellow human beings, but that fascination was no less than the one they held for him. It all started with his biological mother, Vancy.

Vancy was a curvaceous and rebellious half gipsy half French red-haired girl who’d run away from her mobile home at the early age of thirteen. Her parents run a medium-size circus that was travelling through the French northwest coast when she met Johnny Shaun, a handsome blondish eighteen year old boy who was at the time spending a vacation with his college mates in Calais.

It was not love at first sight; it was lust, an irrepressible, voracious, maddening lust. Vancy had developed quite early and her hormones were raging underneath a set of breasts and hips that were easily mistaken for those of an older girl. She had already kissed with two boys at her parent’s circus, and one of them surprised her taking a bit further… down. The boy hadn’t hesitated to touch her most intimate parts and although it had made her feel extremely violent at first it was not long after that she had started to long for that kind of touch.

What nothing had prepared her for was the strange sweet pain she’d felt inside that very intimate place the first time she’d met Johnny. Other girls, and even full-grown women had noticed his presence too at the beach that day. Emerging like an otherworldly creature from the turquoise waters of the sea, Johnny’s eyes opened underneath the salty beads and the scenery behind him paled in comparison. His blond hair had a honey coloured hue to it, dulcifying a face that although very young, was already chiselled with a masculine straight jaw and high cheeks. A broad set of shoulders and narrow hips completed his strong but gracious frame. His lips parted with a shy half smile, knowing he was being observed from head to toe, and it was then, when his eyes looked sideways, somehow embarrassed by all the attention, that he met with Vancy’s. Luke was born from that young fiery passion, but to this date, and despite all clichés, his flesh-parents were still together.

Vancy was, no doubt, his favourite riddle, because Johnny had no more secrets waiting to be unveiled by his son.

“G. J., look at the kids around, it looks like they’re starting to feel it” —He whispered on G.J.’s right ear.

—————-To Be Continued

Keep tuned for:

Chapter 4 – ‘The Powers Within’ – Part III: Growing Within /// ONLINE: 11th of APRIL!

tdWss – The Story_Chapter 4

Chapter 4 – ‘The Powers Within’

—“She’s just…, you know, natural…”—12 year old Roger Haze was patting the head of Willow, his bull terrier, who was visibly excited by the previous head-scratching at the hand of the dark tall gentleman in their left—“and honest, and she likes cool stuff…”–he let out a deep sigh, knowing that as much as he’d try to justify his crush on his Art teacher Beth to his mates, they just wouldn’t understand it.

Beth Adams was talking animatedly with a group of strangers, on the pavement opposite to where they were. It’d been her idea to have that ‘impromptu’ excursion with her art class, right after the break, and of course her pupils had been delighted with the surprise. What they didn’t know is that their spontaneous teacher would be facing a straight dismissal as soon as they got back to the school premises, for she had taken them to that event certainly on a whim, without the parents’ or the principal’s permission.

—“She’s a naaaaatuuuuraaaaal woooomaaaaan….”—Lou sang mocking one of the songs that his nana used to listen to from her old records. The teenage gang laughed and howled along—-“wooooomaaaaaaan ooooh oohhhh naaaaatuuuuraaaaal wooooomaaaaaan….”

Beth looked at the group of exalted kids, curious about their sudden singing of what it seemed an Aretha Franklin’s song… Surely they didn’t know who Aretha was… Roger noticed that their teacher was looking at them at that moment and could feel how his whole head, from the base of his neck to the top of his scalp reddened—“You’re a bunch of assholes, you are”–he mumbled with contained rage, looking away towards the clock, convinced his head was looking like a giant red pepper by then.

He wanted to cry so badly that it was starting to show on the white knuckles of his clenched fists. It was his way to contain his tears, but only his dad would know that… And that realisation calmed him down a bit. Plotting how to get back at Lou, to whom he had confided his dark secret on the way back from the morning break, was also a sweet way to calm his nerves. Deep down he knew his crush on Beth had something to do with losing his mum when he’d only been five. Beth looked very much alike her, with that earthy feel of hers, her long brunette tresses falling in cascade over her back, kept away her face by two plaits tied on each side of her head, resembling one of the forestry nymphs out of the pictures that his mum used to paint. He felt how his throat was getting all dried up again. For as long as he could remember, the smell to paint oils and brushes dabbed in watercolours were extremely comforting to him, so being around Beth was like being in a dream, a dream where he felt safe and warm, a dream where being overwhelmed by emotion was okay.

Roger looked sideways at where his art teacher had been standing just a moment before and as he was making some sense out of the faces and colours in that direction Lou whispered in his ear—”Looks like you’ve got some competition, mate”—and his whole universe stopped, caught in the momentum where his eyes met those of Luke’s.

Luke Shaun had always known that he perceived the world differently to how his peers did. In fact, his earliest memories differed very much both in time and nature to the earliest memories that most people used to have of their childhood.

The journey through the tunnel had been a little uncomfortable, and feeling all the vibrations so intense, some even hostile amid the blinding light and sensory overstimulation, at the end of it, had frightened him helplessly. It didn’t help knowing, somehow, that it was meant to be felt that way…

—————-To Be Continued

If you liked the first part of this fourth chapter, keep tuned for: ‘The Powers Within II: Luke’; online very soon!

tdWss – The Story_Chapter 3

Chapter 3 – ‘Nothing but IT’

‘Sometimes when we think ALL is lost, when there is no hope, when we can only think of dragging our souls till the end of our days, just trying to have it as painless as possible … is then when ALL starts to happen again as if there was a strange force that, knowing that a sufficient critical mass is finally considering the possibility of a zombie-like trail of living, their gray matter and their entrails devoured by the relentless thirst of hate and apathy, ignites a flame within us to shake us off  inertia as in waking from a nightmare in which everything is as grotesque as some of the faces in the surrealist paintings of Dali or Picasso.’

Andrea Meyer sat on the stone step at the foot of the Clock Tower, the monument in the centre of the street between the two opposite sidewalks and where several people had started to flutter as if waiting for a special date, although, like her, had been there for almost an hour by now. The crowd was now considerably large and Andrea had attracted her daughter Vashti to sit between her legs, to shelter her from any pushing and shoving. Vashti’s brown hair fell over her cheeks in a bob, ray on one side, sustained with hair pins so it would not fall over her eyes. Her big green sparkly eyes reminded her of her father, Isuu, whom she had not since in years. The last time she saw Isuu he was drunk and up to his ears of cocaine, surrounded by his band mates and some of the groupies that had followed them from Manchester, and the drummer’s wife, Tony, both now looking at her furtively, from behind the largest sofa. Their look was that of those who didn’t agree with what was going on in that room, and could even feel her pain, but did not have the confidence to stand up for themselves, even less to meddle in the singer’s affairs now that the band seemed to be finally taking off.

Isuu threw the empty cigarette pack to her feet—“Bring us cigarettes, dumb”—And with a malicious smile on his bony face, from which his big cat-like eyes seemed to pop out now like glistening emeralds, his undeniable attractive now cracked by so much excess, blurted out-– “What the f…k are you looking at, standing there like a scarecrow, oooh look, look Jonah, doesn’t she look like a fuc….ing scarecrow now?–The addressed band member laughed without even looking at her.  Andrea picked up the crumpled package from the floor overflowing alcohol, where wet butts smelled to gin and old urine, and it was at that moment that she had her epiphany, as she called it, the moment she learned that Vashti, who was asleep in the van, was the future, and as such deserved a mother with guts and self-respect. She got up slowly, her blond hair over her eyes, with the package in one hand, her body shaking with rage and anticipation, and throwing the package with all her might agaisnt Isuu’s face, a face she could not recognise anymore, left the room without a word and ran down the metal stairs that gave to the club’s back door, went on the alley, opened the van, checked that Vashti was still asleep, turned on the ignition, and run off with her daughter in pursuit of a LIFE.

The flashback had pulled her out of reality for a few minutes. “Mom,  I’m hungry…—Vasti sighed, between annoyed and amused by the crowd that now surrounded them, rubbing her right leg against her left because her socks were causing her some itching. She loved her school uniform, it was easily the coolest in town, with its embroidered edges in yellow and the rest of the cloth in a deep purple velvet, but she absolutely hated her matching knit socks. She was going to ask her mom to buy her socks like those that Elsa’s dad had bought her for her birthday, made of elastic plush. Elsa said it was like walking on clouds, and she would spend class after class caressing her glorious socks underneath her desk. She had five different pairs, Vashti had already identified them all, even if the colour was always the same, pale yellow, as it had to be for the school uniform. Elsa had told her they were expensive and so Vashti had not yet dared to ask her mother if she could at least buy her a pair. But today she seemed to be in a good mood and although she wasn’t sure why they were sitting there and what were all this people waiting for she could feel that it was something important, like a celebration of some kind. And the best part is that now she had something to tell Elsa…something for which she would give her five pairs of cloud-socks to find out about... Roger, the boy from senior year that she liked so much, was with his dog and his group of friends just one person away from her and Roger’s friends had not stopped teasing him about a certain girl he seemed to be infatuated with.

“Here, sweetie” — Andrea started to open the package of crackers for Vashti and by the time she had finally managed to open it her thoughts invaded her mind again, this time following the burning sensation that she began to feel in her chest –‘The fire inexorable spreads, and the critical mass that only a few months ago had contemplated launching themselves into an eternal vacuum of indifference (where the senses go so numb that they wrinkle to the point of becoming a knot, a state in which all of a sudden, and like mocking the usual out-of-the-box magic trick, flip and disappear),  start to become aware of their automated status and seeing it as no longer admissible, although without any anger, bitterness, or resentment, come to realise the exhilarating wave of a conviction that like fire unfolds before the eyes of their mind, dancing the flames with the shadows of endless possibilities that had previously been hidden behind a thick fog of despair. Her daughter was free inside her belly and perhaps today, what she felt and what she could see that others were feeling too, like that petite girl with the  pale face and the short hair that was looking to the other side of the road as if a rainbow had been deployed right into the eyes of that tall dark man with the Roman profile, perhaps today was the beginning of a true freedom…’ she thought.

Sometimes she hadn’t even had the time to think, consumed by the demanding routine of a single parent, raising Vashti alone had been so hard at times, her bones ached when she went to bed many nights but the pain banished every time she looked at her beautiful daughter, who had to be free, she had to be free. That day, on her way back from getting Vashti out of school, she had also thought…-a minute, what the heck can you achieve with that, a minute of silence like when somebody dies, what an absurd thing to plan…- And then all those things that have been happening around the world, people blamed the Internet, why didn’t they blame the venom of the apparent impossibility instead? She’d put an excuse to get her daughter out of school earlier, something like she had to see her dentist urgently and the dentist had no room for appointments until the following month. She had felt rather stupid making the excuse up but now she understood. Not the end nor the purpose, because there was no specific purpose, you can’t really define something as fundamental as the right to live, not just survive, so many actions taken to ensure that we remain convinced of the impossibility of  LIVING. There were many decisions to be made so there could be actions that counteracted the harm of so many years.  But now I understand, she thought, I understand IT. Seeing our faces on each other, seeing how our masks fall by the same weight of our re-emerged hopes, this fire that has been ignited inside us, seeing how we all crave the same thing, lamenting the same die, dreaming for the same outcome, we are the same, and as powerful as life itself. This fire is spreading inexorably and I can now see it in my daughter’s precious eyes too. Vashti turned to look at Andrea —“Mommy … I feel…strange…like…I dunno…, but it’s real good”

She caressed the rosy cheeks of her 8-year-old—“That’s what you and I feel for one another but multiplied by billions of lives so it makes you feel kind of strange, because it’s really strong”— Andrea hugged her daughter’s little body. Her child could feel it. There was nothing like IT and now, right there, at that moment,  there was nothing but LOVE.

——————-To Be Continued

If you liked this third chapter, keep tuned for the next of a total of 11. ‘The Powers Within’ will be online on the 22nd of February!

tdWss – The Story_Chapter 2

‘Everybody is Cleopatra’

G. J. thought that life holds the sweetest gifts to compensate us, right after we have risen to the challenges that, thrown in our way by our own unique set of circumstances, serve to shape our character and fulfil the destinies that had been intuitively designed for our experience. Luke gave her that first kiss and G.J. understood right in that instant why she’d been deprived of that sublime human contact up until then.

Like water, she had always been able to glide into the recondite corners of her fellow human beings’ hearts, just in time to catch their beat and synchronize with their emotions. If she had touched or been touched like that, before that moment, she would not have been able to channel her flow and master her fluidity. As water does, she would have been absorbed, maybe lost into another soul, into another inner drama. G.J. thought how stupid she’d been those times she’d cried over her loneliness. But she was also proud that no bitterness had settled in her heart. Luke’s kiss of pure love, of authentic surrender, her first kiss, had been her prize for rising above her grief, for using her ability to penetrate the souls of those who needed a good sip of water whilst travelling the arid desert of their own hopelessness.

She turned to look at Harriet and Pedro, the fashion designers from Aberdeen. Harriet had been developing her own Cleopatra phase and had finally arrived to the other side of the Nile, which was where woman, after having asserted her dominance through a woven skin of darkness, had finally realised the futility of it all and, after a painful mutation, revelled in the exquisite light of a reinless inner peace. Pedro was, without a doubt, Cleopatra at a second stage, and Harriet felt immensely happy for the chance to guide her little brother out of the cocoon of shadows that she herself had finally got rid of.

Harriet Dalaras smoothed the short hair tied in the purple hairpin that adorned the right side of her scalp. She was happy that the cancer had finally remitted and her hair had grown again strong and abundant. She hopped on Pedro’s back and tangled her arms around his neck.

“Look, sweetheart, I know how great it is to be alive and bla bla blaaaa but, I’m not going to have the time to fully appreciate it myself if you asphyxiate me with your dangling weight”—Pedro gasped, trying to escape from his sister’s arms—“Besides, are you trying to ruin what it may be my only chance in over nine loooong months to meet some yummy prospects?”

“Yummy prospects? Oh, Peete, don’t tell me that you’re thinking you’re going to pull in this kind of event. Oh, my pretty Adonis, time lies before you like an ocean and you only need to let go of just one drop of it”—Harriet let out a giggle just before she planted a noisy wet kiss on the left cheek of her mortified brother.

“Next time you’re about to die remind me of this moment”—he replied with a twisted smile, his honey-coloured eyes still sheltering a shadow of the heartbreak he’d endured over the months that Harriet had been in hospital and he’d been both her companion and her substitute at the studio.—“I’ll gladly help to finish you off because that cheesy poetry coming out of your lips…oh, darling, that’s just unbearable. What did they pour in those liquids they injected you with? Edgar Allan trippy Poe’s fluids?”

Harriet buried her face in her brother’s neck and sniffed the women’s perfume that her sweet Peete, as she liked to call him, seemed to have bathed with—“If you’re not careful you’ll be killing more than my bloody self with this niff”—She said wrinkling her freckled little nose with a hardly contained grin flashing across her pale face.

Her little brother was the treasure for whom she would fight a hundred motherf***ing monsters. Harriet knew that Pedro needed that minute of silence to realise that he was not alone and was never going to be alone, regardless of whether she’d lose her next fight or not. Pedro needed to feel how beautiful he was inside, how immensely precious his essence was. Harriet had cried rivers over the bullying that for years her Peete had suffered just because he did not feel attracted to girls the same way other born-males did.

As far as she could remember, her little brother had always shown more interest in dressing up with her clothes and designing miniature ones for her dolls than in playing with the toy trucks and cars that their father used to buy him for Christmas. The Dalaras had always been a close-knit family of four. The number of members had changed when her parents passed away in a car accident, but what had never changed was the close relationship between the two members left. At the age of twenty-one and a half she suddenly became father and mother to a thirteen year old. Pedro had come as a huge surprise since her parents had spent years trying to have their first baby. After having her, the doctors had told her mum that she was a miracle and could not expect another one. Eight years later there came miracle number two: a baby boy. Although the boyhood was just a physical technicality because as much as Dalaras father preferred to ignore it, Harriet and her mum knew that Pedro was as female inside him as they two were. God certainly knew how to get a payback for his miracles. Maybe God was a she and that’s why SHE liked sending down more of her own.

Peete was fourteen when, after having been beaten up for the eleventh time, right in front of the school, went into her room and, dropping to his knees, begged her to forgive him if he decided to end his own life, his almond-shaped eyes bathed in tears and desperation, drenched in the sorrow of somebody much older than a kid, searching hers anxiously, as imploring her to not blame herself for what she had no control over.

Harriet promised herself, right at that moment, that she would take the hatred that Peete felt for his own miraculous existence and would use it as a weapon against anybody else who dared to infringe the slightest hurt on her brother from then on. Peete felt the way he felt not by choice, not by his own decision. It was the way he’d been born and he wasn’t bothering anyone just for breathing the same air. She worked countless extra hours at the heliport offices and got him out of that school. Soon after that, they moved to London, where she had enrolled Peete to study fashion design, his passion. Some years later, and not without plenty of sacrifices, they’d opened a little studio of fashion design. Pedro was the talent and she took care of everything else, ruthlessly, as she had done since the day she’d made that promise. And she’d certainly let the hatred nest for a long time in her breast, because a cancer sprang from it. Harriet had countless hours of chemo sessions to imagine the cancer creeping out of the hole it’d dig in her breast, like a slimy hideous creature. She then promised herself to hate no more, even when she could have all the reasons for it, even if it felt just and fair. After all, those were the times when the nasty feeling had its best chance to nest inside of us.

More people were arriving and gathering in the main street. Traffic had been a chaos just a few minutes before but surprisingly enough the horns and the screaming had now subsided, and….Harriet looked at Xora, who was at the other side of the street, scratching the head of a bull terrier who sat next to the tallest of a group of school kids. Xora lifted his head from the dog to where she was, like compelled by a strange force. ‘That’s IT’, they seemed to instantaneously think in locking their gaze.

———–To Be Continued

If you liked this second chapter, keep tuned for the next of a total of 11. ‘Nothing but IT’ will be online on the 11^TH of February!

 

tdWss – The Story_Chapter 1

‘The horse from Thessaly’

Xora looked at his hands…He’d always taken them for granted. Just like his legs, his sight, his hearing, his sense of balance…How could she do it? How could she be so…stupidly thankful all the time?

The first time he’d talked to G. J., Xora Kuratowski had been in deep conversation with her for over an hour before he realised that she only had one hand. But that was what it was so strange about her. When he met G. J. he had immediately felt like if he had known her all of his life. He felt like he was finally at home, a home he had never known. And yet, G. J. was…like water. That was exactly it. He had finally arrived at the right comparison.  G. J. was like water. She quenched a thirst of an eternity whilst blending with everything and everyone, and slipping through your fingers when you least expected it. He was irremediably drawn to that stream of refreshing water.

Like now, as she was standing across the road, next to Beth, the neo-hippie, Harriet and Pedro, the couple of fashion designers from Aberdeen and of course that damned Luke, all next to a group of tourists that seemed quite eager to live that experiment with the locals. They were all listening to Luke talking, a group of lost puppies that felt had been finally rescued, and so they were showing their bellies off with complete abandon in hopes of a good warm scratching from their rescuer.

But if Xora had learned something about Luke in the past few days is that he hated to be idolized. He stood there tall and muscular, with his blond manes and his sandy coloured skin, looking, almost aggravatingly healthy, and downright annoyingly handsome.

Xora looked at the people around him on his side of the road. It was a pretty mixed bunch. Nobody had given a dime about the experiment when it first started and although it was known that a private entity had launched it, nobody back then knew why or what for. It had only picked up momentum a few months ago, when it had been obvious that it was not a publicity stunt of any kind. It was just a crazy idea that somebody in the entity had. Nobody cared about who he or she was but apparently had sold the whole thing like a good way to get some buzz for the entity, with the veiled intention of making people think about the possibilities that the experiment truly poised and hence cause some kind of inner revolution.

Basically, it had come from a crazy heart underneath a fake business suit, hoping to see some crazy change in these crazy times.  And that element of crazy was what had sealed the deal for everyone, who, by now, had made the experiment their own: A soul-searching, soul-breaking, soul-making experiment.

Xora had not spent a full minute thinking of anything pertaining to his soul in his whole life. But there he was, for the love of a woman who only had one hand. Oh, and a crooked tooth: G. J. O’Brien: ‘The pirate of his heart’. That made him laugh. Of course it had been her idea, because if it had crossed his mind first he would have felt terribly guilty for the inherent cruelty of the joke. That he had not spent a whole minute thinking of his soul in his entire life didn’t mean that he didn’t have one. But G. J. was as captivating as funny. Maybe that was why she was so captivating. She made herself beautiful with her sense of humour and that authenticity about her. Xora thought that was true beauty. Xora thought how often that had been said meaninglessly.

Damned Luke. The obnoxiously chiselled Luke, the insultingly compassionate Luke. He wanted to curse him endlessly. He had his sexy pirate! But Luke had been the one that, the night before he’d met G. J., had saved his life, when he’d been lying down intoxicated, on the corner of Rosemary with Violet, and a group of teens on speed had just started to kick him on the ribs, for no other reason but to get some kind of ‘thrill’, some twisted fun, as it seemed the latest city trend.

He still didn’t understand how he’d done it. Came out of nowhere and had shaken them like brittle grass without even touching them. He still had to figure Luke out, but for now he was like Jesus Christ to him. He’d always, although reluctantly, liked the figure of Christ. He felt nauseated by the entire range of religious cults (as he used to label them all), but that dude surely had influenced millions throughout time. That ought to count for something. Xora thought that it seemed he was doing a life of soul-searching in a damned short time. Doing it with the ability to swear all along ought to count for something too.

G. J. sighed happily. The official moment of the experiment was just one hour away but the truth is that the experiment had already started months ago. She caught sight of Xora’s eyes. They had been following her almost constantly for the past few days, like little birds following their migrating flock. He was a little scared kid underneath that tough dark exterior. Xora had been like the horse from Thessaly that Alexander the Great had tamed at age ten. Nobody had been able to mount the horse, but Alexander, with the raw intuition of his childhood years, had detected the fear of the animal, the fear that had made the horse, at least until then, untamable. “But no creature should be tamed”– G. J. thought.

Luke squeezed her arm. She knew that he was aware that Xora had joined the experiment, out of attraction for her. Luke was aware of everything, and disturbed by nothing. He was her rock and her glass container. Because she felt like water, moved her inner flow by every event, always penetrating every soul, whether she wanted to or not, whether she was welcomed to or not, always slipping through every crack of perfectly solid matter.

Gabrielle Jean O’Brien, G. J. for short, felt like a true woman the day Luke Thames had kissed her stump. A stump that was proof of a non-existent hand, a non-existent hand that had made of her childhood a living hell. Her teen mother had left her at one of the two orphanages in a town all the way across the country from where she’d been born, “ ‘cos she was a freaking crippled error” said the note on the blue cloth that covered her as a baby. A place, the orphanage, where all the kids would look at her with repulsion, never wanting to include her in their games, never sitting next to her to eat their meals. Even the nuns seemed to avoid her, not because she had that physical defect but because she could see right through them and that made most of the nuns feel quite uncomfortable.

At the end of what had been the best week of her twenty-four years of life, Luke and her were sitting on top of a grassy cliff overlooking the Bering Sea, in Cape Newenham, where they had met, in her case on a spur of a moment holiday and in his, in a planned trip. He said she wasn’t missing a hand; she wasn’t missing anything at all. What happened is that she had that hand permanently sunken into the ALL, whilst the rest of her body was in flesh in this realm. And that was really lucky because not many people could have a full hand into EVERYTHING. And then he looked at her deep into her eyes with those sparkling green gems of his, and kissed his stump lovingly, sending an electric current all throughout her body that was both rapturously painful and achingly pleasurable. That had been the first kiss she’d received by a man. That was the first kiss of any kind she’d ever received.

——To Be Continued

If you liked this first chapter, keep tuned for the next of a total of 11.

‘Everybody is Cleopatra’ will be online on the 22^nd of January!

Sense of community

It’s only natural, logical, understandable…we all need to feel that we belong, if not always, most of the time. But, is there a real sense of community in a community that is fractured?

Because, even if we may feel that we belong to a defined community…we tend to forget that the first and ultimate community is the global one, the community that all human beings form part of.

Our differences are some of the characteristics that make us incredibly beautiful and exciting and of course there will always be groups defined by their common similarities and their common differences in comparison to other groups. But beyond organic and spiritual diversity…further division does seem to contravene our instinctual need for belonging.

And the truth is…if our basic needs were covered, for everyone, everywhere, would there be so much division? Could our sense of belonging, our need to form part of a community, be exploited so ruthlessly by those who exploit it for personal gain and power?

Would you hate your neighbours, or the people from another country, for their ideologies –assuming they are not harmful- if your basic needs and the needs of all those who you love were covered…or would you simply respect them, if not be curious about them?

Don’t you think that many of our belief systems are based on our fight for survival and the exploitation of the notion of ‘the fittest’ ?

W.

Children of the Revolution

Children are the future, but … this being a fundamental truth … Do we care for our children today?

Most people know that childhood traumas are the most difficult to overcome, for they shape up our character and the ways in which we relate to others.

Despite the crucial nature of this stage … and how important it is for everyone in adulthood, we seem to give little importance to the unspeakable suffering that millions of children experience every day in this world mired in war and conflict, abuse and humiliation, hunger and deprivation.

Because childhood is not only available in those countries where Santa Claus comes down the chimney or comes through the window each December.

Here is the root of wars, injustice, genocide, and many other ills besetting much of the global population, decade after decade after decade. That is the key: childhood.

If a childhood is stolen is never recovered. If fear is engendered in the early years, never or hardly ever leaves the being.

Buying the affection of your child or happily letting consumerism and brainwashing entertainment be their nanny is not far from depriving him/her of essential skills to their development too.

So, among the children who swim in useless gifts and lack of genuine support and guidance and the children who suffer in war, violence and poverty … lies the childhood to cultivate, the real sense of childhood that long ago escaped from our fingers, a childhood that , even though we forgot it is vital, we can still and must save.

Why? Take a look around you, switch on your TV, open your newspaper, browse the digital media.

Children are indeed our future. And our future must be different from our present, different from our past.

We must protect and educate our children, ALL THE CHILDREN, because all the children constitute THE WORLD we live in, the world your and our descendants will live in.
W.

Best Friends

Who is your Best Friend?
A best friend is one who best knows you and who, knowing you, always encourages you to achieve the best version of yourself that you can grow into, and to recognise the happiness that is within you.

And who knows you better than yourself?
However, far from being our best friends, many of us just reach the status of tolerable acquaintance to ourselves, and that only when we gained some life experience.  Many of us tend to be our own worst enemies.

We’re not aiming to be our own best friends when we tend to thwart any possibility of knowing ourselves, through distractions, self-deception and/or addictions.
If we know don’t’ know ourselves we cannot identify our mistakes and if we cannot identify our mistakes, we can hardly address them. And if we cannot rectify our mistakes … we do not evolve, improve, move forward.

When we start becoming dangerously close to being our worst enemies is not only when we avoid, at all costs, to truly know ourselves, but when we abuse our minds and souls, through negative thoughts that torture us, when we limit ourselves, when we neglect our feelings, negate our power and abandon our dreams, when we are flooded with fear and resentment, when shun all responsibility and abandon ourselves into patterns, activities and / or destructive relationships.

If we cannot be our best friends, hardly we can be best friends to other people. And if we cannot be best friends to other people, we can neither be their ‘friends’, for the concept of friendship is directly relational to love, and as such, is immeasurable.

If we cannot create healthy relationships, and since, in essence, we depend in each other, we are creating an anti-nature.

As you can see, we live in anti-nature and we’ve lived like this for centuries, as our ‘development’ is heading towards our mass destruction (nuclear weapons).

Unless one by one, we begin to be our best friends and relate to others in a natural way, the anti-nature that we’ve created will end up destroying everything we know and don’t know, friend or foe, in this our lifetime.

Let’s never give up learning to be our best friend; surely our best friend would really appreciate it.

W.

The Butterfly Effect

You’ve probably thought now and again on the consequences of your actions, but most probably because those consequences have been… quite noticeable.

But have you ever considered what consequences your thoughts may trigger?

We tend to conceptually separate thoughts and actions, as if the two were completely different processes (and due to the fact that most of us do not really feel as free as to act on many of our thoughts) but the truth is that our thoughts are far more powerful than our actions.

They are, after all, the source for the deeds eliciting the most dramatic results: our habits.

Our habits end up shaping our character, and our character determines our daily deeds, which, although may seem that do not have any dramatic consequences, they actually harvest the most fundamental of all consequences: how we felt throughout our lives and how the way we felt affected the lives of those we crossed paths with.

You may be familiar with the term ‘The Butterfly Effect’, especially when attached to time-travel scenarios (out of the famous movies made with this same title), but here there is a description, extracted from Wikipedia, on the scientific theory that this term refers to:

‘The butterfly effect is a metaphor that encapsulates the concept of sensitive dependence on initial conditions in chaos theory; namely that small differences in the initial condition of a dynamical system may produce large variations in the long-term behavior of the system.’

This means that the smallest of changes in behaviour can give heed to unforeseen and unpredictable consequences.

If our thoughts are the strongest of behaviours, for they breed our habits, imagine the far-reaching consequences of changing just one of our more widely recurrent thoughts: fear of what the day of tomorrow may bring.

Let’s do another little experiment. Better said, let’s prepare the experiment to put it into practice tomorrow when we wake up in the morning.

EXPERIMENT:

First thing we think as soon as we wake up:

‘I have the power to decide how I feel. I have the power to decide what I think. The future will turn out to be exactly what I need it to be like, for I can feel and think consciously.’

Let’s hold this thought throughout our day and most importantly, let’s share it with somebody else who may need consoling, support and let’s encourage them to, also, share this thought with another person they know who may also really need to hold this thought, at least for a day,  and so on and so forth.

What do you think will happen?

You’ll be kidding yourself if you think that nothing will happen. There’s not a single atom that can escape the butterfly effect…even if we may not be immediately aware of this.

W.