If life is a dance, then I will spend it dancing on the edge of madness. Many people could tell you of this place that is unlike any other. It is liken to a cliff, the edge of which is quite unsteady and could throw you off at any time. A slight misstep or a strong wind, and when you talk to plants, you suddenly get answers. The thing about this cliff or edge is that when you get there once, you have to fight like hell everyday for the rest of your life to avoid going over. If for only one moment you give up, you are already lost. In the end it is easier to give in to the madness and give up on the world, but it is the fight that allows us to keep our humanity for as long as we can. However, I fear that at some point it will all become too much and I will no longer have the strength to hang on.
My story comes in parts and is reliant on many factors. At this moment, I am only nineteen, yet it strikes me that I have experienced more at my young age than some people experience in their entire lifetime. I have read about people who spend most of their lives as hermits, and of course those who simply avoid living life out of fear people who spend weeks on end in their homes without any thought or desire of leaving to go out into the world. Fear is one of the few things in this world that can completely stop a person from living life. It is a powerful feeling, and once you give in, the game is over.
Run…run…run… This simple command seems to be all my brain is capable of telling me. Too bad that’s not much use at the moment. I’m stuck in a situation I can’t really run away from. You see, it’s the first day of my senior year in high school at
And yet today there is something different. My instincts are telling me to run but I can’t figure out why. There is no one new that I can see and nothing different about the school itself, so why the internal command? Since there is nothing my brain can find as out of the ordinary (or at least more than usual) I just continue on to first period psychology.
Now to give you a little background on me before this story gets a bit confusing for you. I have always lived in Delong. It’s a town with a population of about three thousand give or take a hundred depending on the time of year. For those of you in normal parts of the country, if you would like to find my home, start driving north and when the border patrol stops you, you’re probably pretty close. The entire town is Catholic and being as it’s such a small town, if you do not attend church everyone knows it. Here we find problem number one: I’m not Catholic. Somehow I managed to learn about the beliefs of other people even though that is highly discouraged and I found a system that called to me. This faith is called Eternalism and its basic principles are: 1) do no harm, 2) use your gifts for the greater good, and 3) make of yourself a vessel to do the bidding of the Goddess.
The reason this tradition called to me is because of my gift, which is where this story begins. I can sense intentions. Do not confuse this with mind reading or empathy - it is not quite as easy as that. The best I can do is to know if someone means harm or good in their endeavors, which can tell me the general character of a person in most cases. The first and second principles are rather self explanatory, but the last takes some understanding. Since I was brought up Catholic, it came as a huge shock to me that I could be brought to worshipping the Goddess. However, the Goddess is really an abstract idea at best. As the name of the religion suggests, it is about the continuity and connectivity of the world as a whole. All people are connected intimately in that we are born, we die, and we continue on until we find peace. When our bodies return to the earth we provide nourishment for others who in turn live and die. It is the eternal circle of humanity. The Goddess originally comes from the concept of the Mother Earth. From the earth we take nourishment and to it we return. A unique talent of the Goddess is to manifest her essence into human form to somehow help with the turn of human events. It would be a shock to all the good Catholics hereabouts to learn that the Virgin Mary was a manifestation of the Goddess brining a man to life who would change the course of history.
