Hope in Madness

This damned asylum denigrates the mind, body, and soul with its hopeless atmosphere; it depresses the body with its harshly dank and grim conditions, breaks the mind through the pervasive sense of impending oblivion, and renders spirits immobile with the impotent rage of dregs barred from the societies that long ago discarded them. What a fitting place rock bottom makes for self reflection and personal unity. Here, you have no choice but to revisit the past you have made, the notions of moving forward halted perhaps temporarily, or, if you cannot manage to break the grip of nostalgia, perhaps permanently.

Look back at your life, then. Look back and see the tracks of the path you chose, the routes that trail off into the unknown ether that you could have taken, the beginning of the journey where you were blessed with ignorant optimism in the future. If you are perceptive, there may be hope for you yet, found in the lessons learned from failure and tragedy of circumstance, a hope built on what is necessary and indeed possible in the days ahead.

It is this hope that has carried the Moon Born into the Ottoman Empire, into the arms of Allah, the Benevolent, the Merciful. It is a need for redemption from the torment of the self that will reunite her with love.

1

I must be here, I must make peace with this evolving world of the living, however difficult that may be, before it washes me away like so much grime from the street. My heart has grown bitter here, tainted by the years of seeing slaughter and hearing death professed to be the highest state of being a person could ever hope for.

The brutality of this world and us, its people, it grows and grows each year that comes and goes, acting as a sort of counter-weight to each advancement made, each improvement enacted, each step taken towards such a bright and glorious future.

I have participated in the atrocities of mankind. I have stood on the field of battle and dreamt of the deaths of thousands, making those dreams reality through the burning of villages, the slitting of innocent throats, the imposition of my will and ideals over the honorably defeated. I am a savage force of nature and I know it is this savage unending life of mine that now haunts me, stalking me from behind the hollowed eyes of the dull and forsaken, this lamentable lot I now am steward over.

I wonder whether or not I am only a pawn in the existential cycle of humanity that breeds hate and destruction, renewal and progress; if this truly is my made fate, perhaps I could refocus it and be apart of the good this world offers too; perhaps I can hope for peace.

Everyday, I pray to Allah, Ar-Rahim, As-Salam, Al-Wasi; I pray that I may find peace in this world, and that I may be able to overcome my eternal internal struggle with the hatred that feeds me, coercing me into a rage against those mortal beings who disappoint time and time again.

This place, home of the dregs and rejects from various lands, peoples, and cultures, will serve as the site of my penance. Here I will repay the world and dominion for my agency in the chaos that has and continues to eat at the soul of the ephemeral lot. Maybe this will bring me some measure of redemption.

What time is it? No,wait, what day is it? Better yet, abominable-self, what year is it I now find myself living in, What’s the era? What’s the point? How long have I been in this place of hell that churns me about like a raging sea, crushing in its turmoil, suffocating me under the surface for unspeakable moments, only to give me back to the living, a continuous effort to deny me a reasonable end.

I don’t care anymore; I forget the time and my place. I forget the cause of my torment, it’s been so long since it even mattered.

2

The masjid is quiet, the people are praying and reflecting on their lives in accordance with the teachings of the prophet, peace be upon him. It helps in clearing my mind, the understanding that I am not alone in the need for reflection and amicable communication with a higher version of consciousness. The asylum, with its suffering and wailing, its cursing, crying and delusional laughter, it burdens my soul in knowing that all I can do is watch and care for those decaying individuals. I need a reprieve; so I pray.

I temper it all, pushing it down into a trunk far deep within my mind, yet always very near. I raise my hands and begin the Fajr, the thunderous ruckus of the world outside falls silent. Here, in this moment where I am so aware of my sins of centuries past and present, I reach out to a beautiful abstract.

My prayers are not long; I do not ask for help or any favors; I won’t plead my case to authority, begging for leniency in my moral failings. I can’t sing the praises of the divine; I will never subjugate myself to a mortal god again.

My prayers, then, are my way of finding some silent aspect of being to talk to. I need something that inspires awareness and understanding and love and keeps me in mind as I go about this new life I’ve made up.

I am alone now. My love, that tragic bastard of fate and poor decisions, has cursed me to this existence of perpetual night, with no sign of the ever approaching day. I hate him for it; I hate myself for being so willing to participate in this hell. I cannot say that I wouldn’t commit to it again, though, I could not leave him alone in this world.

Still, I wish we had never wandered out of the desert into that ancient city, and met those people so eagerly advancing towards the sky. But how could we have known? I am aware of the irrationality my anger brings against ourselves, I blame what little humanity I may have left. Looking back, it is his humanity that gave him a desire to help all whom he could. I chose to join him in this self-sacrificial campaign, eventually becoming more open myself and more willing to show the world the love it had never shown us.

I loved him for his naïveté and his caring heart. I still do love him, but I cannot be around him now. I need to find my own path in this new existence we are faced with, the un-alive, un-dying, inhumans.

The gift of finite life is wastefully squandered and largely dreaded, only when the alternative is considered impossible. I remember the wonders of life through the knowledge of death’s slow embrace, and find myself missing them from time to time. I will not be bitter, though, I think that I should find the pearl in this cloistered shell.

3

I was a fool, thinking I could resist the pull of corruption. Nothing I did saved those damned people; I suspect they never really wanted a savior in me anyway. I remember the search undertaken in my time of distress, I remember the great yearning for worth and meaning in my life. But I also remember the pain of watching a people tear themselves apart.

It hurts so bad. It hurts to know that you fell in love with a self destruction and the descendants of chaos. For god knows how long, I searched for them, my people, my family; I looked for any remnant available, any record of their lives left to the posterity of the world. I searched for purpose and found nothing. There are no more stories; there are no more names for the records of their people; no artifacts; no dilapidated architecture. There is only a blank space. How dare they? How dare they waste the gift of life, at the expense of my own. I don’t care if they wanted or needed me to be their savior anymore, that isn’t why I committed to the consumption of the corruption.

They were supposed to inspire greatness in this world of ours, a call from the past to achieve the highest ideals of being for all generations to come. Instead all that remains are a pair of listless vagrants, squatting in life’s peripheral gaze.

I can’t believe it; all those lives, all of those sacrifices. All of my sacrifices. For nothing.

One of the diseased has become unruly in recent days. He refuses to leave his bed, much less his room, and barely eats or drinks. His ramblings are particularly disturbing; he repeats “pointless” over and over, vaguely, but to great effect.

Resident and care-giver alike have become weary of his presence here. If they could they would have him thrown out into the streets, discarded from sight and mind, left to rot from some invisible ailment that is attacking his mind.

I won’t let them forsake him. The careless hearts of those who have never truly suffered life’s cruelties, those cautious, safe, herded masses, will always feel blinded and removed from the people around themselves. They don’t know what it is to have a piece of you stripped away, to see and hear the chaotic thing that is life tumbling and spitting on your wretched form.

I will care for this young man, then; I will care for him as only the dreadful can care for one of their unfortunate own.

That vicious girl, the evil harpy bitch. Why won’t she let me die in solitude? Why does she insist on having me bathed and feeding me against my will? I do not want to be apart of your world anymore, I will not let your kind dictate my ways any longer. I only wish to spend my contemptible life alone, away from everything that drains my spirit for its own perverse ritual of self sustainment. Understand me, and realize that I will not give you any more of my being. Do you not realize that I have broken for you all? Do you not realize the pain you bring me every time I look into your faces? Of course you don’t, you never will. After all, I made this burden for myself, I will have to endure it alone.

4

For a time this was normal for the two, as they went about life unaware of the past they shared and the love they felt and continued to feel for their assumed departed mate. He spent his days consumed by dread and self despair; she looked to find some solace in a world she was becoming increasingly interconnected with. They lived in tandem, working with each other and sharing moments of little triumphs and colossal failures, neither recognizing the immense changes they were undergoing.

The Sun Born began to realize that the terrible weight he felt in his heart could be tolerated, so long as he made an effort to confront it head on and garner from it insight into himself.

The Moon Born delved further into the depths of her being; the peace of self reflection is a powerful tool for the weary and can bring about a second wind to a person who thought themselves on the brink of forfeit.

His improvement reflected itself in her gradual contentment, just as her self insights guided his recovery. Experiencing the world individually, they inevitably came back together, watching time roll by and stack up the weeks as they became months, and the months as they rolled into years.

Their love triumphed and manifested itself soon enough. They began to realize that what had drawn the patient to the care-taker, the humanist to the redeemer, the sun to the moon, had been defined in a distant memory.

Our heroine and hero came to the conclusion that they should build a life together outside this temple of seclusion they now occupied; it truly was an era of bold, new ideas. When the day of their release came he packed the sack that had brought him to the asylum; she tendered her resignation to the grateful Imam.

As they stepped out into the streets of an unfamiliar land, they each wondered what their future would be. The fear of the void and those unknown and multiplicity of paths that lay before them now, began to subside as a simple, reassuring thought was spoken to the son by the daughter, “We have but one direction to go, my love, forward.”

Next Chapter: Golden State Blank