While mayhem in my psyche ensues, I hang the portrait of My Mirage on a nearby wall.  The first sign of life in the house.  I think about being zero for two in my attempts to be successful with My Mirage and UFO Girl.  Maybe I was really two for zero.  Numerologically, twenty is related to the Judgment card in the tarot deck.  Not unlike how I’m feeling with a strange and unexpected dawn.

My thoughts turn to K.  If I’m going to have to cowboy up and be the horror host, she’ll have to be the hostess.  We need to get this haunted house in order!  We decide it’s time to blast away all these beams and blocks cluttering up the place.  Hard work stirring up dust and moving debris out of the way to go out for the Hek-yeah Disposal Team on night-time pickup.  There’s stuff I have in mind for a giveaway too.  The time has come for clearing out the mental space.

I head into the attic of my mind and go through some things, taking inventory on what will be a good start on a new year’s clearing out.  Some things will be put away again in proper order, while others will be brought out and handled.  Such is the tyranny of objects.

What I find are a host of treasures left behind in a psychic space so visibly tiny you could hardly see it.  There’s a room in my haunted house that defies the model of physics, working by the principles of trans-dimensional engineering.  Can it be that My Mirage has been like a western dragon, collecting rare things of which he cannot use and hoarding them without understanding?

I take up an old audio tape, a promo copy given to me by a radio gal I knew named Kate from a while back.  A selection of songs by a heavy metal band named Kryst The Conqueror, taken from their Deliver Us From Evil album.  I pop it into my player and listen to a series of epic songs from the days of headbanging long hair.  One thing heavy metal was good at was metaphors for the ordeals of love and the struggle against darkness.  The lyrics from In God We Trust come back to me from the depths of time:

For we have seen the face of hell and still believe
That the sword to kill the beast he’s given me
So how many more must die that one may see

I’m listening this time.  My soul returns back to when I was living that dark confusion and raw enthusiasm for understanding through heavy metal questing.  I remember the trauma of being wounded by the forces of damnation, an injury that went as deep and fatal as I had ever experienced.  My enemy, myself lost and gone bad in ways I never would have imagined or wanted.

I notice a plain, hastily scribbled letter from a dear friend in 1995.  I remember reading this but not understanding the words.  I was hearing the words in the songs I enjoyed without listening.  I read words in letters by important people in my life without paying attention.  When you’ve lost your way in the sickness of your own unlighted ordeal, so much is wasted.

SNACK!

Words matter.  They give form to ideas in our thoughts which lead to tangible things.  Words can destroy and they can build.  A single word from a troubled soul can rob you worse than any thief.  A single question, spoken from a humble soul can heal the wasteland and restore an ailing king.

“You will always be the first person I fell in love with.”

Just like that, a self-inflicted wound I had resigned myself to bearing the rest of my life, a horrible black void of failure that had stolen the best parts of me – crippled me, is healed.

The very words I’d needed most to hear had been glossed over blindly.  Then, the day I’m in smolder-mode over doom and doing post-Mirage work, I see and hear the words that close up maybe the biggest hole in my life.  I never expected the caring I gave away without thought to return to me with such power.

The Hana Valley in my heart is restored and a huge, huge core part of me is made whole again.  I can move forward, alive once more.  Welcome to the next level.

Wounds can heal in the darkest nights and hauntingest of houses.

Thanks Yoshie Izumi & Little Yo, for the Okami hookup, and for the message about caring.