Let’s Kill Evil

“We can never go home again.”

What if destiny doesn’t exist? What if evil isn’t supposed to be, and it’s actually just an unnatural anomaly? What if a single, random bolt of quantum lightning tore a hole in the fabric of reality, a single fluctuation ripping its way through time and space at trillions of points all at once? What if countless catastrophes and tragedies throughout human history could all be traced back to a rogue flash of chaotic energy that had just as much of a chance to never have come into existence?

And what if you knew where that fluctuation began? What if you discovered the origin point of every disaster and war and unimaginable horror to ever have occurred? What if you could travel to the advent of all that is unholy and see it with your own eyes? What if you knew how to stop darkness from ever coming to be? What if you could kill evil?

There are so many questions and so few answers, overwhelming uncertainty and also confidence in the minutes before launch when I pray to a God I’ve never believed in because everything science taught me might be a lie. When I was a child, I wanted to believe in something greater, a benevolent force watching over mankind that nonetheless let us make our own mistakes and hopefully learn from them. What a fool I was, thinking there was an easy way out – existence is chaos, and it’s arrogant to believe something as simple as God could design something so erratic and expansive, as though omnipotence would ever be so wise. I understand truth is subjective, that the universe is infinite and also ever-expanding – this is my opportunity to prove it, that reality is nothing more than random chance, that everything evil is just the result of an unbalanced equation waiting to be solved before it becomes a problem in the first place.

I want to kill evil, cut its head off before it learns to speak, end every nightmare before they had the chance to be born, ignite shadows in their infancy, and erase the very idea of war before it came to pass.

It started with the frequency, the one we found hiding throughout human history with the same signature wherever we looked. For how vast the cosmos truly are, there is order to the dissonance, patterns and rhythms we can forecast like the weather – but this frequency was erratic, like a song with no melody or tempo or beat that burned our ears whenever we heard it. Keepers of the old faiths believed it divine, an immaculate signal broadcast through all of history to call the faithful home again – they were wrong. Astrophysicists and cosmic etymologists claimed it was a upper-dimensional message from the distant future, an indecipherable beacon hurtling backwards through space-time – they were also wrong.

The frequency is a splintering singularity, a quantum fluxuation affecting everything all the time as an amorphous, semi-sentient conduit that both is and isn’t – and we found where it all began, the moment when evil came into existence and spread forth like the virulent plague it would eventually grow to become. We all know what we signed up for, that what we are doing means forcing the universe to bend to our will, and that no one will ever know the sacrifice we are about to make. But it doesn’t matter, now, because none of us could walk away knowing we could save everything – what’s five lives weighed against the corruption of an entire universe? I’ve been to space before, but it never felt like this, never so freeing and absolute.

We see thing we shouldn’t, things no one was meant to witness. We passed by the advent of society and law and goodwill, glimpsed the first fire built on a cold night with death waiting to pounce and the great beasts that roamed our planet millennia before man ever came to be. We watched prehistoric amoeba seed life on Earth – and then we keep going. We witness the cycle of life amongst the stars, alien species achieving advanced utopian societies, then back further to their earliest days, back through eons and epochs and all matter of inconceivable wonders, each worthy of a lifetime of study but that we only see for a single moment before they disappear into history.

Metrics of time are meaningless now, and not just philosophically. Some days, my hair is thin and grey, my skin old and weathered, and I can feel the pain coursing through every inch of my body. Other days I feel decades younger, stronger and more awake than I’ve been in years. I try to hold onto those feelings; one I thought I’d forgotten after so much heartache and pain, the other I never thought I’d be lucky enough to feel. But every time I wake up, it’s like everything that came before didn’t happen, as though my memories are just stories and I have to learn how to be me all over again. I wish I could blame the mission, but what good would that do?

It started to feel like we’d never get there, that the ship would just keep going and going until we all died, one by one. I wondered if something was missing, if there was a component we weren’t aware of or a variation we couldn’t compensate for; the farther back we went the more we slowed down, like some invisible force was keeping us from making it over the last horizon that just kept moving further and further away.

Then we saw stars, swimming in the air around us – just tiny pops of energy in all different colors, buzzing and flitting around one moment then gone the next. No one said anything; we just stare in silence, listening to the song even though there’s no music playing. Then it was too much, and I reached out to touch what must be providence at the end, the light to show us the way because it has been so dark for so very long.

Ryder holds wife one last time and reminds her that even when she doesn’t remember him, he’ll still love her. Freya plays a final show at the Met, arrangements that bring the entire house to tears, knowing that what they are hearing is beyond anything anyone has ever heard or will ever hear again – it’s perfection, and she feels it. Francis asks the question weighing on her soul her entire life, faithful now that the answer will be true – it scares her more than she could have possibly imagine. Rustin admits the truth, holds his breath in a that moment stretching forever in a microsecond, and he finds what he is looking for. It’s a moment where anything is possible and nothing is, too, because I don’t see anything – just the void for as long as I can remember and no time at all.

And now we’re here, at the advent of all things.

Dawn of the first day when existence becomes in the blink of an eye, time slows down and each nanosecond is an epoch. In the first, the stars are born in fiery forges of light and wonder. In the second, gravity forms and bends and splinters and folds. And in the third, the essence of sentience snaps into existence, aimless and without form floating through a virgin ether, nothing more than the will to live. Within this moment, the very first moment to ever be, all of reality comes into being; it is nothing less than sublime. And in the next moment, we thought we saw the singularity, the nearly-imperceptible thing that grows and mutates and festers and will one day birth all that is wrong in this existence. It is the spark of eventual darkness, primordial terror writhing in the abyss so far from anything warm and understanding, the purest form of evil we have come to slay.

“We were wrong – you could spend ten thousand lifetimes doing this, and you wouldn’t come even remotely close to affecting anything. We were wrong.”

We always knew it was a quantum frequency of an erratic and unstable nature, so we compensated and made adjustments for the variables of its quasi-compositional state. And that was the joke – we understood how the universe worked until we forced our own ignorance. Time isn’t real, but effect is everything, and our cause smashed its meaning to dust. We wanted a foe, something we could hit and strangle and beat into submission through sheer force of will – how foolish we must have seemed, so desperately foolish.

Just being there changed everything. From the distribution of the first cosmic dusts and the angle of this reality’s first physics, to the bending of matter and the life altered because of it – our presence was the effect, the only effect. We were the singularity we thought we’d executed.

I started laughing. It was reflexive – such a dark joke, so intensely Baroque, I couldn’t stop myself. It was just so damn funny how sure we all were, how confident we must have seemed – all of us, just staring at the universe like it owed us something after we tore it apart and tried to murder a cosmic force of nature only to see the shape of ourselves in the evil we wanted to kill.

And it’s funny because it’s true – we let go of everything human about us except our contempt for evil, stripped away anything but blind hatred for a concept we inadvertently created because we are flawed. Stuck here at the moment of conception, we let our anger and fear and hate and everything else dark inside us come forth, and we called it righteousness without a hint of irony.

Ashland, the City: This is Who We Are Now

ACT III of III: Empyrean
Part XIII: Ashland, the City
    Episode Four: This is Who We Are Now
(From Look At What You’ve Done)

Do you ever have the feeling that everything makes sense? Like you cracked the code, or that all the puzzle pieces fit? Like you made all the right decisions and the whole world played along to your rhythm? This is my city, my world, my life.

THIS IS WHO WE ARE NOW
Do you ever have the feeling that everything makes sense? Like you cracked the code, or that all the puzzle pieces fit? Like you made all the right decisions and the whole world played along to your rhythm? This is my city, my world, my life.

My name is Ashland Mizota and five years ago, I was an orphan living in a group home and doing everything I could to not be noticed by anyone. Then one morning, I realized yesterday happened first. I thought I was going crazy, that I’d been so sad and alone for so long that I’d lost all grip on reality!

Then I started hearing voices. But it wasn’t like in movies – they weren’t evil voices telling me to hurt people. They were like stories playing in my head, radio dramas about people I’d never met. I ran away when the other kids in the house caught me trying to talk back to the voices. I lived on the streets for months, fighting whatever was in my head with every ounce of strength I had – there was no time for school or friends or a normal life. It took everything in me to keep the voices from driving me insane.

On a particularly humid summer evening, I fell to the ground behind a fried chicken restaurant next to the food scraps being eyed by the rodents in the shadows. I hadn’t eaten in days and the puddle water made me sick. I felt like I was dying. I had no more to give, no energy left to exert and I let the voices take me.

And that’s when I felt more alive than ever before.

The city spoke to me through the voices of the past, the lingering shadows of history that clung to the energy coursing through every nook and cranny of a metropolis with hundreds of years teeming with countless stories. I spent so long fighting such a beautiful feeling, a warm connection with the steel and brick and concrete and wood that held this city together as a testament to the ingenuity of mankind and the beauty of nature through science. Every crack in the sidewalk, each stain on the side of a building, and every corner of any neighborhood abandoned long ago – they all hold stories from the past, anecdotes about who and what came before. Sometimes the stories aren’t worth hearing, like how the paint dries on a wall. But often, the world has more to say than anyone cares to believe or hear.

I learned more each day. Five years I spent listening to everything I could, feeling the past flowing all around me, stepping through history as easily as I would the corner shop or high school. You’d think the center of the city would have the best tales, the epic sagas of families spanning centuries through good times and the bad. But those tragic romances quickly start sounding the same era after era, the repetitive song and dance between the aristocracy and lower castes that permeates through the entirety of human history.

The dark, forgotten corners of the city are where the richest stories live, the ones rooted in passion and flair for the lives of ordinary people. Because everyday life is a struggle constantly undermined by tragedies of horror, news of cataclysm that makes introspection more compassionate. Part of the human condition is downplaying the achievement of getting up each morning and facing life without bursting into tears over existential dread. We praise the exceptional, berate the unproductive, and forget the ordinary. I find the exceptionally ordinary stories hiding in the cracks, behind the stains, and under the ruins of what’s been forgotten.

Then one day I lost myself. My connection had never been stronger, but I felt more alone than ever before. As much as I knew about the people who once were, I barely spoke to the living, the ones walking right beside me that had turned into backdrop long ago. I realized I’d forgotten it in people – I let the memories overshadow the now and it was too late.

The pain of knowing I’d missed one of the most important aspects of humanity for a chance at everything else was too much. I couldn’t make a decision anymore because making a choice meant sacrificing all the others that might have been, letting go of every other potential thread to focus on one. I wasn’t ready to create differences. A storm brewed around me like a vortex pulling at everything else nearby.

But human thought is all about differentiation, separating ourselves from everything else at the beginning then splitting what we know even more to encompass new people, places, things, actions, behaviors, ideas, and feelings. Learning that you are insignificant on a cosmic scale makes accepting the relativity in your truth all the easier.

The storm grew worse around me and there was nothing I could do to stop it because that meant wanting something and I didn’t want to want anything ever again; stuck between wanting to be something I knew without doubt and knowing more than a single person ever could. It was crushing.

This isn’t who you are, Ashland.

Choose to be something more.

It was just an idea at first, just words in the whipping winds and dense, claustrophobic clouds swirling through my mind. Words that had no meaning, just letters strung together at random. Each time the words got closer, and each time I ignored what they were trying to say.

So I closed my eyes and stopped thinking.

I listened for the words so I could hear what they meant, the feeling behind the tone and the movement under each syllable. There was nuance between each character, symbols agreed upon and developed over time only to be perverted and mangled and twisted into something new and beautiful. The idea called to me, over and over through the maelstrom I’d made for myself in a place that shouldn’t exist, a park bench conjured from the past and future that threatened to tear apart the present. Drops of rain screaming through the sky as they barrel towards the earth, trillions of individual pieces shooting down at the ground without plan or direction as zephyrs festering into a tempest pull everything around them into a howling vortex – the rain is trapped by the confluence of weather, the elegant miasma of the maelstrom I had become.

You are not alone.

The man mourns for a past that never was, a future he cannot see, and a present he wishes he could change. The woman is missing a piece of herself, a part of her soul stripped away when she learned what she could be. Two hands, one from each, reaching out to pick me up.

Revolver and Ex Materfamilias.

The rain stopped but it didn’t stop raining – reality took pause and a deep breath in that moment as each drop of water hung in the air ever so slightly. Just one second stretched out and decompressed, kneaded out wider than it should have been, clinging like static in the sky. Each raindrop was a mirror, infinite tiny looking glasses reflecting me in each of them. They told my story, and the countless others of which I’d learned and felt over the years, the incalculable makeup of what I had come to represent.

The storm was me, and the more I kept running away from the chaos the stronger it grew. So I turned around and ran back into the abyss.

I ran for hours, days, years – an eternity with each footstep. And each of those moments was another piece of me, another story from the past seared into my memory, one more possibility for the future tucked away under other theories and extrapolations. Every part of what I was, every instance I had ever known, any feeling I’d ever shared – it was all there waiting to come back to me.

Ashland, the City…

Girl of a Million Voices

Speaker Metropolis

Herald of the Infinite Civitas.

The conglomeration of raw materials, industrial design, societal persistence, and cultural cohesion as beacons of innovation and evolution beyond nature working in tandem with people. A city is a network of ideas, an overwhelming web of overlaid wants and needs and dreams. It starts small – just a concept waiting to be more – until it grows by virtue of free will and determination, a village that becomes a town then a forest of buildings and neighborhoods, an ethos of competing goals somehow working together.

Beyond Tokyo, into the night sky amongst the clouds, I looked down upon every city in every nation across all continents on this planet, covenants traced back decades and centuries through countless souls that have come and gone over millennia. None are perfect, each with their flaws and blemishes, but there is beauty everywhere, serene brilliance flowing through every story ever told in every city there is or ever was. Each of those tales adds to the fire, another coal keeping the flames of humanity alive through generations across oceans and over mountains and rivers.

Keep going.

Then silence in the forever garden and a muted stare between three individuals who might just save the entirety of existence.

Because the whole planet is a city, a developed organization filtered through people’s affinity for one another, no matter how much they might protest their nature. The world grows smaller as cities grow larger and metaphysical portals gain more meaning on the digital frontier where viral cowboys and virtual shamans build their flocks.

I can feel it all – every last iota of every single moment.

And in the corner of my mind’s eye, the very darkest place I could have looked…

I see what is coming.

That which shouldn’t ever have been, but was always inevitable.

This is how we die.

NEXT: Empyrean, Part XIV – Revolver

Ashland, the City: Five Years Later

ACT III of III: Empyrean
Part XIII: Ashland, the City
    Episode Three: Five Years Later
(From Look At What You’ve Done)

Do you ever have the feeling that everything makes sense? Like you cracked the code, or that all the puzzle pieces fit? Like you made all the right decisions and the whole world played along to your rhythm? This is my city, my world, my life.

FIVE YEARS LATER
The tracks are gone, covered up by a snow that won’t stop falling – I can’t see where she’s going. There, in the distance; small sparks flicker in the white maw, quick flares against a blinding backdrop. A single blanket made of countless flakes strung together by circumstance and climate, clingy and co-dependent as day turns to night and no one wants to be alone.

Winter is a curious thing for a city, something we don’t control yet try so hard to predict and contain even as it continues to surprise each and every year. There’s always a new way to beat the storm, a clever tip for de-icing the car, maybe an improved road clearing schedule. But in the end, winter wins out because there’s strength behind the wind and snow and fog, a cohesion in the season that makes the cold both bearable and overwhelming at the same time. Winter stops a city in its tracks and forces adaptation even amongst steel mountains, asphalt rivers, and concrete valleys whose silence is swayed when it’s turned a wonderland of snow and ice. But I have to keep searching for this girl because she’s all I can think about.

It doesn’t take much to get things started – the neighborhoods are chatty and often make the first move. All I have to do is reach out and listen; an analogue parking meter to my right, the cracks in the sidewalk under my feet, the power lines sagging between juncture points. There are stories under every rock, tales coursing through every subway tunnel, centuries-old epics hiding behind the modern veneer. This city speaks all the time but no one listens. The snow starts falling harder, an even more impenetrable wall of pale twilight cascading through the buildings into our lives.

The sidewalk sends out a chorus of footsteps, each one another note in the daily serenade for commuters and students within walking distance to their schools. Cracks and stains are everywhere over concrete and brick designs – contemporary vs modernity. The second-to-last cigarette is actually better than the last because the end is near but not so close that you can’t enjoy the smoke for what it is instead of as the addiction you don’t want to admit. A smoke and a sit – got to collect myself and listen instead of assume, hear what’s actually being said and not just what I want.

This junction is a curious thing – both a physical and metaphorical crossroads stretching back centuries. First it was a bridge over troubled water when rivers ran red and banks left to smolder. Then it was the fortress in waiting, a nexus of trade routes thus a target and liability. Next it was left to die, a corpse of an outpost burned and broken on the water’s edge. Fast forward and the river dries up, the ruins are grown over, and men once again build something – this time a house, then another one after that. The earliest days of the city are peppered with doubt and insecurity as they often are, the time when nothing is certain and it could all fall apart in an instant. But still she persisted, and it morphed with the city getting bigger each generation, a metropolis still in its infancy finally blooming into what it should be. Now I stand here, on the corner of the intersection, waiting for the lights to change so the small man can tell me I to cross and keep looking for the girl.

Where is she? I can’t see past my own hands and it’s getting late.

Wait…there.

Past a bookstore of stories within stories and down an alley set ablaze by a leaky gas main more than once, through a neighborhood she’d never seen and into a park so warm and welcoming the snow didn’t stick. The trees were still bare of leaves or snow, skeleton’s hands reaching into an otherwise empty sky. Birds chirp and squirrels dart about because there is no storm here, just a slight breeze and faint traces of snowflake envy, like sepia surrounded by the white maw. On a bench sits the girl, alone and deep in her own thoughts. She cannot see the brilliance within, the energy erupting effortlessly from inside her making this whole place a more perfect day.

She’s special and beautiful…she needs my help. She’s me, I think, just younger – because I can hear what she’s feeling, see what she’s thinking; and she’s terrified. There’s too much passing through her, the energy of ideas too many to count, of theories and people and places and experiences and emotions and perspective. The war in her head rages on, nonstop conflict between what she knew and what’s real. Things fall apart when the center cannot hold, but if hope persists then the center will be known. She doesn’t understand how little she actually understands, how much more there is to see and do.

Doubt is a difficult concept; a necessity for the development of ideas, yet also the flaw in all things. We doubt against what we know to be true, and that skepticism has the potential for unbound greatness or relentless nothing. Understanding doubt helps diminish its power – recognize the value of your doubts and the answers no longer matter.

The everything else isn’t what scares her – she’s been stuck in between wanting to know and fearing what that means. Because the more she wants to know, the more she loses herself in the miasma of the city, the rising and falling tides of human interaction and technological development, the changing landscape we can’t ignore. And that doubt is what keeps her going, the pressure that pushes her one way or the other as seconds expand out over hours and days decompress into months. In her head, she’s frightened and alone, walking home trying to understand why she feels like the entire world is fighting to talk with her. I know what that feels like.

She didn’t hear my words because the fog was still thick between her ears, the smoldering black cloud of existential turmoil she simply couldn’t break even though it bent and twisted and warped beyond what the impossible. The feeling of helplessness had very nearly taken her completely, as though she were sitting on the precipice of a bottomless chasm instead of the bench in a park outside time and space. She hadn’t even realized what she was doing, dragging the past and present and future behind her as the storm in her soul threw relativity out of sync. Everything I knew and loved about the city swirled around me in the crackling chaos; the memories and voices and experiences that I understood so intimately it felt as though I’d always been there, like I lived thousands of lives each as brilliant and beautiful as the one that came before. And as I trudged through the tempest, my boots sliding back with each step, the fire spiraling around her became clearer; a funnel of flames shooting into the sky and reaching out like witch’s fingers across the city as I became more and more real in the corner of her eye.

When I spoke next, she heard the sound of something sweet amongst such dire cacophony, but my words still slipped into the chaos before she could understand. I moved closer still, my hand reached out through the fire and ice and dawn and dusk and years that haven’t yet been so she could see I was there to help. I knew it would get worse before it got better, that her fear would cut through me one thousand times before she accepted what I was trying to say. My hands are swollen and bleeding, rotting and growing and splintering and shimmering, passing through the cosmos wrapped up into this girl’s metaphysical meltdown in a park that doesn’t belong in a corner of the city where no one lives.

The third time I reached out, she heard the words through the maelstrom, the ones I kept repeating like a mantra over and over until they pierced the veil she’d made for herself. Each time she made out another part of each sentence, as though she was deciphering the meaning even though it was obvious. The whole thing felt longer than it should have, stretched out over the years she thought were only days that then came to a head when time caught up. But, she didn’t want to listen because what I had to say meant finding a solution to her indecision, and future uncertainty was her greatest fear of all.

Even as the doubt caused her nothing but pain, she didn’t want to go one way or the other. She’d found a toxic comfort living in between experiences and existing vicariously through humanity as a cracked existential lens. I know she would be content feuding with herself forever into infinity, constantly second-guessing herself and wondering about the possibilities instead of choosing anything because not acting is addictive and cancelling plans at the last-minute feels better than believing she’s not good enough. Because I felt that way all those years ago when the city first spoke to me like it’s trying to speak to her. She’s doing everything she can to not decide.

There’s a light at the end of the tunnel, but she can’t see.

Because I’m not there. I was never a person or even a character, just a concept personified. This is a notion begging for life in an unending tempest. I’m nothing more than a faceless idea in a story that’s not about me. Everything is everything else.

Some people live and die and never leave home, wrapped in their roots so tightly they can’t survive outside the nurturing grasp – like a microcosm of society poured over itself again and again, always in the same place so the feelings never change. What happens when they’re ripped from the ground, when their entire world is laid bare before them and everything else is only a decision away? How do they justify the very existence of the ‘out there’ when the roots have been the everything for their entire lives? And how will they react when home reveals itself to be the empty concept it’s always been?

Some are lost and never find their way, tempted by the possibility of potential and the excitement of what’s new – always traveling so the roots never take hold. How many broken promises does it take for them to show their real selves? What sours optimism past the point of no return? When does freedom chain them more than roots ever could?

The girl was lost on purpose, struggling because she believed that was the meaning of life. She was ready to surrender to herself and make the wrong decision even though that shouldn’t have been possible. The struggle is real in these moments, the final seconds of consciousness as she comes to terms with letting herself down and the idea of me slowly fades into the very storm I hoped to stop.

But time’s running out, repeating instrumentals as she screams and shouts. I wish I’d never left the house; ain’t slept in three days. Popping pills and writing about the life I wish I lived every day. Avoiding looks and stares, trying to dodge these hooks. Keeping who I am safe, nothing overlooked.

Until two hands reached out and separated the clouds down to a slight breeze tickling the back of the girl’s neck, just a slight wind carrying absolution and freedom from the pain and uncertainty.

This isn’t who you are, Ashland.

It’s like I was hearing the words for the first time even though I’d spoken them one thousand times and more.

Choose to be something more.

 Two hands – one from him and the other from her – reaching out for fair Ashland the City, sitting on the park bench begging for her sanity in the storm overwhelming her sense of self. Two hands – one for redemption the other for peace – begging sweet Ashland the City to take hold and remember how it felt to speak with her home, to touch history and taste emotions. Two hands from two others just like Ashland the City who would finally decide to become herself and learn what she was meant to be, the decision to learn whatever she could.

NEXT: Ashland, the City (Finale)

Ashland, the City: Day One/Day Two

ACT III of III: Empyrean
Part XIII: Ashland, the City
    Episode One: Day One
    Episode Two: Day Two
(From Look At What You’ve Done)

DAY ONE
There was no hot water that morning – the other children beat her to it, so Ashland washed her hair in a cold shower. The skies were clear, and it was quiet; a welcome change to the past week of consistent storms and rain. Ashland ran down the sidewalk then through the streets, weaving between gridlocked cars towards the subway station still ten minutes away – she would never get there in time.

Down an alley, she used as a shortcut before delivery trucks blocked it up, Ashland tripped on a pile of dirty clothes that had fallen from their lines. She picked herself up and kept going, wishing the entire time that she’d woken up when the alarm sounded. She ran into a cyclist, knocked a pile of papers from the arms of an irate attorney, and nearly caused a car accident when she ran out into a crosswalk without looking.

The streets all looked the same, each building just another version of the last, the din of chatter and machines grating on Ashland’s nerves until she opened her eyes and she was standing in front of the school with minutes to spare. It didn’t make any sense, Ashland though – she should have been at least fifteen minutes late.

A third-year girl sat crying on the bench near the entrance, staring at the ground through her swollen eyes. Just by looking at her, Ashland could feel the girl’s pain, as though her entire world had fallen apart and nothing felt the same. Ashland wondered what had happened to make the girl so sad. The morning’s blue skies were just a tease as the clouds rolled back in to drape the outside in damp familiarity.

Ashland watched Kazumi and Takeshi argue all through second period – they were never a terribly great couple to start, and the White Day situation put them even more on ice. All through third period and lunch, Kaz and Keshi bickered while people took sides. It wasn’t uncommon for students to voice their opinion on certain romantic dramas, no matter how unconnected they were to the involved parties. Everyone knew how it worked, the kids in the spotlight with grace and poise, then those on the edges left to comment and opine.

It wasn’t terribly original Ashland thought as she fiddled with the pile of rice on her tray that looked about as appetizing as the pile of rice from the day before and the pile before that. There was no good reason to indulge the melodrama, nothing to gain from subtly encouraging conflict between two people who would do good to simply end what they have and go their separate ways – but that’s part of the act, Ashland had come to believe, that the narrative mattered just as much as the emotion to a box full of hormonal teenagers trying their hardest to focus on anything other than their education.

The final bell rang, and the wave of students pouring from the front doors made Ashland anxious – she stayed back and wandered through the empty halls for a few minutes as the immediate chaos cleared out. The snack vendor was already gone and the crossing guard had stowed his road cones away for the night. Subtle serenity pops up between school’s end and rush hour; just a few minutes of peace after the children reach their homes and parents leave from work. The constant chatter and rumble of everlasting traffic died down, and Ashland let herself content.

Down she turned onto one of the oldest streets in Tokyo, a simple paved road hiding bricks underneath and dirt even further down still, each level bulging with history and the memories of yesterday. History interested Ashland – knowing what came before made sense when no one knew what the future held, and fragments of the past became clearer the longer she looked. Knowing what made her home what it was gave Ashland confidence, savvy on the subject her peers cared about least because what sort of income would an education in history bring?

She liked to notice what others took for granted. Like the fox that appeared before Ashland, the neighborhood’s familiar strayed too far from the woods looking for a way home. Or the group of barely-teenagers playing at street gangs, shoving and insulting one another because they saw it on TV and it looked cool. Perhaps the struggling game developer who finally hits a milestone. Maybe the old woman keeping the noodle shop died the week before, and her son still couldn’t get the process right.

Silence persisted; Ashland walked alone up and down and through the seven neighborhoods between school and her bedroom, seven distinct segments of Tokyo she’d come to know intimately. Then, in the park across the street from the orphanage, Ashland watched love die under pale moonlight just beginning to overtake the twilight’s lasting gleam. This woman’s heart was broken, fractured, and dying inside – she gave everything to this man, and he threw it all away. This man’s guilt consumed him every minute of every day – he betrayed this woman and she lost all faith in him.

Ashland laid down to sleep that night wondering what would come of the man and the woman, if the developer could sell his game, what the fox saw in Ashland’s soul, and why the son couldn’t get his mother’s noddle recipe right. Then, before she drifted off, Ashland realized there was no noodle shop.

 

DAY TWO
Ashland took a long shower before even the sun woke up, when the other kids waited for their alarms and she could move freely without worrying about personal space. The rain poured through the night and Ashland knew a bright morning was too much to ask, that she would have to try for the early bus if she had any hope of staying dry. As she got dressed, Ashland thought about noodle shop that didn’t exist and why she had such vivid memories of something that wasn’t there.

The bus was ahead of schedule for the first time ever, and Ashland found herself in the rain, sloshing through giant puddles growing from the edges of the sidewalk. She turned down the same alley as yesterday. A cat jumped out, and startled Ashland slipped on the wet concrete; she reached out for anything and grabbed a laundry line tied to building. Clothes fell from the sky into a pile at Ashland’s feet, the same pile of clothes she tripped over the day before. She didn’t know what it meant, such a physical coincidence, only that it made her uneasy.

There was no hustle or bustle yet in the halls, just a few eager students who showed up early every day including the third-year girl Ashland saw crying the previous morning. She was on her phone, panicked and distressed as she argued with her father about the laundry that somehow never made it onto the line even though she absolutely hung it up. The look of terror that washed over the girl’s face gave Ashland chills, and she walked into the school wondering what was going on as panic started to build.

Ashland hid away in a dark corner of the library, a spot she often found herself when the anxiety got too difficult to handle or she felt like life was bigger than she imagined. The library was always quiet; students either avoided the book stacks like the plague or adhered to the rules and kept their mouths shut. Because of this, Kazumi and Takeshi’s sudden outburst was all the more obvious and obtuse.

She demanded to know why he was sitting with another girl, why he would spend his time with someone else. He reiterated a point he must have made earlier, told her that he explained she was his sister’s friend and why he was sitting with her before school started. She asked what he said to make her cry – had he admitted that he was seeing someone else and was he getting ready to do it again? She started to sob through her words, only the worst possible outcomes swirling through her head – Ashland felt what Kazumi felt but didn’t understand how or why. Takeshi cut through the bullshit and Ashland felt a deeper cut; it was the girl outside crying.

Panic slowly crept through Ashland’s veins as she saw what was happening – a chain of events with results of which she experienced prior to inadvertently orchestrating them. It was half past tomorrow, ten ‘til yesterday, the day time stepped back to move forward. Ashland didn’t know what to do, how to comprehend that she lived tomorrow yesterday already.

Ashland kept her head down for the rest of the day; a flimsy bandage on a gaping wound in Ashland’s psyche. Her walk home is rife with paranoia as she looks over her shoulder every five seconds wondering how she changed the course of history in a single day, her every step another chance to fuck everything up more than she already had. She remembered when she saw the fox and turned her head. Then a new though arose, a new notion Ashland hadn’t considered as she walked through the park and seven strangers watched her from the shadows:

Maybe it’s the same day.

Through the fear and guilt Ashland wondered; if she had the ability to make things worse, why couldn’t she make them better, too? Seven strangers wreathed in light and chained by tradition stay themselves just a little longer. An orphan girl with no place in the world, lover of that which no longer exists, and seeker of stories – Ashland asked herself what was stopping her from at least trying to make it all better.

She passed by the kids bullying a smaller classmate and stepped in. She threatened to call their parents and report them to their homeroom teachers. Ashland made a difference, if only for a few minutes; she felt good about what she’d done, like she could truly start to affect change even with the weight of this time nonsense.

The silence persisted again as Ashland walked alone through the park toward the orphanage – she remembered the couple who couldn’t find the good in each other, the lovers destined to kill love just a little more under a pale starlight and washed out fluorescents. Ashland felt the woman’s heart like she had yester-morrow, the inconsolable panic, shame, and sadness from learning what the man had done and why. He had an affair, a gentleman’s intermission because the woman’s daughter was too much to handle, a third-year student unable to even keep the laundry hung let alone do anything to make their lives easier.

Ashland felt the woman’s pain, the utter loss of confidence in herself as a person and a mother. The man betrayed her trust and her value, kicked her soul to the curb instead of owning up to his insecurities and misgivings. Instead of communicating, he fucked around and broke this woman’s heart. Ashland recognized that there were some things she could never fix.

Seven shadows become seven figures with seven faces and seven voices calling out for Ashland in the twilight settling into dusk.

The city fell silent as Ashland walked up the steps to the front door of the orphanage and it broke apart, the front façade split at the windows and melted into the ground. Shifting back and forth, the Victorian aesthetic inverted within itself and reconstituting as something new. The massive entrance swelled and shrank like the house was breathing, as if it knew something had changed. Ashland nearly fell in; just one slip away from losing herself. Seven hands reached out and pulled her back from the abyss, saved her from everlasting chaos and confusion.

She hung in the air, unaware of what was happening as Kendrick Lamar’s “DNA.” played on repeat; until she realized it was absolutely everything.

NEXT: Ashland, the City – Episodes 3 & 4

Service

*Original Draft: October 28, 2012

This constructed reality,
Or that one…
Does it really matter?

Of course it does.

This fabricated reality,
Structured by belief
Not actuality.

Desperate times.

Truth is relative
Until it isn’t.
It’s an excuse
That fragments
Everything,

Splinters morality and
Bargains idealism
For comfort and
Superiority.

 

Divisionaries

*Original Draft: October 28, 2012…for real.

It’s a death in the nation
Of ideas and competency.
Where did the vision go?
How did we forget ourselves?

Uninfluenced, unfettered in
Stalwart belief – no room for
Change. Disturbing.

Society will fall because
We were too proud
To let those we don’t
Understand still be.

Remember these days when
People still respected truth;
They are fleeting, and
Tomorrow will be staged
In warehouses and in our minds
Because we don’t
Care enough to ask why.

It’s a death in the nation
Whose reason isn’t real.
Forgotten in the trunk
After she became too
Annoying on Facebook.

Found lying on the side of the
Road, decaying in vain.

This Story (Now Told)

*Original Draft: December 24, 2014

I.
Day three.
Eighteen never felt more real.
The air was wet, and
We met.

Handshakes and hugs,
Expected but not reciprocated.
Drugs, alcohol, everything else.
Those nights I don’t remember.
We grew up.

I watched you discover,
From afar, the things
You’d always hold dear.
That life couldn’t last.
We grew apart.

II.
Together again,
Not unlike the first time.
Everyone knows everything.
Parties bigger than your head,
People bigger than people,
Life larger than average.
We bonded.

There’s more here than it seems.
Expression from restriction,
Beneath a house of sin.
We were confused.

Without much light,
An idea crawled forth,
Entering our vernacular.
I left.
You accepted it.

In a car, hand on the wheel;
I never forgot.
Words more satisfying than
One hundred Christmases.
Stage two – I thought (would be) the last.
We kissed.

III.
Everything is everything.
Lives intersect.
Emotions never go away,
Happiness springs from
Beyond a ring.
We were happy.

Ten thousand oceans
Couldn’t break us.
Aliens on a redirected course,
Finding our center in
Each other.
Surreal and hardened
At the same time.
We explored.

In settling,
The structure flipped.
It grew stronger, resolved in it’s
Efficiency and fortitude.
Promises were made.
The years began to show.
Once brilliant, the
Pieces simply smiled in the mirror,
Hoping to be convincing.
We struggled.

Streets not so easily navigated,
Talks of indecision.
Confidence is a hell of a drug.
The screw was stripped, and
I didn’t have the answers.
We worked.

Familiarity concedes to difference.
Symbiotic becomes parasitic.
They were watching different movies.
Expectations change because
We changed.

IV.
Frustration;
Lines on a face from too much
Anger and sadness.
This suture is ripping;
I keep wondering why.
We fought.

Lies are told,
Trust is destroyed.
A common denominator is
Harder to find.
Both feel betrayed,
We talked.

If only the heavens could be
Moved, you would be seen in a
Good light.
All my rage is nothing.
Bitter endings after a
Gold star tenure.
We tried.

New avenues where there were
Once roadblocks.
She saw them ages ago.
There’s nothing left;
The legacy will remain intact,
The truth is much harder to swallow.
We walked away.

Giant Days: Comics, College, and Cohesion

My mother once asked me, “Why do we pursue higher education?” The question wasn’t about my own reasons, but rather the greater meaning.

“To get a job,” I said, more or less confident in my answer.

“No,” she replied. “We go to college to grow, to become more well-rounded members of society – it’s not the only route by any means, but if that’s the path you choose, it’s important to know why.” The point of college isn’t to earn a degree to find a job – that’s a big part of the experience, but not the focus.

College is meant to provide students with a chance to gain wisdom from differing perspectives, to step outside your own world and experience a much larger one. Meeting new people, engaging in new activities, and learning new ideas are the pillars of higher education, the driving forces that make college/university worth the effort.

John Allison and Max Sarin’s Giant Days from BOOM! Studios is a seminal foray into the lives of three university students who meet as freshmen roommates and grow into fast friends. The series deconstructs higher education archetypes into relatable and familiar narratives about personal growth, friendship, and the navigation of emotional obstacles.

GD-characters

In the vein of French creator Diglee’s phenomenal Forever Bitch, the nuances surrounding Susan, Esther, and Daisy’s friendship are undeniably connected to the visual aesthetic, a symbiosis of the written and visual few comics achieve on a consistent basis. Sarin’s emotive cartooning combined with Allison’s dry wit exemplifies the medium and should be regarded as a high-water mark for the art form.

Even the title, Giant Days, evokes the feelings of being a college student, when nothing can go wrong and the whole world is simply waiting for you to come and take what you want, when you feel like a giant because your life from before seems so small compared to what comes next, when you’re empowered by the expansion of your own horizons because each new day is a new adventure.

Not everyone has the means to attend college, and not everyone considers higher education a worthy endeavor. The latter opinion is unfortunate insomuch as Giant Days aims to inform as much as entertain, to provide a generally realistic glance into the ups and downs of university life and how those experiences can affect perspective.

Because of course, Giant Days isn’t limited to the goings on of just Susan, Esther, and Daisy. The supporting cast is integral to the fabric of this series, which might sound like common sense if this dynamic wasn’t so hard to find in most superhero fare. And while Giant Days is by no means a superhero comic book, any story with a fully developed cast of secondary characters is better because it gives readers more reasons to care – even if you love to hate Susan, you might relate to Ed or McGraw.

Dramedy today is often drama with spats of humor as opposed to the inversion John Allison creates in Giant Days through a steady stream of humor with purposely paced drama as an emotional anchor. Esther’s charmingly egotistical behavior starts to make sense when considering her family dynamic; Susan’s hilariously public inner turmoil stems from her unabashed independence and stubbornness; Daisy’s about as naïve as they come, her awkward cuteness a byproduct of a sheltered upbringing by her kindly grandmother. All three girls have something to prove, whether to themselves or others, and relatable drama borne from comedic situations has become the bedrock of this title’s narrative draw.

DC and Marvel often pair writers and artists together based on metrics other than creative cohesion – writers tend to guide the ship while artists build around the script. Friction between the words and art in a comic can break the entire experience and leave readers feeling disconnected and frustrated. That said, the ‘indie’ sector (Image, Dark Horse, Dynamite, of course BOOM, etc.) understands the value in a coherent creative team that can take a comic book from great to exceptional – look no further than Tom King and Gabriel Hernandez-Walta’s The Vision for evidence to theory.

crop_dress640

In an industry with such visual and graphic diversity, ‘cartoonish’ is a classification of comic book art often frowned upon, which is odd considering the medium was once dominated by lighthearted, cartoony fare more so than superhero house styles or genre-specific aesthetic. Giant Days is a cartoonish book – there’s no question about that – and Max Sarin’s artwork is what makes the book work as well as it does.

The norm for animated programming typically involves voice actors recording their lines separately to be edited together in postproduction. This norm for animation compares to the aforementioned development process for mainstream comics (writer provides artist with script, “edited” together in final stages). The cast of FOX’s Bob’s Burgers record together in sessions as a way to create more believably humorous interactions. Similarly, Allison and Sarin have a working relationship wherein their output feeds into each another almost seamlessly.

A lip movement perfectly fits the cutesy pronunciation of “lerv”; a specific eye roll conveys the perfect balance of snark and hurt; personified drama clouds over the perpetrator; a misguided hug looks as awkward as it must feel. When considered through an analytical lens, all of these nuanced moments in Giant Days create trees in the forest, small instances of depth hiding in plain sight that each add to the story’s emotional weight.

Giant Days is a shining beacon to the tenet of symbiosis; a textbook example of how a writer and artist can work together with clear direction and focused intention. Allison and Sarin are by no means the first duo to reach this level of synergy (Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie, Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely, Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams), but they do give nearly everyone else a run for their money in regards to effect.

Which brings me back to college (not literally, though it might be fun to have another go.) There is no right or wrong way to ‘do’ higher education. Giant Days makes this clear: everyone’s experience is different. Some go the super-studier route while others drink themselves into a stupor for four years. Some find a good balance between classes and social life while lose themselves in the chaos. Some coast through their studies with natural adeptness while others work hard for every passing grade.

Each character in Giant Days comes with his or her own baggage and skills, the flaws and the strengths that define us as human beings. If you were the big fish in a small hometown pond who became a much smaller catch, Esther’s journey through her own hyper-confidence might mirror your experience. If leaving for college was the first time you left your home state (or county), Daisy’s wide-eyed enthusiasm might speak to your own optimism for the future. If you’re cynical to the world and have the emotional scars to prove it, Susan’s self-reliance and dedication to her values will feel relatable.

More than most titles on the stands today (or any day), John Allison and Max Sarin’s Giant Days stands a testament to the college experience, the comic book medium, and storytelling as an art form.