To Roam

To be born in the world of humans is a very challenging test. Nothing is visible, at least, nothing that matters is. The world is just a reflection of other worlds that came across it before. 

I was born in the world of humans without a father, without a mother, I was born on a street in a city of which name holds no more significance than any other name in this world. I do not remember much of the first few years of my life but I do have a very slight recollection of what's before it. I did not have a form but I had a will, and I had a fate.

I remember that the likes of me were waiting in line to be sorted into worlds, we've always wondered how the choices were made then, but every time we doubted things, we remembered Him. He who told us that he is god, and we who believed that he is God and thus all our doubts  were answered with faith,  and all our prayers with fate. I may not have remembered god after I was born but I remembered the faith and the fate. 

Yet to be human is a fickle thing, their memories are volatile, very limited, they can not remember where their souls have been, they can not remember what they have been created for and so as the days went by, so did my memory of god and even faith and fate disappear, as I was learning of a new world, I was fascinated by its many reflections, for the world of humans is a mirror, but one in which you can palpably examine the reflection, taste it, experience it inside you and outside you that you become one with it, that unity is called Love and it unifies the reflection with all your senses. 

I found out about love earlier than most humans do, because I was born on a street in the winter and I did not know anyone, a strange homeless creature like me had to pick me up. She was a woman who made many mistakes and did not care for one more, maybe she thought I was the best mistake she'll ever make, maybe she found in me a last chance to build or break herself, but I’m sure she was experiencing love herself and she wanted to reflect it unto me. Her intention might have been one of many things or all of those things, but her action was one, she found me and so she took me.

And God teaches humans about fate everyday, now that I think about it, he tried to teach me about fate that early in my life but to no fault of my own, I was too consumed in my new nature to notice it, for that woman who had nothing to give or take from the world anymore, did have the one thing a newborn needs, milk.

Her son had died at birth a week before I arrived as if god had made him for the specific reason of uniting me with his grieving mother, and he might as well have. Because of her grieve, because of my loneliness, she fed me, and if that boy had lived, my whole purpose would have changed. His purpose was saving me, his mother's purpose to me, was to grieve her son through me.

But after the grieve, and after her breasts ran dry, she had nothing more to give me and so one day, I woke up a two year old on another street I did not know, without her, without the alley where we crawled and curled, where we felt cold together for two winters with no hope of warmth but her bosom. But she was not my mother, she was a pawn in my advancement. A pawn whose head had been collected. I do not know if she had really died, but it doesn't matter, because I could not see her. I did not see her since and thus it became her death, for death is merely a vacancy and even if she had died I would think that she thought to herself the world was dead instead of she. Death is one truth that unite every inferior world, just like Faith, just like Fate, to each his definitions and to each its reflections and it's manifestations in the world of humanity, yet, none is visible.

And humans depend much on their eyes, and I have learned to explore their world thusly.

They have a way of pursuing Knowledge that I tried to come close to understand, it identified with their validation of the world, most humans inherently believe that the more they validate their world, the more it validates them. That was their pursuit of knowledge, of course the main objective was not to know but to live, because knowledge in its extreme form is a divine attribute, humans know that, because like all soulful creation they hold a breath of god, and so humans chase the chance of approaching their immortality, as if their knowledge of the world, this validation of its reflections, will put out a good word for them with death, postpone it for a while and then maybe, forever. 

I did not succumb to that theory for I also found out one day that death was not an enemy of the soul, it was a savior, for one day I met a scientist, he was a man that knew a lot about the world, he was old and I was young , he had been to many places and he had seen so many things, he could talk for hours on end about books and places and people's faces, and I was just a young boy on the street who cleaned his car and carried his bags upstairs, I enjoyed his stories about distant streets, and about high buildings and cathedrals in Russia and Rome, names and names and more names. It was enjoyable but I did not understand the world any more, it did not understand me anymore than it did before, but I thought to myself that maybe because he was much older, that he knew enough to be successful in his pursuit and after all, he was a man with a clear definitive purpose and I was a boy on the street. His immortality must be in the fulfillment of his purpose, I thought. 

Until one day, I heard that the scientist upstairs had a car accident and was paralyzed, he could not move all his hands and legs or even talk anymore because his neck broke, so he was left alone on his bed and soon while he was alive the world started to forget him, it started dying around him, he remained only in my thoughts, his stories faded with the days and he started dying to me when I stopped getting the money he used to give me every once in awhile, and then when i walked further away from the street and forgot his name, that's when he just fell dead. 

His knowledge did not make him immortal, it did not even sustain his life until fate and death made their agreement with god on when to take the man’s soul back to him.

You might wonder as of what reason I write about my life and my knowledge today if it will not immortalize me with you, and I say that as much as immortality is not a sound purpose to move my hands, love is, I do not mean to influence a soul by my existence but to unite my existence with the world I was chosen for, I do not do that through writing of the events of my life, but through the reflection of myself upon it, and it's reflections on me. For soon enough, contemplating life does not suffice to truly live and then you must venture to find a way to take part of your own life, that's what I found to mean the search for love. And truth be told I am not an enemy of mortal knowledge, in fact, love that comes without knowledge is a naivety that life must not forgive, for how do you unite yourself with creation if you do not at least attempt to understand its ways, its secrets, truth and revelations.

In the world of humans, they start forming a concept of love when very young, because in most cases it is exerted upon them, it affects their senses and transcends to their young homogeneous souls, and when they are older, they set out for their search, and they want to impose love on the world as much as they want it to expose them to the many worlds that come across it. Some find their comfort in experiencing many faces, places, sensations, swamping their senses with input that they can identify with, they travel shallow and wide, trying to absorb as much as they could as quickly as they could just in time to experience something different and new, they know faces but not eyes. And some travel narrow and deep, they search for the unity with one other soul, one other being, one other reflection, manifestation or an idea, a word, a profoundly humanizing love. They might take years and years, their minds search for love in many eyes and many hands, they might pick pockets for the chance of this deeper passion, another secret common of all the worlds.

I was one of those whose passion has prevailed young also, and passion to me came with a wind. Just like all the things that matter most in life, you could not see the wind, but you can feel it, just like faith, the wind was invisible and just like faith it caused me to tremble in its stability, in its consistency that is tainted with the uncertainty of change at any moment in time, just in a moment the wind can fall asleep and the next it distills your coat and your hat and you feel like it will carry you with it to god only knows where, maybe faith first came to our souls in a wind just like love came to me.

I found a face that I want to know, I found a reason to reach out to the world's understanding of me and to try to manipulate it to my favor so that maybe she, with her pale lips, could find out about the possibility binding us silently, that secret hope in my heart waiting to turn into passion. 

And the world finally knew something of me, I had a wish to acquire a name of myself in it, a name that will allow her to validate me, and so it gave me a name with her, the beginning of knowing another human mostly is a name and so the world told her mine, and one time under the throne of a tree, we knelt, and our love was crowned by declarations and sighs and dances, all in the way to stir up the winds of our faith towards one another, and then to stir the fires of our passion to warm us against the winter's celebrations. 

Then I asked my pale-lipped love of why her lips were not as red as the others and she answered that her body was riddled with a flaw, and even though none who is mortal can be perfect, none of the others’ flaws showed so clearly on their faces.

She told me her disease will cost her the rest of her life here, that death will be coming for her all too soon, her eyes were confident and at ease with her fate but love stirs up the most human of traits in one's soul, fear. And fear is a malignant force of destruction for it does submit to the rules of creation but twists them for his own selfish benefits, fear reproduces in the souls of humans until it dominates them, and so I was afraid of fate and I was afraid of death for the first time in my life, not my fate, and not my death but my beloved's, for to lose the one that you love is no ordinary decay, it splits your soul in twain, it leaves you with an empty half that is rarely filled with anything bright, it's a space for your beloved's ghost to dwell, a moorland that gets darker in time, gets infected with the swarming creatures who dwell in this darkness, it becomes a city in ruins and where once was green and gold, a dark metallic grey rises in hurricanes of dusty memories. 

I was always a man who did not subscribe to world's will even though it had its toll on me, I never allowed it to exert much force so easily, I who took pride in my soul refused to let it run too far from me without consent, that way I kept the world's futile tries to break me in order, and so I was not going to let the world invite death into my pale-lipped girl's heart. 

Once I heard the old sages talk about secret knowledge, one which the greatest searchers for truth set out to find, a substance with the name of “Elixir of Life”, which purifies the spirit to the point of immortality. And so I walked with the sages on a journey to form the elixir, I examined their ways and paths and their strange equipment, and they looked down on my fear and tried to save me, they tried to help me for there was no other way to save my soul, but Alas, Even the sages could not find a way to distract death away from her, or themselves or anyone at all. 

Purple, black, crimson and emerald colored potions, I sent them all to her but her lips got no brighter. Until one inglorious student of the alchemists' wisdom explained to me that “All that is above is as below”, and as god has condemned my lover to death, then maybe I should not pursue her life in the greedy knowledge of alchemy, but in a far more deeper place, away from this world and into what lies beneath it. As this world is merely a reflection it can not defend us against a truth as profound as death in all its might. I decided to venture into the worlds that lie beyond that of humans. Death was a creation of god, hence to defy it only made sense to seek immortality in the only place where death was feared as much as I feared it in my own soul, I started with the land of Lucifer.

Most humans think that the devil lives in hell, but I have went to hell and asked for Satan, there the condemned souls told me that he had not been seen there in ages. I wondered, what kind of creature would leave his home for such a long time? I found that man’s assumptions were a myth.
Satan is full of fear and resentment towards hell just as much as humans, but once upon a time, when Satan used to live in heaven, God looked upon his creative will and asked him to build walls around hell as beautiful as he can make them. And so Satan obeyed the Lord and he built a wall and decorated it with the most beautiful jewels and designs he could come up with, the only restriction Satan  had on his task, was God's rule that he can not use anything that he saw in heaven, and so Satan's design was beautiful but not as beautiful as the one designed by God, the beautiful, who created beauty itself. 

And Satan wondered why God had ordered that something as hideous and malicious as hell fire should be decorated with such elusive beauty. Nonetheless, he  was very proud of his work, even though the purpose remained concealed from him. And so when God decided to create the new magnificent yet apparently inferior being called man, Satan asked around about why God had created him and the answer was always that man was created for heaven, that man was the chosen one.

Satan sat alone with his burdened heart and he wondered why God would not choose him for heaven, Satan's love for heaven was great and his knowledge of beauty, he thought, made him more fit to appreciate it. And so when the day came for the first man to come to life, and god ordered all the heavenly creature for a celebration of the new being, Satan came with envy in his heart and wrath in his eyes, the angels had nothing to fear and so they were happy, but Satan was all too familiar with the pain of being rejected. 

And there the moment came and God asked them all to swear allegiance to man, that they would assist him from a distance in his mission, the angels bowed, the devil did not. His vanity triumphed over his faith, he who has created a concept of beauty for his own, he who has worked so hard to please the Lord shall not bow to the inferior creature. God's wrath was unleashed on Satan and as he knew what Satan had feared most of all, he chose to punish him with exactly that. If Satan had believed in God's will then God would have never let his fear take form, but now that he let his fear consume all his faith, his blasphemy should be his own fears taking shape, Satan was  banished from heaven, Satan was demoted and he was to live with the pain of rejection that accompanies that.

Satan was petrified for a moment after God damned him with a life away, and then all his burning hurricanes escalated fueled by his anger and his vanity, for a moment he told himself that heaven was not that beautiful, that he did not lose a home when he lost it, that the beauty he created around hell is just as appealing and that he can easily attract humans to it just as they are attracted to God's heaven and maybe more.

God heard Satan's thoughts and in all his might he told Satan to carry out his plan of seducing humans to hell. I found out that Satan did not love hell at all, nor did he live in it and for exactly those reasons he chose to lead mankind to it, for he did not love mankind either. And there God's will manifested clearly. He ordered Satan go build the fences of hell when he was really building Satan's pride, that pride was a test of his faith and his failing was and remains the test for humanity.

Satan left his home in heaven and decided to form his own world, a world that accentuates all that is opposed to Godliness, not only that, but it also glorifies it. And Satan secretly thought to himself that he might have lost a battle but not the war, and if he gathers enough humans to build hell's army, he might eventually show God that he chose the wrong creature, and then his army will do anything to get out of hell, maybe even fight God and as their king, he shall rule, and he will destroy the land of God for good and his word shall reign over all.

I told myself that I will use his world and all his hate to myself, I shall visit him and tell him what god had fated me too.

The land of Lucifer is decorated with peacocks, feathered and colored on walls of black, and they're all looking towards the left, the ground is unpredictable and it changes shape under my feet as I walked that I almost trembled and fell, and the air was cold that it pierces my skin as if every breeze is made of icicles aimed at me with all the winds' speed. I walked on the fickle ground, grey dust rising and falling at the stumping of my feet, I chose to walk on the up tides as it's always more likely that the tides will lead to the shore and the shore in this land must be none but Lucifer himself.

The deeper I went into this world the less demons I saw and one would think that it would be more infested with their darkness if they are more on the surface but it is true that the demons who dwell on the surface are the weaker ones. Their darkness, as great as it is, does not amount to the darkness of the few deeper, inner circle demons. They all looked at me with scorn and doubt, how I managed to keep my feet in their darkness was a mystery even to me. 

In the land of the fallen there's only one method to find your way and that is to follow the peacocks shining eyes, but for them to shine for you, they require a dedication. To see with the eye of the peacock you have to allow vanity to own you. The first sin of Satan was always his most dreadful and so to take off on the journey to him you have to taste the same poison. 

I allowed my pride that I tried so long to control to present itself in full form, I allowed it to fill my head with thoughts of self-love, my pride became a demon of monstrous vanity that it devoured any and everything that threatened it with anger and demise. Only then the peacocks eyes shone bright for me and I walked head high into the paths lined with scourge, anguish and ghostly shadows, all of them making a way for me like I earned the right to float past them, demons were bowing their heads to me and monsters killed their own roaring to silence when I passed by them. 

Until I reached the sea, and they said that Satan's throne was on the surface of the water only further in, but in order to walk on water, beyond where no peacock could reach the greatest of peacocks, I had to learn a certain science that human refer to as magic. They said magic is the science of exerting your will on existence, it is the art of making yourself a God. But in order to do so, you first have to liberate yourself from the chains of submission to God in heavens, to liberate yourself from fate. You have to liberate yourself from faith as well and allow yourself to experience your soul away from the divine, drive it into the abyss so that it is worthy of the light that will come out the other end.

I paused for a moment, hesitating in my turbulent soul with longing for my girl and the last flickering light of faith waiting for my decision, alchemy could not help me, and only the devil ever defied God's will, and if I turn back now my journey would have been all for nothing, and would God even accept me if I return from the land of the fallen? After I came that close to his enemy? 

My decision was made, God wanted to take my love, Satan knows a way to give her back to me, I must walk on water if I am to get to him and so I must become a God of myself, and that's how I murdered the last light of faith. 

The purpose of becoming a God is all to do with freedom, it is in fact a liberation, but when you liberate yourself from god and take too much pride in your own will, you realize what faith was protecting you from. You realize how, as blind as faith is, it was the way you perceived the world, how it exerted its toll on cynicism and skepticism without which those forces ran wild until they ate the meaning out of everything, and how it also protects you from pain with such gifts called patience, trust, optimism. 

The magic of the devil render such states as mere states of delusion, and it takes on the truth to be in only one thing, the freedom of your will, therefore you had to not just recognize it, but control it perfectly. So the demons took me through tormenting exercises in order to exert my control over my new God. I experienced pain, I felt it skinning me off my divinity down to my most human self, and in time after time, I was slowly becoming the master of myself, it was up to me to make my pain whatever I wished it to be, even turn it to pleasure, I even walked on fire for sport.

Until there I was, a powerful God of my will, I could bend the world to it if I only wished to do so. And so I could walk on the water to get to Him. 

The devil's throne is so high that his head is safe in the ice cold clouds and his feet of fire boil the water underneath it. I approached in my halo of perfect temperature towards rainstorms and volcanoes that exploded around him, but once I stood before him, my magic was ineffective at once, he told me it was because his will is superior to mine, it was after all his land and he brought me to my knees.

I told him of my blight and begged him to slay my beloved's death.

The devil stepped down from his own throne pleased at my desperation, his eyes shone like an angelic peacock, he surrounded me with his feathers and beauty, down on my knees as I stared down, I felt his sweet breath on my back and his soft feathers on my cheeks. Drenched in beauty to a hypnotic state, he told me to look around and see the dwellers of his world with his eyes, all the powerful magicians, the naked-bodied sinners, the self-destructing shells of men, all at great ecstasy, all should gladly give their lives to Him, gratefully they would place their necks on his altar, just for one small price, their freedom.

I looked around for him, but he had already wrapped me in his vision, I could not move a limb nor say a word. My will was not in my hand anymore but in his, and the more I struggled to escape the more I fell deeper into submission, the more he became powerful. He asked me to find what I find in common among his servants and I told him that it was blasphemy, but he answered that they were all once faithful and some still hold some faith in god, and what was in fact common between the devil's slaves was their addictive love for illusions, it's a love that they don't even realize they hold, they do not seek truth but they seek an escape, and so they choose the way of magic just like he did, they only forget that this knowledge is a temptation as well and that He, the Devil, has controlled every temptation like puppets on a string, and so the truth of it was that they abandoned their faith in God for their faith in his illusion, and now he enslaves them, they are as fallen as he is from God's grace. 

And as for death, he said, it is a truth that needs a strong kind of magic to bend  and only Satan himself has achieved it, so he gave me a choice, either submit my soul to the Him and join his army then he will save my beloved's soul and take her to be with me, under his name, but then there will be no place for the pure faithful love of the angels left for us and we'll both relish in the beauty of darkness forever. Or I have to be on my way, only to return to Lucifer's land if I was ready to sacrifice my soul on his altar for my love.

I broke free from his embrace and went on my way, weeping over the ruins of my faith, over my lost hope of defeating my fate, her death. I was in open space, lost between the worlds, so unaware of my still hypnotized soul that I wondered if I existed at all. 

And then it occurred to me that I might have lost my faith, but I have a chance to dig up its dried well for some last drops of hope by which I can go to the land of God and beg him to cure my love.
I was on my knees again with hands in the half-dry mud and sweat dripping into my eyes, I dug deeper and deeper into the will, it was so dry that by the time I found the last drops of hope, I could barely see the sunlight anymore, but there I had them in my hand, and I was ready to take off to my next destination.

The road to the land of God is through the world of humans, I never realized before how much the reflections of the world could lead to rejuvenating your faith. I walked the earth and the different worlds in it with new eyes, the eyes of a man who knew the power of destruction in himself, but a man who also knew the power of creation.

I held an axe in my hand and felt what Abraham must have once felt when he smashed the idols, the demonic reflections in his village, I understood what it means for degeneration to be regenerative of faith, I had to pluck the leftover feathers from my hair and burn them down. So I went back to the street, where the lost children still played and slept and for a second I brushed the dust off their hands and faces and showed them love, it was a side of my humanity that I had truly missed. And with every contemplation, with every sensation and act of purpose, and  with every communion with nature I felt the stones of my idols tumbling down and shattering, and God's divine breath was waking up inside me. The demons of the devil visited me still, and reminded me of the glorious games of the devil, the beauty of illusions and the surrender of my will to his majesty. But the demons of the surface were too weak for me, I am the man that knelt before the devil himself, who saw his slaves with his eyes, who knew that it takes all his might to stand in the face of death, one of God's creations, I knew he was weak in front of God. And so I proceeded on my path fueled with love for my girl with the pale lips, until blight landed on me.

My failed attempts had kept me too long from her, and her death was due, she smiled at me one last time as her grace ascended with him. There I was a traveler on the road to the kingdom of God for her, and there I was again at the short hand of fate no matter how far I tried to reach.

I did not have to stray for long to understand that God was trying to teach me again what I forgot about patience. I have always been quick to retire but also quick to return.

The death of her was as lightning to my soul, it burned me up but with a light, a fire that consumed my soul and left me half hollowed and with great deal of pain in what is left of me, but it also left me with a revelation, I might have sent all my brigades to defeat death but it was not the purpose of my journey or the purpose of my existence. 

To lose a love is to break up a union, and my union was very much present even though she is not. My war was not on death, it was a war on fear, I feared the death of love with her decay, I feared the hollow night of destruction, I feared worthlessness just like a human, I looked for validation in pride, and I traded late for fate.

The memory of humans is a disaster in the handling indeed, it betrays what you know, it remembers what you dread and forgets what you dream.

I have forgotten my faith for a heart of gold, I have shattered it on many altars and I found it in submission pure and transcendent above the world of humanity, and so I shall never settle so I will never forget again, I shall love but never again will I try to own, I was never owned by anything that I did not choose, and that is the freedom of my submissive will. 

I will remain, the faithful who fights his way to martyrdom on the road to God, who walked many paths searching for the truths beyond the reflections and never took comfort in his humanity... I will live and die, above all, a pilgrim.