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Devotion of Four Seasons
So true to thee in death I lay
Against my virtues, the skies betray
Uncertain, Unfounded love, I bleed
Willing and ready lusty seed.
Exile this, mine twisted soul,
Lofty dungeons to make me whole.
Blot the sun from mine wayward eye.
Live in Shadow. In Shadow I die.
Yet I am strong as I am proud.
Strange to think I'm neither loud...
Not loud, not soft, but silent still.
Silent, quiet unwavering will.
For where am I when I am where?
To be the unworthy, unsavory heir.
Heir beyond an heirs compose,
Twice as worthy in pains slow prose.
Dost thou love me?
For a question so sweet
There can be no cure.
Whether yea or nay my meaning is pure.
And my heart beats in this traitorous chest.
There is no repose, and no compensense.
You've given me a soul,
I can beg you no more.
So sweet, oh thee, in sleeping lay.
Lips firm, soft, parted in such a way
As to beg for reset.
And so thou art left
In such an exulting way.
I should have kissed thee whilst I had the chance.
Regrets are piercing like the lance,
But regrets are for lesser ones than I.
All I offer thee is a cry.
I cry for thee, my beautiful one.
Thy light shines too brightly to compare to the sun.
The sun is dim and vile temporary.
So better suited to live in a mortuary.
But thy art here, and here thy shines.
Far too wild to call thee mine.
But my heart to thee, a willing slave.
Bound in the shackles of a piercing wave
Of love, Of love, Of love forbidden.
Love from a heart that must remain hidden.
1
Dorothy Fretard
March Twenty Third, 2009
Blackwell
English 102
The Truth About Love
When I started going out with Bradley Rade I jumped immediately in to the deep end. There was never a stage of friendship, or a stage of courtship. As soon as the relationship began, it was decided that we would marry, have children, and live happy long lives. When you're young, you believe in the ideal of love at first sight, and the expectation of normalcy, but none of it is the truth, and sometimes it takes experiance to prove it.
Brad moved in to my home a week after our first date. His mother had made the mistake of calling me an "Ugly little tramp" upon our introduction, and he decided that he could no longer live with her, claiming that he intended to live on the streets. Of course, my family couldn't allow that to happen, unaware of what hindsight would scream, so from that night on he had a place reserved on our living room couch.
We blossomed. Brad was the perfect boyfriend. He stopped at nothing to make me smile. Watching him make a fool out of himself, just for that half hearted chuckle that sometimes escapes people when they see something so stupid that they can't entirely wrap their mind around it. He defended me from anything that could possibly have hurt me, emotionally or physically didn't matter. He went with me to school plays, he sang karaoke without shame, he carried my bags at the mall, he opened doors. I was sure that this time, this magical first time, I had found the one, and that I was the exception to the rule, the one who really did fall in love at the tender age of sixteen, and who had it all together and ready.
I was the first one to crack. My friends were already talking about going to college, and I was already planning my marriage. They were talking about all of the parties they would go to, gorgeous men that they would sleep with, and I began to think twice. All of this, I would be missing out on, because I would be living with my husband, a man I truly believed I loved, but the only man I would ever be with. He soothed me with kisses and hugs but they didn't hold the warmth they used to. All I could think was that I would never have the freedom I craved.
When my junior prom came, he was surprisingly against accompanying me to the dance, complaining that he had already gone to so many with his previous girlfriends that they had all grown boring to him, and that I wouldn't be missing anything if I skipped it anyway. I begged, I coerced, but even once I had convinced him to take me there, he forgot to bring a corsage. When my mother reminded him, he insisted that he would wear no flowers. I bought my own corsage. Even once we'd gotten in to the building, I very nearly wound up taking my Junior Prom photos without him.
Our relationship, or more realistically his facade, continued to deteriorate more and more quickly after the dance and in to the summer. He insisted that all of the people staring at us, either for our off the wall clothing style or for our looks in general, were admiring him. He began to mention his ex-girlfriend Patricia more and more often until I heard her name at least three times every day. He began to flirt with my friends, and the other girls around him while I, ever so stubborn and ever so naive, did my best to ignore him and pretend that our relationship was as healthy as it had ever been, and that the future we had set up for ourselves wasn't in peril. Although we were falling apart, we considered buying a puppy together, and I continued planning our wedding.
The first blow I really felt was when he moved out on my eighteenth birthday, and begged me to leave my home to move in to his mothers over stuffed two bedroom house. He began picking me up on the weekends, and pressuring me every moment we were together. He didn't want me to finish highschool, much less go to college. He wanted me to marry him then, and there.
As I continued to refuse, he grew more and more violent. Bruises on my arms and stomach became commonplace. I wore turtle necked sweaters to hide black and blue necklaces, and armwarmers over my bracelets of bruises. I said nothing, did nothing for months until he decided to try his hand at jealousy, telling me how in love he was with another girl, and how badly he wished he could have us both. That night, when he tried to bruise me again, I fought back with every technique I'd picked up. I yelled at him, screamed that what he was doing was abuse and that he was lucky I hadn't had the nerve to stab him with one of his own knives, to call one of my friends to save me, but he just laughed.
He handed me a knife, then and there, and told me to stab him if it was really what I wanted. He handed me his cell phone, and told me to call someone if I really thought any of my so called friends would even try to save me. I did neither.
I don't know if what he did, then, could be called rape. I didn't fight him, but then, that was because I was afraid to.
Two weeks later I told him I was pregnant. He suggested we break up so I could tell everyone the baby belonged to someone else.
I refused, but I also forgot.
I don't know how one forgets that they're pregnant. I don't know how one forgets the fight that ensued after sharing the news, or being punched repeatedly in the stomach because the father wants to pretend he doesn't like the news any better than the mother, or how a woman forgets crying night after night because her freedom really, truly is gone. Maybe Freud actually had something in his theory of repression, or maybe I'm just a special case. Either way, hearing the baby's heartbeat, knowing that it only existed because the man I thought I loved didn't want me to go to college, snapped me in to sanity. I was twenty weeks in, but I found an organization in Georgia that seemed to have no moral qualms with the fact.
I signed away my naive ambitions and hopes from what seemed like forever ago when I climbed in to the car, and as my mother began to drive. Little girls may fall in love with a simple glance, but girls are never little forever.
Dorothy Fretard
Blackwell
2-10-2009
Spiritually Real
Virginia Beach is in the bible belt, and the people there act the part, even if I can't manage the feat. Even if one could find the wiccan shop there, located deeply in outskirts of town center, the distant reaches of the city that nearly no one ventures in to, it is merely a single serving place that few people venture in to much less buy things from, and which seems to think that incense and jade statuettes are wiccan and unholy pariphinaliea. This is the world that I grew up in from the time I was eleven years old, and this is the world that I discovered a different side of life, a side where anything and everything is humanly possible.
I've always been the odd kid out. When most of the girls were outside in their short shorts attracting as many boys as they could, I was inside, soaking up the air conditioning and playing video games. When most girls were running around in the malls and one of the many pools that litter the city, I was holed up in my room with desktop computer, keyboard clicking away as a story of one shape or another blossomed on the screen. When most girls were drawing parodies of pictures, poking fun at whoever they could (and most of the time, the 'unfortunate' soul was myself) my pen was scratching away at a piece of paper, sketching out profiles for characters I would use in my manuscripts, and then putting them in to action, delighting in making them feel as realistic to me as anyone else that I knew.
It came to no surprise to anyone in my small family of friends that my beliefs would also come to differ from theirs. In fact, the only one I managed to surprise was myself.
The toss up of the reality that we know technically started before I'd even arrived in the majestic state of Virginia. As early as kindergarten, I refused to walk the halls of my quaint Connecticut elementary school alone, particularly after hours. I'd seen shadows shambling behind doors, gathering the way nature never intended them to, flowing like liquid beneath the flurescent lights of the halls. I'd heard them call me by name, beckoning to me, swallowing my mind and my thought until all I saw was black, though my body continued to be animate, leaving the conciousness helpless and asleep, lost when the darkness faded in to pinpricks of reality and I awoke to a new scene. Sometimes they would find me outside of the school, whispering my name as I fought to slip in to sleep. There were too many voices to cancel out, urging me out of bed when all I wanted was to stop hearing them, and to fall in to blissful unconciousness. Some of the voices were ones that I knew, ones that I had heard during the day, but then there were others that I had no chances of recognizing.
When these whispers evolved in to words and pleas, relaying gruesome stories or sometimes fading in a pathetic din of the word "help", my father taught me to focus my mind on the silence that I heard outside of the roar, and to leave the voices in the dust. I also learned to control my dreams, to cycle through hundreds of possibilities as though changing channels on a television the way he did, turning my head away from the dreams that the bodies behind the voices saw fit to infest.
I grew so practiced and skilled in this art that I learned to do it subconciously, and the shadows and voices ceased to be a problem. I forgot about them, the way a child forgets an imaginary friend.
We went to church regularly until during one youth meeting I informed the preacher that the bible quote, "I am a jealous God" blatently admitted that there was more than one God. We may have attended after that day, but if we did, I don't remember, and I have my strong doubts. The preacher wasn't highly pleased.
When I was in first grade, the control over my dreams that I had so enjoyed began to dwindle. The possibilities that I'd found began to lessen, until there was only one dream to chose from: A nightmare about my father becoming something else, and begging me to flee, insisting that he wouldn't be able to protect me much longer. A month later, he suffered a heart attack and died. With him, died any control over the dreams that I may have had, and the shadows came back, lurking always behind the doors, though steadily I grew brave enough to walk past them without turning my head.
When I was eleven we moved to Virginia Beach. There, life was as normal as it could have been for a family such as mine. My mother and I lived alone in a victorian style house on one of many dead end streets that formed a laticework of the American dream. It wasn't long before my brother slipped back out of the woodwork, a vaguely psychotic drunk with a young daughter and a highly psychotic girlfriend.
In my freshman year of highschool, the shadows and blackouts came back with a vengeance. I had just peaceably broken up with my first boyfriend, an unreasonably sweet sophomore with a life unjustifiably destroyed, when a particularly difficult menstraul cycle sent me reeling out of my classroom and stumbling for the bathroom, arms outstretched for balance as the voices screamed through my mind with a vengeance I'd never had the misfortune of witnessing. Body screaming with pain, I was nearly half way to the bathroom when the voices somehow increased in volume, and dots of black began to dance before my eyes, gathering and clumping until I was manuevering only through a few specks of what I should have seen. My breaths came deep but shallow as my body wavered, giving in though my mind screamed to fight harder. As my vision faded entirely, I fell against the wall, trembling. I slid, slowing myself as best I could with the friction of my palms against the cold blocks, to my knees. Tears poured from my eyes streaming down my cheeks in hot rivulets that dripped off my chin to burn a path over my wrist and to the floor.
I felt a hand on my shoulder, and like eletricity the touch sent a jolt of reality through my body, and pieces of the darkness blew away like sand, showing me the face of a boy.
"Are you alright?"
I wasn't, but I fought the growing buzz with all of my strength, lips parted in a strangled, silent cry as it roared electrically through my mind.
I failed.
When I woke up, it was in mid conversation with the nurse. I was laying on my back on one of those cots they always have in the nurses office, explaining that I was simply menstraul and that the pain from the cramps had overtaken me, and if I could get home and take some medicine, I would return to school healthy and well the next day. As though someone were playing with a volume wheel, the sound of the roar dimmed rapidly down, allowing myself to hear the words that were leaving my mouth in a voice that didn't sound like mine.
It didn't end there. Every month on the same day, at exactly 10:56 in the morning, the scene would repeat. Gradually I made it closer to the bathroom every month before I lost control. Eventually I could find the bathroom, empty my stomach, and return to the classroom to insist that the teacher summon the nurse and a wheel chair.
It was my sophomore year when I met Brad. I can't exactly say that the start of our relationship was a highly romantic one, but it was a start. Brad was a boy (I say "boy" only in hindsight. He was three years older than me, and in all sense but that of intelligence, a man) with an open mind-- a boy that knew of a genuine Wiccan Shop in Norfolk, a mere half hour from my perfect christian home, as well as a man that ran a coven. A tarot reading during my first visit to Mystic Moon, by a man named Shaman, claimed that I was what Pagans refer to as a Blue Light-- a living person, normally a young woman, that acts as a lighthouse to the dead so that they may be guided in to the next realm.. either when the Blue Light herself passes on, or through the Blue Light's instructions. A visit with the Covenmaster Brian supported this claim, with a sort of twist.
It seemed that I was the strongest Blue Light Brian had seen in his twenty six years of spiritual acknowledgement, and that it was only one aspect of the potential welling within my spirit. He took me under his wing as a sort of apprentice, with every intention to make me the second in command of his coven when I was fully trained and aware. He taught me a great many things, but most importantly, how to guard my mind from intruders of all varieties. Needless to say, the incidents that started my freshman year of highschool did not recur again.
My junior year, Brian had a premonition. Because it went against everything that he had been training me for, he was hesitant to inform me but in the end he decided that he had no choice, and relayed it to me in very vague detail. I was to begin my own coven. It would become direly necessary that I choose only those whom I most trust to form my ranks, because once the five head seats were filled, in his words, "The s**t would hit the fan."
It took the rest of my junior year and all of my senior year to fill this requirement, and as predicted, my life took a sharp down turn as soon as my task was completed. Shortly before prom, Brad grew to be more violent. I began shutting memories out of my mind through the meditation that Brian had taught me, and finding bruises that I never let anyone see. I wore turtle necks in spring to hide black and blue necklaces, baggy sweatshirts to be sure a tee shirt would not ride up over my belly to reveal more bruises, peppered with sickly green.
My coven reeled against me, begging me to do something about it, doing everything that they could to force me, but I was afraid.
After graduation, through a gynocological check up I was getting so I could prove to Mary Baldwin College that I was fully healthy, I discovered that I was pregnant. Not only pregnant, but twenty weeks pregnant-- far too late to get an abortion in the state of Virginia. What was worse, was that I had no memory of the event that took my virginity.
I spent eight hours in the passenger seat of my mothers car as she drove, tight lipped and tense to Georgia, cursing Brad's very existance. I spent fourty eight hours of absolute agony, praying despirately.
I broke up with Brad, and went to Mary Baldwin College, thinking that it would be an end to the torment, but it was not. Most old campuses are bound to be haunted, and anywhere you find the overwelming crowd of closed minded jesus freaks-- not to be confused with christians-- you are bound to find the curious ones that were like me. The onslaught against my mental barriors increased exponentially, even as I set to investigating the situation scientifically with a few newfounds friends. We took pictures, recordings, videos-- anything that the critics that sent us bladed looks when they thought we weren't looking, wouldn't be able to deny. Once we'd massed a rather large amount of data, we delved in to the more spiritual aspects of the matter, with pendulums, my practiced ability to open and close my mind to other minds, and a Ouija Board.
The thing about a Ouija board is that it is highly difficult to control. Using one, presuming that you don't have someone too close that's hellbent on fooling you, is basically opening a door to the other side. One never knows who will come in, or even if they'll tell the truth, much less whether or not one will be able to get them back out. I was arrogant, and so I was willing to give it a try in the highly haunted piano room of Spencer Dormitory, back to an empty couch and fingers resting as lightly as possible over a glow in the dark triangle, eyes closed and mind melding with the plastic, and the mind of the slender friend sitting across from me.
For a half hour, nothing happened at all, and then as the air thickened around us the triangle jerked sharply to my right, landing squarely on the uselessly decorated word "Hello". A third friend read the dictation, voice trembling with surprise, and I took a deep breath, gathering myself to play ambassador betwen the worlds of the living and dead again.
"Do you know someone in this room?"
"Yes." The third person dictated softly.
"Who in this room do you know?"
"Y. O. U."
The air grew heavier, darker, tenser. It was getting harder to breath.
"What is your name?" His answer was Cerg. "Do you have something to ask for?" The answer was yes. "Do you want help?" The answer was no. The air continued to grow heavier, so that the observers shifted uncomfortably in their seats. I opened my eyes slowly in to slits. My partner had backed away from the board entirely, was watching me with wide eyes. This was legitamate, and whoever Cerg was, he wasn't happy.
I don't know what inspired me to ask the question. I had had an entirely generic one lined up, on the tip of my tongue, but I forgot it, and different words emerged instead. "Do you mean me harm?"
"Yes."
By thanksgiving break, my room in mom's house was absolutely saturated in the feeling I had had in that piano room. I attempted an excorcism, with all of the skills that I had, but nothing seemed to work, and so I called on my mother. She didn't believe me, in the beginning. After all, what sane individual would? Once I'd convinced her to walk in to the room, however, she sensed it for herself, and immediately started to pray. With all the things I've done, and seen, I never had much faith in the power of prayer, but after two hours or so, the feeling vanished, and we retreated to her room for rest and cigarettes. The rest of the night was engulfed in what most would consider insanity. Both my mother's and my conciousness faded in to memories from past lives, messages from deities I had no understanding of, and for the first time, I witnessed a prophesy first hand. I was cursed, but also beloved by God, with more of a purpose than I had full understanding of.
The rest of the break was consumed with skeptism and irritation. Everywhere we went, there was someone complaining about superstitious people and their stupidity, people complaining about who I was, what I had become, what I had accomplished, and my shortcomings. People who, like the majority of society, had no desire to understand the kind of world that I had found myself initiated in to and continue to struggle against. People who never understood how one person can stand so vehemently against the majority for what they believe.
 Viral Freya · Thu Apr 16, 2009 @ 06:03pm · 0 Comments |
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Salomon Alexander E MD
42 Lambert St, Staunton, VA 24401
(540) 886-6259
Viral Freya · Thu Nov 20, 2008 @ 03:23am · 0 Comments |
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There was a gay guy (no, I'm not homophobic, or joking, just keep reading) supposed to be asleep on the floor next to my bed, but I woke up with him practically molded suffocatingly around me. I tried to kick him out of the bed but he got emotional, and said he was leaving to Delare to ship fruit if I wouldn't have him. I was sad, but I would rather have him leave than HAVE HIM, so I got online and tried to read some messages from aim, but they were all blurry. Then, mom and Tracey rushed in to my room to tell me to get dressed up to go pick up "my husband" and Tracey started stringing necklaces (silver and laboratory rubies-- you know the pinkish ones?) around her body like clothes. I was pretty much just sitting there and pouting, so when she asked me something I was too emotional to think through what she'd said, so I just snapped, "No, Tracey." And took away my bra that she was holding. She looked at me like the world had just fallen down and mom looked at me in horror. Mom said, "She just asked if she looked pretty." And I felt guilty but I still backed myself up with, "Well, that's the second bra of mine I've had to take away from her!"
Then we were outside that little strip mall thingy that has coldstone in it, in front of wallmart on that one street with the mall on it (*trying not to give out clues as to where she and her friends live, in case some wierd stalker people get on myspace and try to hunt her down*) in front of wallmart. It was nighttime, and we were waiting for Brad to come home from... like... the off beat military or something. He was an assassin of some sort or another. The gay guy was telling mom where he was going, and that he was going to ship pinapples across the Maryland Delaware line, as I watched some far away lightning contently. This chick in a sporty car pulled in with Brad in the backseat, and just as he jumped out to give me a hug and a kiss, the gay guy freaked out, announced that the storm would be here soon, and dragged me in to his truck. He started driving like a madman, and I told him to stop, because "What about mom?!" And he said she'd have to find her own shelter, so I jumped out of the truck. I ran back to mom as it started raining and, drenched, I told her that the storm was going to get worse, and they shoved me in to the car closest to the wall. It LOOKED like a car on the outside, but it was more like a limozine on the inside. It fit four people in the backseat instead of three, so after me, Brad, Tracey, and mom sat down, and then in the front passenger seat, my dad sat. I tried to get a look at the chick that was driving, but all I could see was dirty blonde hair. She half turned around to wink at me. Between the car, and being in Brad's arms again, I was warm, and comfortable, but then we go to the resteraunt that was in the place of wallmart, and Jordan saw me through it's window. I heard her say, "Oh my god, It's Dory! I haven't seen her since just before Texas!" So we got in to the resteraunt, and I ran to go say hi, but she didn't see me anymore. I took of my sunglasses-- two pairs-- so she'll recognize me, but it doesn't help. The sunglasses belonged to Brad, and the scary "gay" guy. The gay guy's were more distinct, and they were the dark blue ones with a bozy frame, and silver dragons swimming up the sides. Anyway, I showed Jordan my earrings anyway. "See?" I tell her, "I'm growing up." And I took them out but she still didn't see me. She muttered about going back to Maryland, looking straight through me, and I memorized her face, as I said, "You're in Maryland?" She nodded a little, but not to me. Just in affirmation to her thought. I went back to the table, bloody and crying. Brad had ordered cheese sticks for me, and I woke up trying to put my earrings back in my bloody ears as I looked at the soups and salads on the menu, looking for clam chowder.
Viral Freya · Sat Nov 24, 2007 @ 02:22pm · 0 Comments |
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A good link to have. Everywhere. |
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We were sitting in a resteraunt, Brad, me, mom, and someone else that I can't remember, and I was going on and on about how wonderful Johnny Rockets is, and wondering why I didn't go there more often, and Brad kinda glared at me, and said, "Cause they made me throw up?" And I was like, "Oh. Yeah. That." And then mom and the random person went outside to smoke a cigarette, and I grabbed one of the incense sticks out of my bag, and put it in my mouth. Mom looked in the window, saw, pointed and laughed. I laughed too, or more, pretended to. You know, pretending I'd done it as a joke.
Now, the dream book says that a resteraunt is a place to get nurishment, cigarettes are a pollution of the body, and incense symbolizes spiritual upliftment. A boyfriend symbolizes either the actual person, or the sexuality within myself-- I think we'll go with the actual person. Now, the number four, which I didn't think to look up til just now.. Home, and balance.
So the basic translated message is that mom's poisoning herself while I'm trying to find spiritual enlightment, and laughing at my efforts as if the path has been switched. Meanwhile, Brad's sitting there saying, "What the ******** is wrong with you, Dory, get over her."
Viral Freya · Sat May 05, 2007 @ 01:44pm · 0 Comments |
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