Building 11 “Phases of the Moon”

I took a different route on the way home from work.

I went the opposite way from the way I am used to.

You wouldn't think such a thing would make such a difference, but the reality is that sometimes things that are simple are often the things that we are missing. Life gets stale and the pain gets too strong all because we forget to do the one thing that matters most.

And that is to be kind.

People have talked about all different sorts of things that sustain living, but I can't really think of anything else that matters more, all in all, than to learn how to be kind, especially to ourselves. It is the self love that I have the hardest time with, and the one that I have to constantly needs reiterating.

I found love where it wasn't supposed to be.

In a mirror.

In my face.

I know when I write to you it is more often than not because I need to tell you about something that is going wrong, but that wasn't the case for a while wasn't it? When we first started talking, it was to tell you about a new job and how excited I was. We were sharing the joys of life even while the world slowly began to fall apart.

It has been over a year since we first started talking, and in a lot of ways it doesn't feel like that at all. So much has changed, including me. I look at my life now and it feels so dirty and messy, the realizations of my past bubbling me over the last few weeks.

And as we have talked, I have told you about other things, about the death of my mother and my friend, and about how much my dreams hurt me. And you have told me about you, and I cannot even begin to tell you how much that has mattered to me.

I know you know how much, because I have told you how I feel.

Plus I think you feel the same.

If I were to have imagined where my life would be a year ago, this would be the last thing that I would have pictured. My work has become almost an afterthought with everything that has been going on, and the memory of the costume and the weight loss...the pain of that disconnect from my body and the harm that seemed to be sitting in all my limbs, those things were such a short time ago in the broad scheme of things.

But actually, they weren't. Those events were over six months ago, and that feels so long.

Walking tonight gave me perspective, in ways that I wasn't thinking it would. People often think about this place as being different at night, and they are not wrong. There is a way the place plays with shadows and the way that light seems to pull away when the moon is hidden in the sky. It is like the dark calls to the dark, and that the deeper the darkness gets, the more there seems to be found.

I say this, because going the “wrong way round”, taking an alternative path home has helped me to see what I have been ignoring, the simple truth that I think is why all of this has been so hard on me, and why you have heard only about the bad things.

Wellington Street is changing, but not in the ways that are obvious to see. For years things were the same, with periodic events of violence. But that isn't the way of things right now.

I have lived here all my life, so when I tell you this I hope you see it as carrying weight. The shadows are deeper now, the changes more frenetic. Things are working and unwinding in ways that honestly, I was never expecting, and I think that I am really getting scared. And though I started this letter with joy and a renewed sense of vigor, it is only so that I have what I need to confront what is to come.

I don't know if this is me being paranoid, but I was too sick to notice these things before.

In order to feel in control, I have constantly gone home the same way every day. Doing things that way caused the details to fall away and into the background of my mind. It was okay to see things that way, because it meant that I was safe from the pain.

It was the hard thing to do for a hard thing to endure.

I don't know yet why the hell my body feels this way. Maybe it is the new medicine doing what it is supposed to, in order to grant me an escape from this fog and this feeling of despair. Whatever the reason, I can see things moving in ways that are uncomfortable.

Like the last account I shared with you.

There are all levels of madness around here, and I know it is hard to believe in these things. Gods know I struggle with it, even when seeing these things with my own eyes.

But the thing that has got me thinking, and the thing that has got me worrying, is the realizations that should have stood out to me before.

The Old Man.

He has traveled and he has sought out new places. He has refined and altered how he interacts with others. His laughter is gone mostly, and he simply seems to want to feed, to incur the pains of those around him. And that in itself is not out of the ordinary. That is his nature.

But the last account left me thinking.

The Old Man is a being that lives on pain and suffering, and yet he is a thing of hunger and need. So when I read the last account, it didn't stand out to me. But when I noticed the shadows and the changes to the street in a way that was real and concrete, I was left feeling genuine horror as I thought about one simple thing.

The man in the last account saw something in the sky that hurt him, and by all accounts that is the sort of wound that the Old Man seeks.

And yet this time, and this time alone, something had changed.

The Old Man ran out of room.

The Old Man couldn't get it all, and that has never happened.

Maybe this sounds mad. Maybe it sounds brilliant. I hope you see it is the latter, because I have gone too far to the edge before, and this doesn't feel like that.

I am scared.

Wellington Street doesn't scare me.

But I am scared.

And a package arrived at my door the other day.

I told you before that dad and I had to change some things to make sure that this sort of thing didn't happen. I mean, I still have things delivered to me, but it is always at my work, especially since I took on my new duties. I waited the safe amount of time, sprayed it down and double checked the return address just to confirm it is a real place.

Inside was a series of images of the moon in various phases of transition. From the looks of it the pictures seemed to be taken around the time when the moon was just clearing the buildings and homes that made up the horizon.

A church was in every shot, though I was not able to locate a church near the home of the person who sent it to me.

There are notes all over the pictures, with complex mathematical (or perhaps not so complex mathematical) measurements and equations, all of which flew right over my head. But from what I can figure, he is using the math to try and assert that there are discrepancies in the size and position of the moon when compared to the norm for that time of year and the expected lunar position.

He isolated a few variables and seem to have a firm grasp of what is being said, but they are all a bit much, so I sent copies of the “findings” to a friend of mine who has connections to our office.

From what he was able to tell me, the person seemed to be accurate based on what information I provided, but said the man seem to be working with faulty or manipulated data, and are not making references to modern states of the moon, at least going back six months.

He tried going back further, but his calculations suggest states of position of the moon that haven't been accurate for well over 5,000 years.

I will talk to my coworkers about all this on Monday. I can only hope that they will manage to see what I am seeing.