Where Things Went Wrong
Where Things Went Wrong
Pencil and India Ink on Paper
It’s been six weeks from today since we saw this place and knew something was terribly wrong. My daughter spotted this seeping black hollow, its horrifically out-of-place cracked body, walled by a cement crypt, in a place where no cement could have been poured. That it exists is impossible and therefore terrifying.
It took hiking seven miles into a canyon and then climbing up and over two mountains to find it. My daughter yelled in alarm, “What is that?” Neither one of us could answer, and both of us knew that we had entered a very bad place. A place filled with spiders, maggots, yellow teeth, and breath the odor of battery acid eating the flesh of anything living that stumbled into its dark maw.
Yet we inched our way past it. Yet we kept climbing. Yet we crested a third mountain with this black hole breathing at our backs from below and the sun setting rapidly in the west. The sky turned sulfur yellow. No brilliance in that sunset. Just a big toxic wrong, from which I have been trying to right myself ever since.
Today when I woke yet again feeling like a pile of rocks that had been hit by a thousand trucks, I decided to draw this place to free myself from the hold it has had on me. This site that marks a turn in my life that seems to have left me skidding on two wheels for over a month now.
If I put it here on this paper, if I draw this very wrong place in cheap pencil in a crap drawing because the place does smell like fetid shit, can I finally leave the long dark nights behind me and get back on the right path?
We knew when we saw it that things had turned very bad. Nothing good comes of a place filled with this much darkness, tucked behind towering mountains and a canyon so narrow even a helicopter couldn’t land to save me when I needed saving. This place that contains the rotting breath of every bad man. Even the dead ones breathe here. And I felt their breath that day when I was lost with my daughter, and they have been breathing down my back ever since. Sometimes I wake in the night sweating their breath from my pores.
Let this physical act of pencil in hand be the final exorcism. The turning point. The place where I can turn myself around and stand upright on two solid feet through the mere act of drawing the demons out of me. Let this drawing block their path to my heart where they have reached their fingers into my arteries and haunted me to the point of utter physical failure. My heart beating and pumping liquid black from this poison that pushed me to the brink of life overdose. This is its end. This is my beginning.
I pour graphite onto paper to create the antidote for the death bite. Hair of the dog and all that shit. I draw the thing that poisoned me to cure me of its poison. Let me turn my back on that dark place, where it came from, and where it took me. Let me set myself right from six weeks of wrongs. Let me live and seal the ghosts and the demons tight within the margin of this page. Lock them deep under the mountains, though they don’t belong there. They are better locked beneath lost trails, than they are burying me alive with every last breath I have.
Today is the day I turn the page. Today is the day I turn around. Find myself again. I am reaching out my arms, pencil stained and ink etched with the will to draw myself back to life. Can you grab me and pull me out? Can you?