(An awkward state of dissatisfaction inhibits my judgment.)

…

The calm…

I am nearer the core now, and looking back I can see my few regrets, my few mistakes. Looking from the center of this hurricane out at the endless stretch of my wake's influence I can see where, I can see who I came from.

Crouching in the eye of the tempest, meditating on a wanted emptiness.

…

The maggot lays dormant, my mind's juggernaut rendered inoperable.

(Danger sometimes seems to recess, and I allowed myself time to forget a poison, a dagger, a self-destruct sequence initiated by my ignorance.)

…

…before…

Obscured by atmospheric haze, I am witness to the distant tormented motions of a people and culture I had given away. Heaps of dumb material balancing precariously on the summit of pride, surrounded by the thin air of inaction…

Among these bungled mutants gyrates an old friend; someone who could be here with me now, naked in the eye of a beautiful storm. I see her. She is tearing at her cunt with a jagged signpost, bleeding and crying while she mutilates her genitalia for the judgmental amusement of an anonymous teenage jury.

Somewhere, within her tangled movements and seemingly irresponsible motion, I think I see her smile out at me. Flashing across her tear-streaked flesh was a beautiful, conscious, knowing smile.

Cousins from a war with no sides save those that we ourselves so foolishly defined.

…

I shift the maggot’s bulk, and drive it from its hibernation. I coax it to continue circling my mind, as milestone to the loves of another, of a younger me.

(I had deceived myself. I had created Judas as a puppet definition for my fears; an escape from a me that I was very afraid to know.)

…calm.

The storm never moves, and its center, its eye, the catharsis of our own existence is defined by our presence within it.