moved

I TRIED TO EDIT BOULEVARD OF BROKEN DREAMS AND I FUCKED UP

Let me tell you what I know about this after living here for nearly thirty years.

This is a modern European country, the home of hot net startups, of Internet giants and (in some places, some very few places) the fastest broadband on Earth. People here live in this century, HARD.

Yet they get nervous about walking up that one hill close to their home after dark, because, you know… stuff happens there.

I know this because Peter and I live next to One Of Those Hills. There are people in our locality who wouldn’t go up our tiny country road on a dark night for love or money. What they make of us being so close to it for so long without harm coming to us, I have no idea. For all I know, it’s ascribed to us being writers (i.e. sort of bards) or mad folk (also in some kind of positive relationship with the Dangerous Side: don’t forget that the root word of “silly”, which used to be English for “crazy”, is the Old English _saelig_, “holy”…) or otherwise somehow weirdly exempt.

And you know what? I’m never going to ask. Because one does not discuss such things. Lest people from outside get the wrong idea about us, about normal modern Irish people living in normal modern Ireland.

You hear about this in whispers, though, in the pub, late at night, when all the tourists have gone to bed or gone away and no one but the locals are around. That hill. That curve in the road. That cold feeling you get in that one place. There is a deep understanding that there is something here older than us, that doesn’t care about us particularly, that (when we obtrude on it) is as willing to kick us in the slats as to let us pass by unmolested.

So you greet the magpies, singly or otherwise. You let stones in the middle of fields be. You apologize to the hawthorn bush when you’re pruning it. If you see something peculiar that cannot be otherwise explained, you are polite to it and pass onward about your business without further comment. And you don’t go on about it afterwards. Because it’s… unwise. Not that you personally know any examples of people who’ve screwed it up, of course. But you don’t meddle, and you learn when to look the other way, not to see, not to hear. Some things have just been here (for various values of “here” and various values of “been”) a lot longer than you have, and will be here still after you’re gone. That’s the way of it. When you hear the story about the idiots who for a prank chainsawed the centuries-old fairy tree a couple of counties over, you say – if asked by a neighbor – exactly what they’re probably thinking: “Poor fuckers. They’re doomed.” And if asked by anybody else you shake your head and say something anodyne about Kids These Days. (While thinking DOOMED all over again, because there are some particularly self-destructive ways to increase entropy.)

Meanwhile, in Iceland: the county council that carelessly knocked a known elf rock off a hillside when repairing a road has had to go dig the rock up from where it got buried during construction, because that road has had the most impossible damn stuff happen to it since that you ever heard of. Doubtless some nice person (maybe they’ll send out for the Priest of Thor or some such) will come along and do a little propitiatory sacrifice of some kind to the alfar, belatedly begging their pardon for the inconvenience.

They’re building the alfar a new temple, too.

Don’t go near big trees in the night

If you live on a farm, don’t look outside the windows at night

I have broken all these rules.

I’ve seen some shit.

If it sounds like your mom, but you didn’t realize your mom is home…. it’s not your mom. Promise.

One walked onto the porch once. Wasn’t fun. But they’re not super keen on guns. Typically bolt when they see one.

You think it’s the neighbor kids.

It’s not the neighbor kids.

Might sound like coyotes but you never really /see/ the coyotes but then wow that one cow was reaaaaaally fucked up this morning. The next night when you hear another one screaming you just turn the tv up a little more. Maybe fire a gun in the air but you don’t go after it. If it is coyotes then it’s probably a pack and you seriously don’t want to fuck with that and if it’s the other thing you seriously REALLY don’t want to fuck with that.

So in the south, especially near the mountains, you just go straight from your car to inside your house, draw your curtains and watch tv.

If you see lights in the fields just fucking leave it alone.

Eyes forward. Don’t be fucking stupid. Mind your own business. Call your neighbors and tell them to bring the cats in. There’s coyotes out. Some of them know. Most of them don’t.

Other than that everything’s a ghost and they died in the civil war. Literally all of everything else is just the civil war. We used to smell old perfume and pipe tobacco in the weeks leading up to the battle anniversaries.

We had ‘witches’ in the mountains (more like ghost-women who will snatch you up by making you wander in a daze around the forest like the Blair Witch before killing you or letting you back out into society but you’re… different). Or devils in springs or abandoned wells (don’t look too long into one or something will follow you). 

But we also had the cornfield demons. I’ve witnessed this many times. You’ll be in the passenger seat looking out the window and see red glowing eyes in the cornfield. No light shining in that direction. Just two red dots a few inches apart faintly glowing in a pitch black cornfield. They’re not the glow of deer eyes in the headlights. More like the embers of a dying fire. Sometimes, as you drive away, you’ll look out the back window or side mirror and you can see the eyes have moved to the edge of the corn field, still watching you. If you bring it up with the driver, they’ll call you paranoid, but grip the wheel a bit tighter and driver a little faster.

There weren’t as many Civil War cemeteries as I live by now (there is one a tenth of a mile from my house currently) but most the advice I learned or decided was good to just trust my gut on still applies. Mind you, I’m studying physics, so I either learned the hard way or just decided that my instinct was better safe than sorry.

Don’t go near the lake at night. Don’t follow the fireflies toward the water’s edge because they’re not fireflies. Trust the cat. The cat always knows better than you do.

If you’re swimming in a spring and see a winking light in the Mouth, don’t go near it. They say people die because they get caught in the caves. I know that’s only half true. Whatever that light is, I’ve gotten close enough to watch it back deep into the shadows. Actually, unless you’re a strong swimmer don’t go near the mouth of a spring at all in Florida.

Touch the Great Oaks and Live Oaks with tender reverence because they are guardians but only if you show respect. Don’t look at the scrub at night, things with yellow eyes will stare back and you will want to follow them.

What I’ve learned in the Panhandle boils down to: stay out of the woods at night unless you know the Firebreak around your house. Be respectful of the dead in the Cemeteries if you must be there after dusk, because the things within the gates will leave you be—it’s what wanders outside the gates that you have to worry about.

When you leave a cemetery at night, get to your car, and get out as fast as possible. Don’t look back at the graveyard until you’ve put a couple of hundred yards between it and you if you can avoid it (don’t invite the ghost in your car, basically.)

There is always some wooden bridge that lots of people have jumped off of and died that is very much haunted that runs over a river. It’s always a pre-Civil War bridge. It might have been remade and isn’t wood anymore, but you don’t cross it at night, and you NEVER cross it at midnight or later.

In my town, there’s a spot in the river where anything built there is burned to the ground consistently, and never lasts more than seven years.

There is one statue in one of the Civil War cemeteries that no one goes near and has never been cleaned. I didn’t grow up here so no one will tell me why.

Trees forming perfectly geometrically shaped clearings are some of the safest places in the woods. Getting to them, however, is probably not, and often is done at high speed. Carry iron and silver with you in the woods if you go out at night. And on those days where the light is tinted gray, and the needles on the pines look like ash? Don’t go into the woods.

Leave the bathroom fan on because you don’t want to hear the sounds that come from the woods. When the neighbor dogs all go nuts and start barking and yelling and yowling lock your doors and windows and bring the cats in if they didn’t come in already.

Stay away from faerie rings. Especially on college campuses. I don’t know why but around here, University and College campuses seem to have much more… active… Fae. Also, don’t ever, and I mean EVER go near a kitten that is in the middle of a faerie ring. I don’t care how much you love cats. I really don’t. Trust me, it’s not fun.

Ignore the thunk against the screen door. It’s just a moth. It’s always just a moth.

Never say too long at the rest stops along I-10. They’re all liminal spaces and you don’t want something following you home. Also, there is one that has just been finished west and closes to Tallahassee… just… I don’t know what they disturbed, but get in and get out because that place feels WRONG. Don’t look into the woods/scrubs along any of the rest stops in Florida. You won’t like what you see, or what you think you see. There are things in the woods that never forgot.

At 2 am on a clear night you will hear a train’s whistle. There is no schedule for the train and only one set of tracks in town. You can be right there by the tracks and you will never see the train. It always sounds as far away whether you’re at home seven miles away from the tracks or are sitting at them.

I grew up in a little peninsula of farming land. Beans on one side, corn on the other. Nightmare for me during rice season because of mosquitos.

When I was five? I randomly woke up in my brother’s room and looked up out his bedroom window to see a pair of large, red, oval eyes on the other side. I didn’t know what to make of it, merely blinked and laid back down to sleep. I don’t think my brother was in the room at all.

He claimed to have played with goats’ heads (y’know, inverted pentagrams and demons and whatnot). I doubt he actually did anything, but he remains convinced and unnerved. Maybe he did do something.

Nothing else happened that I can recall at that house. It was fairly void of things that I’m aware of, though the empty bean fields felt… weird. Mischievous, I think.

Where my grandma lived, however, is a different story.

Things are in those woods in Butler county. You wouldn’t think so during the daylight, but the sheer amount of nightmares I had when we moved there was enough to convince me by the third night in a row of having them, well before I would be scared to go into the bathroom without the light being beforehand. Only once did see something when I was awake at her house, another time I can’t be too sure I was dreaming or not at the house we moved into years later.

The frequent feeling of witch winds without the witch weather is also a common occurrence. … Things… ride the winds, in both Butler and Ripley. They’ve been kind to me.

They prefer the warm fronts, though. And autumn. But they are oddly absent near pine trees or where there’s a lack of open space.

When I was 15 or 16, during a particularly terrified reaction to the premise of playing dodgeball (try being hit in the face at least once a game since they introduced it to the class in public school and not develop a near PTSD-like reaction to it), I was given an errand to go do… something else… because I was legit crying and scared about the prospect of playing and it was obvious that I just wasn’t being lazy and had a legit reason for not wanting to play.

I swear to god something or someone in the wind took my fear. It was a bit windy when I left the gym and it billowed around me, lifted my shirt all around just a few inches, like being under a vent, and… it was gone. I wasn’t scared. I wasn’t crying. I was… calm. At peace. I walked back into that gym perfectly fine.

Be kind to the wind. Sing it songs. Vocalize to it. Read it poetry and stories. Those that ride the wind in the country typically will be just as kind.

However.

Sure, someone might be more technically accomplished than you - you might not be able to colour as nicely or craft a sentence that rings as poetically - but art is only really secondarily about that. It’s firstmost about what you, uniquely, have to express, and how the precise way you express it might be what others need to relate to it - even if it’s less flashy, less “beautiful”, and gets fewer notes.

I promise you this: there are obscure fanfics with only a handful of notes that are the read-and-re-read favourites of someone too anxious to comment. There are drawings done by 14-year-olds in poorly-blended markers that are someone’s favourite because they spoke to something that nothing else did. There are covers of songs where your voice cracks and you cringe every time you hear it but someone thinks the way it cracked just at that moment added beauty to the song. There are angsty three-line poems you wrote at 4am that someone once called “pretentious emo trash” that are loved by someone else going through the same thing as you.

And I guarantee you, there is something unique about your art. Even if you’re “saying something someone else has said”. Even if you’re the thousandth person to take on the subject. Even if you feel like you’re not at all unique. You’re bound to express something, however subtle, that didn’t exist until then.