Castle of Ash

The dinner table is well stocked, full of mutton and turkey, pies and cakes of every sort and flavor. The wine flows freely from its skins into the waiting cups of friends and family who have come to celebrate in my castle. Beside me, my queen blushes slightly, her dark hair framing a ravishing beauty with eyes that hold both innocence and wisdom. I love her so, for she is my world.

"A toast," I declare, raising my golden goblet high so that all my guests may hear. "To a life of good tidings for us all, and a special gratitude that the gods have smiled favorably upon me. For here in my kingdom, here in my castle, no better friends could I have known." My friends cheer wildly and drink their wine as I turn to my beloved. "And no better wife could I have loved," I whisper in her ear, causing her to blush and offer a gentle kiss.

I sit back upon my throne, ready to enjoy the first offerings of my kingdom's harvest when a knight, battled and bruised, throws open the banquet doors and rushes in. "The enemy draws near sire, and with them death and destruction!"

Hurriedly I abandon the banquet hall and rush to the watchtowers to see an approaching army dressed only in black as they march towards my castle. Atop midnight horses they ride, quietly and surely, with faces concealed by armor so that with each step closer they grow like looming shadows. When only a small patch of grass separates their numbers from my castle walls, the army halts and stares in unison into my eyes.

"What shall we do sire?" a frightened guest from my banquet asks.

"Worry not," I reply. "For the castle walls are strong and can repel even the fiercest assault."

No sooner had my assurances been declared than did I see the catapults spill forth from the invaders' numbers. With clockwork precision they loaded, readied, and fired.

At once the ground shook beneath my feet. Walls that had stood for ages past began to crumble and watchtowers that once reached far into the heavens fell. The first shots fell upon my treasury, and all the gold coins and precious jewels I once hoarded were flung into the air like so many evening stars. They fell back upon the earth in broken shards, some burying themselves within the ground while others melted within the fires that now burned.

"Your riches are now but worthless tokens my liege," another guest spoke. "For this army has destroyed in an instant that which took a lifetime to create."

"So they have," I acknowledged. "But my riches are not in the treasury where moth and rust can consume. The sting they have inflicted is mighty, but my true wealth lays elsewhere."

"Where then my king, where is your wealth?"

No sooner had the words left his lips than another volley of the catapults' fury rained down upon us. My friend, who just a moment before had stood beside me was now wiped from the earth, his soul dashed by the catapults' fire. I look around to see all of my friends running in terror as wave upon wave extinguished their lives until at last there are none who still draw breath. All of my friends lay scattered around me dead, mere corpses that can neither hear nor tell the tales of men.

To my knees I fall, but no sooner had they buckled than I feel my strength return as my wife, the woman I love more than any soul upon this fair earth joins my side. She lifts me up, wipes the dust and ashes from my crown and places it atop my head. 

"Though you have nothing left, and your kingdom has fallen to dust, I will always stand beside you my king...and my love."

"My kingdom has indeed fallen," I say. "But of my true wealth I have lost not a penny. For I hold my true wealth even now, in my arms and in my heart."

I lean in to kiss her when the final surge of catapult fire arrives. It snatches her from my arms, tossing me across the desolate ruins that once declared my glory. I tumble through the debris, only stopping when I crash into a tall mirror that has managed to survive the onslaught unscathed.

With choking breath I call out my queen's name. No answer. I yell for her, scream for her, but am answered only by the cold wind and morbid songs of vultures overhead. Finally I see her face, resting on the ground as if she has only fallen asleep. Yet when I speak softly her name, her eyes do not open.

Tears fall from my eyes as I weep for the fallen who surround their battered king. A dark rider dismounts his horse and walks towards me. He unsheathes his sword, ready to end my suffering when I say to him, "You have taken everything from me. What have I done to deserve such punishment?"

He raises his sword towards the heavens, readying his fatal blow, then stops short and points his blade towards the unbroken mirror that rests just behind me. I turn slowly, and behold the only remnant of my kingdom as I peer into the looking glass.

The man who stares back has lost all and I finally see how ugly I have become.

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Today my hope was extinguished. The recent years that have passed have not been kind ones and I have managed through them only with the help of a woman in whose graciousness I am forever indebted. She has been an important part of my life for many years, perhaps the most important. She treated me kindly. She once loved me. Yet I returned her grace with barbarity and callous.

I ask to see her again, to tell her all the things that two years of silence have wasted.

"I'm sorry Bobby, but I am seeing someone else."

My breath is stolen. In silence I falter.

She has moved on and I finally understand what I have lost. I miss her. I still love her. But that love is merely ashes of a kingdom that I have already burned to the ground. I have only to look in the mirror to find my greatest enemy.

Just Another Day

Another day, another year, another season of life has passed, and with the close of 2013 we step blissfully into a new year of possibility where the shackles of burdens past are cast aside and a world of opportunity lays before us. Such is the promise a new year. It always is. Every year the world stops to watch a ball in Times Square count down the last remaining seconds of a dying life so that a new one may be reborn from the ashes. Only it is not from ashes, but rather rainbow colored confetti and the familiar tune of Auld Lang Syne that heralds our arrival into this brave new world. We have done it. We have reset the clock for an entire year, but what chapters now follow remain unwritten, just waiting for us to pick up our pen and fill the page.

The first sentence of my page for 2014 has just been written, not more than an hour ago when I was told, "Bobby, thank you for your efforts but we are going to have to let you go." There it is...again. Another layoff, another company I have cast my lot with is going bankrupt, and like a rat fleeing a sinking ship I find myself once again in the cold waters of frustration and uncertainty. Three times...three times I have been laid off since graduating. And with each unfulfilled opportunity, with each failed attempt in the corporate world, I have finally resolved myself to my fate. I'm done. I'm done with this life of pursuing wealth at the expense of my humanity. I'm done with letting the world before my eyes murder the ones of my imagination. Though my resume reads like that of a businessman, my heart is that of a dreamer, a poet, a man whose only real happiness is known within the beauty of a flowing quill. I cannot fall back into a life pursuing wealth, for it is an illness for which there is no cure.

So where will 2014 now take me? I have no ties to Atlanta or anywhere else that might encumber my wanderings. I have no responsibilities to a wife nor children that might command my loyalty. No, I have a duty only to myself, a duty to finish my novel and pursue the literary dreams that have for so long been stifled by a countenance repressed by irrational fears. My fears were that without financial security in my life there would be no happiness, indeed there could not be. But I am not afraid of that anymore. Instead a new fear consumes me, a fear far more malignant and ominous that anything hitherto seen. I am afraid of my dreams dying. I am afraid of losing the only thing that truly makes me human. And you should be too. If there is one thing that I have realized from all of my layoffs, all of my failed attempts at fighting and scraping for just a tiny bit of security, it is that there truly is none. There is no security, not with finances, not with people, and not with trying to pursue a life that many of us never imagined but have woken up to find ourselves in all the same. But there are costs, and those costs are the dreams you have for whatever life you want to live. That is the part of you that makes you special, the part of you that is makes life worth living, and no one can ever take that from you...but sadly, it can be given away.

Don't give away your dreams, and don't give up on them either. As we begin a new year full of endless possibilities, ask yourself if the life you have found yourself in is the one you want or merely the one you have accepted. Is it a life centered on holding onto security or living your dreams? With each drop of the ball in Times Square, with each rendition of Auld Lang Syne, we are that much closer to writing our final chapter and closing our book forever. Our stories are coming to an end, and with them all of our unfulfilled dreams. So hold fast to your pen and start writing today, then look back in wonder at the story you have told.

One Play

"Just remember Bobby, one play and your life can change forever."

My father spoke those words tonight, not five minutes ago after we hung up the phone. For the uninitiated, he was referencing the outcome of this past weekend's Iron Bowl when my beloved Auburn Tigers made perhaps the most incredible play in the history of collegiate sports to defeat The University of Alabama in one of the wildest games in recent memory. Behold the glory below and I dare you to disagree.

The Play

The Aftermath

Regardless of your affiliation with collegiate sports, everyone can appreciate that it is simply an amazing play and one that has flooded my home state of Alabama with tears of both sorrow and joy (depending on your team loyalties of course). My father referenced this play and the consequences of its outcome for a very specific reason. You see, I planned on calling him this evening with the news that I had been laid off from my job, an unfortunate routine that I have become accustomed to after once again finding myself employed at yet another dismal company. I thought that today would be my last day, I truly did, that the pink slip would arrive and my familiar seat in the unemployment line would still be warm from my last sojourn there. But I didn't get laid off today, not at all. In fact, my employer has instead chosen to fire my boss and promote me to his position, a decision that was not only unexpected but also unwelcomed. I do not want my boss's job, I never have. And what's more, I don't want to spend another second living a life that (despite being the author of its creation) feels so very alien to me. It is a life bound to the demands of corporate America where the soul of man is ripped from his body to leave but an empty husk behind, and the joy of creation is sacrificed to the gods of mediocrity for yet another meaningless dollar. I do not want this...I do not want this at all.

Instead I want to create. I want to use my words to inspire readers with some measure of passion that filled the seats of Jordan-Hare on that November night as the cheers from a hundred thousand soaring voices rose like smoke into the cold air and set the sky aflame. I want it more than anything and, what's more, I am finally prepared to make the sacrifices to attain it. I must become a writer, for all other paths lead only to despair.

One play, one glorious, unbelievable, and perhaps even predestined play changed that young man's life forever and with it launched him into the annals of lore and legend. It was a single moment in his life like so many others, yet its consequences will be far reaching and profound. A single misstep, the decision to cut right instead of left or hesitate just a second longer would have cost him his chance at immortality and with it doomed the hopes of every Auburn fan who watched the impossible unfold. Life is always like that. The choices we make each day cast waves of chance and fortune far into the future, through years that we cannot yet imagine and with people we have not yet met. After years of quiet reflection coupled with moments of sheer exuberance in discovering my one true passion, I finally understand what I must do with my life and why I am called to do it. So I will tell my stories, just as I am doing now, and I will write them only for you, just as I always have....and perhaps in doing so I may finally find the peace that so many of us seek, but which so few ever find.

Colder Weather

Four men sit idle around a campfire, the flames' iridescent glow casting dancing shadows across faces that neither twitch nor stir. Their stares remains fixed, their focus deliberate. A single purpose has drawn them deep into the wilderness to momentarily escape the respective lives that choice and circumstance have hewn from the slab of fortune: the doctor, the lawman, the preacher, and the wanderer...all have abandoned their titles this night to adopt the simple monikers that allow even kings to reclaim their identity.

It is for the camaraderie that they have gathered together, to hearken back to the glories of former days, when the burden of age yielded to the caprice of their tempestuous youth. With gleeful exuberance they recount their childhood tales, aided by the half-empty bottle of "Old No. 7" that both clouds and guides their memory. No matter, for as tales grow larger so too do their smiles, the unmistakable hallmark of time well spent with friends. Long into the night they fill the forest with laughter, merrily singing a ballad of days of old.

In time the unattended flames slowly die and the men retire for the evening. As one fire retreats back into the earth, another crests the morning horizon to welcome the dawn of a new day. The four men rise early and bid their farewells before returning to the lives that for a single evening had been left behind. The doctor will return to his wife and the preacher to his, while the lawman also has a girl that awaits his arrival. But what of the wanderer, the man who lingers long after the others have departed? He stands idle beside the highway, looking south towards Atlanta, then turning north to gaze down winding roads that climb the Appalachian mountains and disappear far into the distance. He wants to follow that latter trail, to tread its steps into an unfamiliar land of ice and snow where all the world is but a stranger, save for that one face...the face his misses dearly, the face that still haunts his memory every day. 

In resignation he begins southward, glancing over his shoulder with every step to imagine a life that might have been.

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I needed to escape last weekend. For two days and nights I camped in the Appalachian mountains with three of my oldest and dearest friends. Each of these men I have known for some twenty years and each is a brother to me. I needed to spend time with them to forget about the reality of my situation, how I am about to lose yet another job to the fickle whims of fate, how I don't have a plan of what to do next. I needed to forget about those things and focus instead on what is actually important in my life and what it is I actually want out of it. Of all the paths that I might take and all the possibilities contained therein, there are only two things that I actually desire. The first is to become an accomplished writer, and to that end I am pouring my soul into completing a project that has been years in the making. My second desire is for a woman I so foolishly cast aside. Somewhere over the mountains she resides, far from my southern home where the snows of winter are just beginning to fall. Of my two desires, one I have complete control over while the other I have none. Instead I have only hope, a misguided, undirected, and undeniably foolish hope that one day the woman I abandoned will return, and with her a love such as I have never known before or since.

The skies over Boston grow cold as winter approaches, yet it is only a soothing warmth that I still remember.

Snow Globe

She dances in a snow globe, her hands twirling the midnight air into a cocoon of icy flakes that surround her body. They settle on her face and disappear in tiny droplets that capture the streetlight's glow and frame her smile in a thousand points of light unrivaled by even the starry night above. Faster and faster she twirls with outstretched arms and a gaze that is cast skywards. She smiles. She laughs. And then she stops.

"Join me," she says as two mittened hands welcome me to the dance.

I take her hands and feel their warmth instantly. She spins within the frigid air, never letting me go as she draws closer and closer, until finally she spins into my arms which wrap tightly around her body and replace the icy cocoon she has now shed.

"Kiss me," she whispers. And I do. I was happy, if only for a moment.

She spins away to continue the dance but as soon as her fingertips slip from my own  the snow globe is shaken and nature's fury overcomes us. A wall of white surrounds me as snowflakes dash unimpeded before my eyes and blind me to the world. I shield my face with one hand while the other blindly gropes through the storm, hoping to touch the familiar face that comforted me with a smile so tender just a moment before.

In the distance I can just make out a figure before me, twirling faster and faster so that her outline becomes a shadowy haze. I run towards her but the shadow is consumed by the storm and surrenders itself to the unforgiving winds. Her familiar face, once the most radiant light in my world, grows fainter still, until finally she disappears into a storm of my own creation, lost forever behind the icy curtain.

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Only once have my words failed me. Only once have I been rendered mute by the realization that there is nothing left to say. No more words of fidelity, no more recollections of intimacies shared, no more pleas for forgiveness will ever bring her back. This had only happened to me once before, until it happened twice.

The happiest moment of my life was a single night in Boston. We waited in the frigid air for a bus that would take us home, a night not unlike countless others that was suddenly made magical by the snows that came at a most unexpected hour. At midnight, countless snowflakes covered everything in a blanket of white and framed a single Boston neighborhood in a mural made only for our eyes. The streets were quiet, the sidewalks empty. We were alone in that moment, the only one I can ever recall where everything was truly right with the world. You kissed me and seared into my heart a memory that will never be forgotten. 

The happiest moment of my life...and I never even told you.