The Manor

Dear reader,

If you have encountered this, I presume you unwell. To hold it lightly in your palms, the sensation of pressure that pulls uncomfortably at the hairs on the back of your neck, you have found yourself inside the Manor. Conversely, I suppose this piece of me, hoping to salvage the pieces of you, perhaps made its way beyond this house.

I cannot fathom what that would mean for the scraps of civilization that remain; I hope not for the latter, as our civilization’s landscape has eroded beyond containing the capacity to smother the sinister flames that flicker from anything tainted by the likes of the Manor. I once hoped by destroying the locket I would contain its darkness. I learned the hard way that the task set before us is much larger than that.

If you are a current inhabitant of the Manor, I must warn you that your pending harm is not limited to a golden heart shaped locket. Your peril reaches far beyond that, into the decaying wasteland from which you seek refuge inside the manor.

This is not your reprieve. It is a more subtle and pervasive rot than what is left of today’s society. I hope that if I tell you this story, you will leave before it becomes your own. I carry no desire to be listened to, only that I may be heard by whomever is next destined to repeat it.

Maybe you are looking out the window inlaid on the kitchen door, mindlessly peering out over red leaves loosely hanging from a tree that’s a bit too dry. Maybe you see shriveled leaves that move a bit too easily, bark with just enough discoloration to notice only if you take the moment to let your eyes fall from root to trunk. The unrelenting midwestern heat can make just about any living creature feel that way. For once in my life there, I wasn’t the exception to a rule.

I couldn’t even keep water flowing through the damn fountain. The lady who rented me the house told me early into my arrival she thought the birds were drinking it.

I don’t know if she was joking, or just plain wrong. I mean hell, there are more things she didn’t tell me about this place than things that she did. Like the backyard opens into an alleyway across from a Men’s halfway house. Or that not every window or door approximates the building’s frame, so even when inside, you will still be an intimate part of the local flora/fauna and approachable yet unforgiving biome that is….Missouri.

She didn’t tell me that all of her belongings would remain inside the domicile. “Furnished” is an understatement. Her towels, bathrobes, and dishes in the sink lay unencumbered, in so natural of a position to suggest that they but rest; anticipatory of her impending return. I came in with what could only seem like chaos to a persons intimate objects, pining their owners’ accustomed return.

I do not look through people’s things, under any circumstance. I have lived enough pain to know that if you do not want me to know, most respectfully, I too do not want to know. But my love, She…she’s different. Powerful while contouring the essence of gentle. Like a flower growing on a granite cliff, with such spectacular color that you wouldn’t believe if you didn’t see it in person; yet the pieces of you that believe in life, know her roots lead to some water source that potentiate such beauty.

Surely anyone who loves themselves might seek reprieve in cool waters of an otherwise barren land. Wouldn’t you?

Her petals had shown a woven thickness when we met, such a richness that brought me calm as soon as I saw them and inherently knew, they wouldn’t be apt to splitting. From our first moment together and each one after, her stem was durable enough to withstand things that brought me to my own knees. She was perfused with delicate power that allowed strengths –even those which meant to harm her--to carry her to a new place like the wind scatters dandelions.

She was a thriving tropical flower in a desert, and I, I chose life over decay.

I had an ill feeling when she found first encountered the necklace. Her infatuation irritated me, but that was as far as it went. I thought. Why would she put on the jewelry of another person? Strange, yes. Jewelry, often a memento of a bond with someone. I was taken a back a bit by it laying loosely around her neck, always from that moment forward. Guarding her, perhaps? I quickly became distracted by escalating, unexplainable goings on within our supposed “safe haven”.. A domino effect of terror left me little time for contemplation of accessories.

The world the Manor sheltered me from doesn't resemble the one that I always knew, dear reader. Outside forces are in control of it and I fear we have given them the power of an indelible façade, composed of our own ignorance. Its curators thrive in our intellectual exile of their true intentions. Half-baked in the hasty desperation of scrambling to the top of a ladder existing only in the context of our weakness, lives the acceptance of disparity. Scarcity. Both sides of this ladder weakly supporting the steps upon which we build our own demolition, these carry the blood of the fallen. Despite notions of futility, I try to promote equality. Which appears to realize, at the very least, the empathy I implore from the perimeters that control our robust populace.

Do you see how they’ve usurped power on top of power, my dear reader? Do and did you see the few who rule from the top down, existing without the capacity willing to consider the interior whom creates life enough to sustain its edges? Humanity, indelible in its flesh and suffering. I believe the callousness of a punishing life wrought with moral conundrums we all faced everyday to survive pushed the owner of the Manor to rent out this habitat. I do want to believe she did not realize the evil contained wherewithin; as it reflects a mirror image of the type of energy that will smother and siphon off of yours, to fuel the realization of its growth. I found, as you surely will, that our wasteland planet has been touched by a similar unforgiving darkness. I don't now if there is a cure for those it has ailed, so I write to you, with deep yearning for prevention for you. Keep your loves safe.

We are the mean and median of the distribution of the surivors of earth, yet the minute few on the edges live in repulsive abundance. They remain unbothered, while we have devolved as a collective unable to see to congregate, mobilize, and rise. No jobs, education disincentivized. Basic necessities becoming more treacherous and less likely to end in the reward of a life worth living. This is hell.

I ache because I know inside, there is enough.

Sure, I have by luck and fate managed to remain on the periphery of the shores of the black lagoon of scarcity. For this, I am grateful. For this, I know I’ve not earned this coveted life and chance has gifted it to me. By this, I am not forced to place every joule of my output of being into basic survival; from this I see the ruins of our world.

It is my true belief, to which I place no greater weight to than yours, that pain breeds love. The lesser of two evils is ambivalence to our hasty descent, and was the catalyst to my own ruin inside the Manor. I was so sure I would be protected from the now extreme climate of earth.

But here, my love began to act like a woman I do not know.

It’s difficult to say the moment it began. One day I watched as she descended the beautifully carved wooden staircase, looked me in my eyes and made my thoughts race as anxiety washed over me in crashing hot waves. Unflinching. They are called windows to the soul for a reason.

Something felt off, and a shroud of uncertainty surrounded me.

People acclimate, I thought fleetingly. Do they change? Well reader, I’m still uncertain about that.

That day, like many, I contemplated how to best exist. I was jobless, prospectless, and devoid of feasible options. Yet I had shelter from the elements from a woman renting me a house for far less capital than I could explain. I had food….for now. I was lucky compared to the thralls of hungry, homeless, and hopeless that wrapped around the corners of every municipality known to what was left of man. Once the last two continents became uninhabitable, and scientific progression ground to a halt, ecosystems able to provide reprieve from the sun and swelling natural disasters burst with environmental refugees. Overrun.

Reader, I am telling you all this to reassure you that I understand as you seek solace and gratitude inside the manor instead of outside of it and are anguished; you must know the truth. It is not safe here, either.

I bear witness to this to warn you to wade through these waters, not because there are not plentiful more worthy and deep that beseech your attention to try to save humanity; but because I fear that this darkness is a foe more cynical than the rampant apathy that brought our species here. This is a darkness each one of us must fight in order not to drown, and the heart I have left begs that you flee inside of the light of certainty before it overcomes you, as it overcame her.

Please, keep away. Leave. The sun--no ozone, it will not harm you inside your soul. You are worth too much. She was worth too much.

Run as if inexplicably you forgot how to look back.

Moments of smiling and joy were sustenance to throttle us forward through days of hard labor, neither fulfilling nor satiating for the urge to be human. You know that feeling, don’t you my literary confidant? Yet she went off to work everyday, like the remainder of humanity. What were the other options, my dear reader? This house will give so that it may take. Do not be fooled.

I still loved her fiercely.

This new way she had acquired… She was different. She didn’t smile anymore. When she spoke, it wasn’t her mannerisms. Benign, initially.

Who will ever know if I was wrong to do what I did. Only those who might navigate the darkness could say. All I can tell you, is that she deserved better. In the end, we all do.

She was owed more than the clouds and the moon, the colors in their entirety when sunshine prisms through droplets of a saturated sky.

The deepest sorrow is that she received the invocation of endless competition, forced scarcity, and the suffering of unhinged greed. The ugly that burdened from society only to attain food and shelter, superimposed on her being ripped from me into to the realm of blackness. The Manor is unforgiving. You will find it is hell within hell.

As the power of your God(s) as my witness, I will search until the end of me to make right what has been done to her.

The emblem, and the Manor must be destroyed. She should not have rented me this house disguised as a home. Though I know she only seeks to survive like the rest of us in this world, she owes a debt for passing on terror.

I seek condolences, open to the desolation of withheld forgiveness for the ashes I will create.

Please be prepared, the world let me and my love be swallowed in shadows from the eclipse of the Manor.

May your own light be enough to shield you.