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October 28th, 2002  Dateline - Rollover Pass, Bolivar Peninsula south of Galveston Texas Crawling into my tiny, tidy Motel 6 bed the other night, I began to cry. Exhausted from 10 hours on the road at 85 mph & the requisite intense concentration, I still managed to cry the sort of deep, chest-heaving, fetal-contorting wailing of the deeply bereaved. I scared myself, so hard did I cry. I crushed my pillow, screamed into the mattress, and inadvertently submerged into every horribly sad memory I have as though grief were a gravedigger hellbent on hitting the bedrock of my mind. I was the pickaxe. I was the shovel and dirt. Every so often I came up for air. But the air was stifling and strange, the room cramped and lonesome to behold. So back to sobbing I'd go, quiet as a mouse being crushed underfoot, for the walls of Motel 6 are thin and my cries surely would have been taken for murder. I was beside myself, as they say, emotionally completely out of control. And that's how I fell asleep. The next day I hit the road with a vengeance. Fast and freaked out I tore out of that place praying the tears would not catch me. I had no idea what had brought them on.
I think I know now. Or at least I am beginning to understand. Here at my friend Stefen's beach house built high on stilts, high and mighty against gulf storms that hit here often enough that the road in is called Rollover Pass. When high seas hit, the gulf waters apparently just roll right over the highway and into the intracoastal waters outside my windows. The name of the actual town out here is Bolivar. To get here from Galveston one must take the ferry. Bolivar. Rollover Pass. Ferries. Faeiries. The Case of the Cottingley Fairies  Roll over in your sleep of dreams. Bolivar a Bolla red wine, a far off land, a hidden channel where pirates took refuge from "the law" and buried their treasures.... perhaps deep in the wetland sands and mud, perhaps encased in mortar, entombed as I entombed my sweet Matilda, she curled up in eternal sleep in a wooden cigar box in a snug sarcophagus of stone poured by pirate Stefen and me. Visions of Matilda both in life and in the horrid throes of dying were definitely all over my thoughts the other night, my cries.
So what's the connection? None perhaps. But I think otherwise. Matilda called me back here, yanked me from my delusional so-called love mission to New Mexico, that stupid race that ended almost as quietly and similar in circumstance as the end of the road for the D.C. sniper duo that very same day: in a late eighties blue Chevy Caprice at a rest stop off a major interstate. Eerie, isn't it? And just as the snipers had sent out word to the police via a third party, I had sent out a call, an email actually, saying here I come love, ready or not. She wasn't ready. And her denial of my offer of love took me quite by surprise. I didn't put up a fight. I couldn't. I was mentally asleep at the wheel, wiped out from so much crying both the night before and then again that morning behind the wheel. My weapon lay on the seat beside me: a silver spoon, symbolic of her love of being spooned in bed. I had, in fact, a whole bouquet of them for her in my flight bag. I surrendered without a fight. Difference was, I'm no killer. Difference was, when it was all over I got to turn the key, ignite the engine, drive away. But to where now? Not to New Mexico, not to her. Then I saw the sign: Winnie, 9 miles. Winnie. Like Winnie the Pooh. Difference being, this Winnie was the gateway back, back to a little spit of land on the gulf east of Galveston, back to Matilda, cigar box sleeper and keeper of all my tears. Matilda, I am here my tiny love, my love that died on the heels of a dying love affair. I am here just paces from your grave, writing in the dark whilst tugboats shoulder barges upstream to my right in the pouring rain. Matilda I am here making too much of a night of tears, of a stupid stunt of misguided affection and drawing absurd parallels between my fall and the righteous capture of killers. Capture. Rapture. Surrender. Matilda, I think I am here to sum up a year of so very much pain, sorrow, self-loathing, and struggle. It was said of me today that I am "in a crazy, chaotic, unstable place." Such grace in irony. For I had to laugh at this dead-on definition of the world at large. It's the world that is mad, not me. Or maybe I'm wrong, and the world does so appear to me because indeed.. i am crazy. Maybe I so see the world because in forty days and forty nights since October last, I worked like God to drown out the world or be drowned. I tried to leave this world and failing that left the good girl and our happy home and took you along to roam and mumble drunk down Napoleon and Magazine and fool I fumbled fragile you and more foolish still (or strong as a god some say) I fed you the pill that killed and set you free of pain.. and then yes, the chaos really reigned and chapter upon chapter of madness has since been written. Matilda, may I go now? If only back to that little bed by the window neath which you lie and we will dream together? For I have not found the end just yet. Night has set but not by much, and gray and foul weather will surely make our mourning dreamsleep all the better. All will be better this after, yes? All will be better I endeavor in the end.. -His Lordship RSM the Duke of Nowhere, USA
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