Ghost in Ghent

“And there shall be no night there; and they need no candle, neither light of the sun; for the Lord God giveth them light; and they shall reign for ever and ever.” Revelations 22:5 KJV

In those days, reality was raw and pure. The now was both too much and not enough all at once. My body was slowly returning to mean; I had grown fat through my listless indulgements. The lust for sex had dulled my perceptions just as gluttony had dimmed my vitality. Left with nothing to waste but time itself and no longer able to garland this waste with illusions, I once more began to venture out from my apartment. My leg was healing so I would either take long walks, punctuated with short bursts of what amounted to a sprint for me at that moment, or speed off on my bike to the docks overlooking the harbor. But these journeys only amounted to a few hours at most; what I truly needed was a place where I could experience other people while not necessarily having to do anything. It was for this reason that Stella Coffee shop became my most favored haunt.

It was there that I made a fool of myself, trying for a last pathetic attempt to ask my (former) love to take me back. But it was also where I befriended a fascinating recently-divorced, newly-named man trying for his PhD in rhetoric; where I dipped my toe back into those stormy waters of female entanglement; where I found out, through fasting, that Ghent has a strong BDSM community, one of whose members was also periodically visited by a derivative of the deceiver from the beginning; where I saw my (former) love, again, and coped by making our interaction as formal and devoid of our former emotion as possible; where I separated myself as honestly and surgically as I could from that new female entanglement; and, where, finally that world of immediacy and pure desperation and unadulterated pleas for help and demons attached to the hurting, began to fade as I began to acquire restructured modalities of thought and remold perception in my own (slightly better) image. The immediacy of the present faded; I plateaued and there was night.